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The New Hillary
 So
here we are, in the twenty-first century, and it appears that the
country whose great political debaters have included Jefferson, Madison,
Hamilton, Webster,
 Calhoun,
and Lincoln will spend the next two or
three years arguing about whether Hillary Clinton is a lesbian.
Mrs. — oops, Senator
— Clinton is clearly going to run for president in 2008, and she already
seems to have a padlock on the Democratic nomination. Her record by then
will include two terms as first lady and seven years as a junior senator from
New York. Will she be qualified for the presidency?
Silly question. Since when do you
have to be qualified for the presidency?
Like her controversial husband,
from whom she carefully distanced herself even while he was president (a
historic first for a president’s wife), Senator Clinton inspires a most
extraordinary hatred among Republican voters. Her own book has been a
bestseller, but so have several anti-Hillary books, the latest of which, by
Edward Klein, bears the breathtaking title The Truth about Hillary:
What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become
President. Which probably gives us the basic idea.
I’ve read only the excerpt in
the current Vanity Fair, but Klein is said to report, among
other things, that Chelsea Clinton was conceived when Bill raped Hillary during
their marriage. How Klein could have learned this is an interesting question,
but no “fact” is too lurid for the anti-Hillary genre, according to
which she is ruthless, ambitious, communistic, and as lesbian as a woman can
be while having an affair with Vince Foster before engineering his murder.
Reviewers complain that much of
the book relies heavily on other such books and on hearsay. Even the
Vanity Fair sample sounds vaguely familiar; but at least
it’s believable. When Hillary set her sights on the New York Senate
seat long occupied by the late Patrick Moynihan, who was then retiring, she
had to overcome the strong dislike he and his wife felt for her. They
regarded her as an arrogant upstart who couldn’t be trusted. She was
also unpopular in New York, where many Jews resented her call for a
Palestinian state and her public embrace of Mrs. Yassir Arafat.
![[Breaker quote for The New Hillary: Is she really so bad?]](2005breakers/050621.gif) But
she duly buttered up Moynihan, affirmed her dedication to the
state of Israel, and announced that she’d been a lifelong Yankee fan,
and soon the state’s Democrats, including Moynihan, rallied behind her.
It helped that her prospective Republican opponent, New York’s Mayor
Rudy Giuliani, ran a floundering campaign, then dropped out of the race upon
learning he had prostate cancer. An even weaker Republican succeeded him,
and Hillary won by a landslide, moving straight from the White House to the
Senate.
Still, she committed many gaffes
and was further embarrassed when her husband ended his presidency with a
series of scandalous pardons. But she managed to neutralize the gaffes with
brazen flip-flops, erasing her radical image; and before you knew it, she had
emerged as the biggest star in both the Democratic Party and the Senate.
Nobody quite knows what she stands for anymore, but that only makes her a
more elusive target for the die-hard anti-Hillary forces who will forever see
her as a Marxist-lesbian.
Today she has made lots of
friends in the Senate, Republicans speak well of her personally, and only her
husband rivals her as a fundraiser. She has proved an adroit politician, whose
careful positions bear no relation to internal conviction. Even her dress and
hairdo proclaim an unthreatening figure. This is the New Hillary, suitably
tailored to an era when political liberalism is passé.
So why do some conservatives still
look at her with fear, loathing, and implacable suspicion? Do they imagine
that, as president, the Old Hillary would cast off her disguise and revert to a
plan of Communist world conquest? How on earth, in today’s
circumstances, would she manage to execute that? And why would she want
to?
No, the New Hillary, more
moderate than the Old Hillary, is here to stay. Like her husband, she has
bowed and bent under political pressure. Her ambition itself has made her
abandon any utopian dreams; it’s doubtful she’d even take
another whack at a national health-care scheme, having learned from the
ignominious failure of the first one. If, during the Lewinsky scandal, she was
willing to play the role of Bill Clinton’s dutiful squaw, we can assume
her feminism is on a very short leash.
Is she even very far to the left of
what conservatives should really dread — the Republicans’
big-government “conservatism”? It’s sobering to recall
that Bill Clinton said that “the era of big government is over.”
Then came George W. Bush.
Joseph Sobran |
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| Copyright © 2005 by the
Griffin Internet Syndicate, a division of Griffin Communications This column may not be reprinted in print or Internet publications without express permission of Griffin Internet Syndicate 
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