Like the Secret Service in the future, the staff at the governor"s mansion would cower at the words of abuse--and occasionally dodge objects--that the Clintons hurled at each other.
But in the end, nothing happened. The basic deal remained intact.
The other women remained, on the outside, an enormous distraction and the source of great pain and immense risk, but ultimately used and discarded. Only Hillary was the first lady. Only Hillary had the ring. Only Hillary could count on a husband whose political instincts and abilities were so fine that his White House staffwould one day call him their "racehorse." Only by staying married could Hillary have a husband who could win power and would be willing to fully share power with her.
One constant of their relationship, from the early days in Arkansas to their most recent summer vacation on Long Island, is a devotion to reading history and biographies. Scattered among murder mysteries, light fare about Faith or self-improvement, is almost always the latest biography on Franklin, Eleanor, Jack, or Jacqueline.
They are steeped in history, often to a degree that is counter-productive. Bill, according to d.i.c.k Morris, consciously patterns his marriage after FDR"s marriage to Eleanor Roosevelt, seeing in Hillary a wife who is his intellectual equal.
"Sunday-morning Clinton felt no hypocrisy in marrying Hillary Rodham," Morris writes. "Indeed, he probably saw marrying for brains as a notch above marrying for glamour as Kennedy had done. It mimicked more closely the behavior of his other role model, FDR, who betrothed to Eleanor but tarried with Lucy Mercer."*38 Hillary, for her part, willingly plays the role of Eleanor, obsessing on her predecessor to the point of imaginary consultations with Eleanor in the White House. In return, she is given access to power and the ability to make decisions that Eleanor could only have wished for.
The morning after losing to Hammerschmidt, Bill Clinton cheerfully went about Fayetteville shaking hands, in effect campaigning for his next election.
For Bill, the campaign had been a strenuous workout, a chance to establish himself with voters and gear up for the next race, a statewide race he"d have to win.
For Hillary, it was a lesson on life in Arkansas and life with Bill Clinton. Years later, in the aftermath of Hillary"s publicly revealed "seance" with Eleanor Roosevelt"s ghost, Hillary told the Washington Post, "When the inevitable c.r.a.p comes, which it will, in anybody"s life, and, not just once but several times, there is a cushion of capacity there, and there is a structure that gets you up in the morning."*39 Part of that "structure" is her religious belief, her ideological zeal, and her persistent identification with a former first lady and her travails. Another is the knowledge of what she gets out of the basic terms of the deal she has made.
Hillary worked out this deal with Bill, just as Eleanor and Franklin did after she learned of his numerous affairs as a rising young dandy in Washington.
Over time, the union between the Clintons became, as it did for the Roosevelts, a marriage of the mind, a political convenience for two ambitious people who inhabit--or often don"t inhabit--the same bedroom. Of course, the Clinton marriage takes the equation to lengths that ultimately makes the comparison utterly untenable. Bill Clinton seems unable to contain his vociferous appet.i.tes, and repeatedly sublimates his presidency, his nation, his political party, and his family to his personal wants and needs. Hillary knows that he has done so, and knows that he will continue to do so. But she stays, and she supports him because she knows that he is her ticket to the fulfillment of her own equally intense needs. They are partners. They both know that if they are to survive--and to prevail--they will do so linked inseparably together.
FIVE.
VILLAGE SOCIALISM.
"The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice. Those who enshrine the poor or Have-Nots are as guilty as other dogmatists and just as dangerous."
-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.
The president-elect, William Jefferson Clinton, and is wife arrived in the capital before the inauguration to attend a glamorous fund-raiser at the National Building Museum. But Hillary, not the president-elect, gave the keynote address. The evening and the cause were Hillary"s. The fund-raiser was for the Children"s Defense Fund (CDF).
In her quarter-century of attention to "children"s issues," Hillary focused most on the subject of children"s rights. She radiates enthusiasm when she speaks on the subject, yet she does so without a trace of Alinsky"s inner doubt. "There is no such thing as other people"s children," Hillary often tells her adoring crowds.*1 Another favorite quote of hers is from John Wesley: "Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as you ever can."*2 To paraphrase her husband, it depends on the meaning of the word "good."
For Hillary, children are the levers by which one forces social change.
Hillary found an outlet for her social agenda in the CDF, and through her long a.s.sociation with its founder Marian Wright Edelman, a leading civil rights activist and longtime FOH. Edelman"s group was well-funded, well-staffed, and well-connected long before one of its leading advocates became the first lady. Its donor base is generously sprinkled with Fortune 500 patrons.
In 1973 it dawned on Edelman that the "country was tired of the concerns of the sixties. When you talked about poor people or black people, you faced a shrinking audience .... I got the idea that children might be a very effective way to broaden the base for change."*3 A convenient, sympathetic, photogenic, and maleable cause--how perfect. Hillary agreed.
Edelman"s great insight was to put children squarely in the front of almost every domestic policy debate. This is central to the CDF"s mission and a marvelous marketing tool. Throughout the Carter, Reagan, and Bush years, the CDF used a combination of shrewd inside lobbying and outside activism to protect and expand the welfare state. The CDF has browbeaten lawmakers for such programs as Head Start or the nutrition program for Women, Infants and Children, as well as expanding welfare and public housing programs, guaranteed employment, and higher minimum wages.
When critics argued that America"s welfare program was subsidizing illegitimacy and creating a culture of government-dependent poverty and victimhood, the CDF countered that any attempt to reduce the welfare state was a direct a.s.sault on children.*4 This kind of high-profile political warfare brought instant status to the CDF and Marian Wright Edelman.
Named after Marian Anderson, Edelman had earned her law degree at Yale, was the first African-American woman to pa.s.s the Mississippi bar, and was a hero of the civil rights movement, organizing voter registration drives and protests against segregation.
It was Edelman"s husband, Peter, a former aide to Robert F. Kennedy, who first contacted Hillary after reading about her Wellesley commencement speech in Life magazine.
Later, as a Yale law student, Hillary read a profile of Marian Wright Edelman in Time magazine. In the spring of 1970, "in one of those strange twists of fate that enters all our lives if we"re open to hear and to see them," Hillary recalled that she noticed that Edelman was returning to her alma mater to give a speech. Hillary was in the audience and experienced the kind of minor epiphany that seems to strike her with some regularity. "I knew right away that I had to go to work for her."*5 It was easy to see the attraction. By 1970 Marian Wright Edelman had become a central figure of the mythic left. She used her growing clout to establish the Washington Research Project, the forerunner of the CDF. Hillary secured a small civil rights grant to go work for her. As part of her summer job, she performed research for a Senate subcommittee chaired by Walter Mondale. She traveled to migrant labor camps and interviewed workers and their families, doc.u.menting the conditions and their effect on children.
Later, Hillary worked as a volunteer in family custody cases in New Haven. Hillary, by then living with the gregarious third-year law student who would become her husband, took a fourth year to study child development at the Yale Child Study Center. There she researched her now well-known legal writings on the rights of children for the Harvard Educational Review.
After Yale, but before she went to work on the House Judiciary Committee, Hillary moved to Boston to serve a stint as a lawyer for the CDF. She joined the CDF board in 1978, and eventually served as its chairman for six years.*6 To understand Hillary"s politics today, it is not enough to review her resume and her rapid a.s.sent through the then-chic liberal advocacy groups. One must read her writings from this period. It is in these samplings from her past that Hillary finds a fully developed, albeit superficial, political philosophy. All of this was set before her husband"s political ambitions forced her to retract, disguise, or repackage in more benign wrapping her radical critique of society and the family.
Marian Wright Edelman opened other doors for her bright young acolyte. She helped Hillary win a coveted research position with the Carnegie Council on Children. At the Carnegie Council, Hillary worked as a research a.s.sistant on a panel chaired by Yale psychology professor Kenneth Keniston. Kenneth Keniston opened up the world of social sciences and psychology to enrich Hillary"s legal agenda.
Keniston ran the Yale Child Study Center and supervised Hillary"s work drafting guidelines for abused children at the Yale New Haven Hospital. More importantly, Hillary a.s.sisted Keniston with several chapters of the Carnegie panel"s report on children"s rights, All Our Children. This report became a kind of compendium of left-wing, pie-in-the-sky wish list, one in which Keniston advocated a national guaranteed income, a universal ent.i.tlement state, and greatly expanded procedural rights for children. Issued in 1977, this report quickly became the conventional wisdom of the time, that adult life-style choices would inevitably create different kinds of families. Moreover, rather than resist this deconstruction of the American nuclear family, the report advocated that society had best find ways to encourage, supplement, and support single-parent families.
If anything, the Carnegie Council"s report took a sanguine view of the rising divorce rate and single motherhood, a view that Vice President Dan Quayle would later a.s.sail in his "Murphy Brown" speech.
What would matter in the future of children, the Carnegie Council stated, was not the family structure, but the larger village of teachers, pediatricians, and social workers who would socialize the task of raising, supporting, and nurturing children.
The time had come for society, we were told, to see the rearing of children as less of a parental task than as a social one. It was here that the full panoply of Hillary"s beliefs can be seen in microcosm, from generous family leave to universal health care. Most utopian and ultimately insidious of all were the council"s proposals to develop "public advocates" who could intervene between parents and children on the latter"s behalf, reducing parents to subunits of the state. There would even be "child ombudsmen" who would represent the rights of children in public inst.i.tutions, helped by a new cla.s.s of public interest lawyers to advocate the rights of children.*7 Thus the parents would be subordinate to judges, social workers, and bureaucrats--the real experts in the raising of children.
Hillary, ever rigorous, explored the idea of children"s rights to their utmost limits.
THE CHILDREN"S CRUSADE.
During the 1992 campaign, sympathetic journalists and campaign image-masters claimed that right-wing demagogues had grossly mischaracterized Hillary"s academic writings on children. Columnist Eleanor Clift informed her Newsweek readers that "The Republicans had great fun at their convention last month ridiculing Hillary Clinton as a radical feminist who promotes left-wing causes that undermine traditional family values." She complained that Hillary was hysterically accused "of comparing marriage to slavery, and of favoring the rights of children to sue their parents over such mundane matters as taking out the garbage. Clinton"s critics say her husband may be a moderate, but that she has a secret liberal agenda and the Rasputin-like influence to implement it."*8 Hillary, of course, was particularly anxious to put the Republican characterizations to rest. "There is no way that anybody could fairly read the article and say I was advocating that children sue parents over taking the garbage out," Hillary told Newsweek.*9 John Leo wrote in U.S. News and World Report that "The Republican attempt to demonize Hillary Clinton is shameful." Leo added, "She is not a radical feminist. She did not say that marriage is like slavery or the Indian reservation system."*10 These articles, and others like them, served as a firebreak against further criticism.
Hillary completed her image-makeover on children"s issues as first lady with the 1996 publication in her name of It Takes a Village.
The book was breezy, folksy, and moderate in tone, vacuous, but middle of the road on substance, stressing the importance of the larger community, of adults taking responsibility for child rearing.
It Takes a Village was seasoned with Tipperesque critiques of Hollywood culture and moralistic quotes from Bill Bennett before the Christian Coalition.
The 1992 campaign criticism of Hillary as a dangerous ideologue is now long forgotten, swept away with all the campaign bunting and failed rhetoric of President Bush"s unfocused and discursive reelection campaign. But in fact, a careful reading of her work reveals a not-ready-for-primetime Hillary as radical as the Republicans said she was. Hillary"s writings reveal a leftist ideologue, dedicated to centrally directed social engineering, dismissive of the traditional role of the family, and interested in children primarily as levers with which to extract political power.
"The phrase children"s rights is a slogan in search of a definition,"
she declared in the opening sentence of her opus on the subject in a 1973 issue of the Harvard Educational Review. That term "does not yet reflect any coherent doctrine regarding the status of children as political beings," she said. She started with the unremarkable proposition that children already had limited rights as parties in lawsuits, as legatees under wills, as intestate successors. Older children had additional legal rights based on some recognition of their growing competence--including the right to drive, to drop out of school, to vote, to work, to marry.
Between the late 1940s and late 1960s, successive rulings by the U.S.
Supreme Court extended procedural protections afforded adults (against self-incrimination, the standard of reasonable doubt) to children in juvenile court. The court also ruled in favor of limited First Amendment rights for children, allowing them to refuse to salute the flag if it offended their religious beliefs, and protecting their right to wear black arm-bands to protest the Vietnam War.
But, Hillary argued, the only way to give children real power was to make their needs and interests enforceable as const.i.tutional rights.
Her solution was to use the alchemy of the law, to melt all arguments in the furnace of adversarial argument, and, as she saw it, to separate the base from the pure.
She made several a.s.sertions that still have the power, many years later, to cause jaws to drop--statements that reveal the contours of Hillary"s better world.
She writes: "The pretense that children"s issues are somehow above or beyond politics endures and is reinforced by the belief that families are private, nonpolitical units whose interests subsume those of children."
Charting the fallacies in this one sentence is quite an undertaking, but a useful one. The word "pretense" indicates that somehow there is a conspiracy at work in the treatment of children, which the rest of the sentence indicates is somehow political. In a condescending, academic way, she snidely ridicules the belief that families are "private, nonpolitical units" indicating that she does, in fact, reject the notion that the family is a traditional inst.i.tution that has arisen organically and stood the test of time. In her view, families are essentially low-level public ent.i.ties dedicated to explicitly political ends. If they are subunits, what is the larger unit but the state, its public programs and prevailing ideology?
Her contemptous tone toward the family unit continued throughout her paper with her conviction that the interests of a family--its culture and beliefs--unfairly subsumed, and thus undermined the best interests of children. Taken one way, this is Jeffersonian individualism on 1960s recreational drugs. Taken another, it is a pointed denigration of families steeped in religious tradition or a particular culture, whether they be Ha.s.sidim, evangelical Christians, or recent refugees from Kosovo.
Another pa.s.sage was so d.a.m.ning that it became the focus of damage control in the 1992 election: The basic rationale for depriving people of rights in a dependency relationship is that certain individuals are incapable or undeserving of the right to take care of themselves and consequently need social inst.i.tutions specifically designed to safeguard their position. It is presumed that under the circ.u.mstances society is doing what is best for the individuals. Along with the family, past and present examples of such arrangements include marriage, slavery, and the Indian reservation system.
John Leo"s subsequent rationalization of this pa.s.sage was based on a quick dismissal of it as a piquant, but fair, description of the evolution of the legal concept of dependency. But Hillary herself is not so easily disguised. Children"s helplessness in society must be seen, she wrote, "as part of the organization and ideology of the political system itself." It is not enough to say that between the give and take of powerful interests like business and labor, children get left behind. She saw a more sinister conspiracy at work--a theme which is an indelible part of her hard-drive. She perceived the hidden hand of ideology., a power elite that for whatever reason is actively anti-child. In other words, the opposition is not just wrong, it is morally perverse and out to repress good and maintain the rule of the suppressive elite.
Her early writings are also shaped by a radical academic Marxism and feminism. Christopher Lasch, one of the few intellectuals to take her writings seriously enough to criticize them, wrote a trenchant article on these Hillary essays in Criticism on the eve of the election. "Though Clinton does not press the point," Lasch writes, "the movement for children"s rights, as she describes it, amounts to another stage in the long struggle against patriarchy."*11 One of Hillary"s legal models was a 1972 opinion by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas. Douglas dissented when the Supreme Court upheld the right of Amish parents to exempt their children from compulsory schooling, on the basis of religious freedom. Douglas noted, somewhat mildly, that there were two parties with stakes in such decisions, the parents and the child. Given that the "education of the child is a matter, on which the child will often have decided views," and he or she may want to "be a pianist or an astronomer or an oceanographer," it is reasonable to seek the view of the child.
This is a relatively modest step, given that the law recognizes the child as a person (a consideration that neither the late Justice Douglas nor Hillary Clinton has ever conceded to the unborn).
It is a huge leap, however, from the judicial consideration of the child"s needs and desires, and the litigation of these needs and desires by the child. Yet Hillary has been anxious to make that leap. The same woman who later forbade her daughter Chelsea from piercing her ears would advocate giving children the same rights in court as adults.*12 "Ascribing rights to children," Hillary wrote, "will not immediately solve these problems, or undermine the consensus which perpetuates them. It will, however, force from the judiciary and the legislature inst.i.tutional support for the child"s point of view."
Using children to force judicial mandates and legislative change is at the core of her phiosophy. That goal would have to be accomplished, of course, by adults acting on the children"s behalf.
But what is the "child"s point of view" and who will determine it?
Hillary qualified and defended her views in her 1978 essay "Children"s Rights: A Legal Perspective."
"The fears," she wrote, "that many people have about the formulation of children"s rights arise from their concern about increasing government control over such intra-family disputes. A letter sent out several years ago about the Child and Family Development Act urged persons to oppose the proposed bill because it would, according to their writers, allow children to take parents to court if they were ordered to take out the garbage."
The real issues, Hillary argued, are far more important, and were already embodied in legal doctrine. "There are, for instance, a line of cases in which a child either wished or required a certain medical procedure that his or her parents refused to provide." Hillary cited cases in which courts allowed minors to receive abortions without parental consent, and the rulings of courts to override the refusals of Jehovah"s Witnesses to allow their children to have surgery and blood transfusions.
"I prefer that intervention into an ongoing family be limited to decisions that could have long-term and possibly irreparable effects if they were not resolved," she states. "Decisions about motherhood and abortion, schooling, cosmetic surgery, treatment of venereal disease, or employment, and others where the decision or lack of one will significantly affect the child"s future should not be made unilaterally by parents."
In other words, don"t get so worked up. Children"s rights will be invoked only for the serious stuff, like terminating pregnancies, which school to attend, breast implants, whether to work in a saloon, the things that really matter; not for taking out the garbage or any other frivolous dust-up between parent and child. In Hillary"s world judges, social workers, and other "real" experts will only play a decisive role in the things that matter, the parents can still be involved in the little things.
Set aside the whole abortion issue. Set aside the fact, which Hillary herself presents, that courts will not hesitate to override the rights of parents to advance their perceptions of the health and safety of the child. The larger issue is that given the sort of lawsuit-crazy society in which we live--and I write as a lawyer myself--we know the answer is, yes, children will sue their parents over taking out the garbage, how late to stay out, and what clothes to wear and there will be lawyers who will argue that taking out the garbage is involuntary servitude.
Hillary seems utterly oblivious to the fact that in our legal system, any new right that is created is certain to be explored to the farthest frontier of absurdity. This, after all, a legal system in which suits have been filed on behalf of children against Disneyland over the trauma of being taken on a backstage tour, only to see that their beloved cartoon characters are really people in costume.*13 This is a legal system in which a girl sued a county school board for $1.5 million after being allowed to play football, only to be injured in the first scrimmage.*14 This is a legal system in which a teenager won a $50,000 award from his school when he snagged his teeth on a basketball net while making a slam-dunk, losing two teeth.*15 This is a legal system in which a California law allows children to live on their own as adults, and a Florida judge granted an eleven-year-old the right to "divorce" his parents.*16 Whatever the extenuating circ.u.mstances, all too often law that addresses human tragedy ends up as social farce. If children were given full rights to sue, parents would become the targets of the suits of the future. Hillary also seems to have no concept that the adversarial process of lawsuits will turn parent and child into defendant and plaintiff, and bitter lifelong enemies.
Although she may have a better appreciation of the civil justice system now than when she wrote these things, Hillary also seems to have been oblivious to the reality that the cost alone of a lawsuit is enough to sink most family budgets, forcing parents to sell their homes or liquidate their retirements to fight their own children in court, or just to keep them in the family. Nor does she seem cognizant that lawsuits are ill-suited to resolve disputes over a parent-child issue because of the months or years of bitter wrangling a suit can eat up. It is not unusual for suits to drag on for years before final resolution. By the time a suit can finally be resolved in a child case, the original issue will be often moot. Many children will be well on their way to independence.
Hillary"s kiddie rights solution builds on the extension of adult rights to children made in 1967 by the U.S. Supreme Court Gault decision. Gault, however, involved the rights of juveniles charged with serious crimes. (Hillary obbliquely criticized the Court"s refusal to require jury trials for juveniles. Unanswered is whether she would empanel a jury of adults, or true peers. If children have rights, why not a jury of other kids, perhaps a jury of twelve-year-olds?) The courts, even while extending procedural protections to children, have always recognized the limits of treating kids as adults.
Hillary does not. She notes that children"s rights are enforceable only vicariously, dependent as they are "on adults to represent them in claims to achieve their rights."
It is at this moment that Hillary puts her philosophy of family socialism on parade. "Although there are difficulties attached to making the law more discriminating, they do not seem to be any greater than the problems lawmakers confront in many other areas.
Deciding what kinds of crop aid should be given for a particular year to various regions affected by different weather, pests, and prices is not easy either, but it gets done."
It is astonishing that any parent could believe that raising a child is as simple as deciding on aid to farmers, but Hillary and her husband have been politicians and wards of government most of their adult lives. Perhaps it is understandable that she would have such a warped and disconnected view of families and normal life.
In a 1977 Yale Law Review critique of The Children"s Cause, by Gilbert Steiner (on which she bestowed mild approval, though registering disappointment with it for having a "cautious att.i.tude toward government involvement in child-rearing"), Hillary called for a series of national experiments.
"If Albert Shanker wants the teachers to control day care programs, let him have an experimental grant for a few ears .... The Children"s Defense Fund might be given financial support to coordinate programs under varied community control models."
Why not experiment with a few children? Hillary expresses complete openness toward experimentation with children in a variety of ways with the exception, perhaps, of any program that would lessen the dependency of families and children on public programs, such as school choice. (Though, of course, the Clintons would later send their own daughter to the same expensive private school attended by the children of Senator Bill Bradley and Washington Post reporter Bob Woodward.*17) What comes through in these essays is the arrogant voice of the social engineer, the activist who believes that reshaping the most intimate of human relationships is as simple as rotating crops.
There is more than a little foreshadowing here of Hillary"s future effort to centralize the management of Arkansas education from the governor"s office in Little Rock, and of her great socialist health care debacle in President Clinton"s first term.
In a 1978 article Hillary wrote that the federal school lunch program "became politically acceptable not because of arguments about hungry children, but because of an alliance between children"s advocates and the a.s.sociation of school cafeteria workers who seized the opportunity to increase its membership." Children, she concludes, deserve similarly "competent and effective advocates." It doesn"t seem to matter to her that the cafeteria workers were not interested in the children, but the power of their work force. Children and their real interests don"t seem nearly as important to Hillary as the power of the political lever they represent.
Just who will the children"s advocates be? It is doubtful the field of kiddie rights would attract the likes of a Johnny Cochran. There would be no money in it. Who could afford such a practice? Those "interested adults" who would answer Hillary"s call to arms could only be a certain type of self-professed public interest attorneys, inspired, sustained, and directed by groups like the Children"s Defense Fund. Or if cla.s.s actions or punitive damages could be added to the equation, perhaps the contingent fee trial lawyers, who have been such good friends to Bill Clinton throughout his political career, could be incentivized.
These advocates, to the extent not motivated by high fees, would come to each case not essentially as representatives of the child-client, but as activists looking to see how this little boy, or that little girl, fits into a greater strategy to expand an ent.i.tlement or control how a government agency functions.
"The notion," Christopher Lasch commented in his criticism of Hillary"s writings, "that children are fully capable of speaking for themselves makes it possible for ventriloquists to speak through them and thus to disguise their own objectives as the child."
Hillary wrote in a 1978 book review for Public Welfare, "Collective action is needed on the community, state and federal level to wrest from machines and those who profit from their use the extraordinary power they hold over us all, but particularly over children."
The idea that power must be wrested from "machines" is peculiar, ignoring that, at bottom, Hillary"s children"s crusade is a hard-nosed exercise in expanding power in a different direction, in the direction of public interest trial lawyers with a social engineering agenda. Children are useful, just as migrant workers and the indigent elderly are useful, as tools to pry loose the controls, to get into the guts of the machinery of law and governance.
Children are the rhetorical vehicles she still uses as first lady, whether pressing for national health care or to get Congress to pay UN dues. She writes: "Since many of its [the Carter administration"s] top policy-makers are reportedly inclined favorably towards children"s programs, saving the "family" may become the justification for, rather than remain the nemesis of, those programs." Her use of quotes are telling. The future of the family makes for a good propaganda point.
"Apparently we share so much apprehension about potential harm to cherished, albeit fantasized, family values that programs for children must demonstrate immediate success or risk extinction."
"Fantasized family values." The meaning is unmistakable. The government is the real provider of values, and the real source of necessary change against traditionalist "cherished," "fantasized"
family values.
When the 1992 presidential election came, Hillary"s radical stance had been blurred by her own election-motivated moderated rhetoric and by the friendly treatment she received from sympathetic members of the liberal establishment press. She was able to take what should have been an embarra.s.sment in her past and transform it into a point of pride. As the wife of a presidential candidate, Hillary, the child advocate, took on Vice President Dan Quayle.
Shortly after Quayle"s "Murphy Brown" speech, Hillary attacked the vice president"s observations before a San Francisco audience, saying, "I wonder if he lives in the same America we live in, if he sees the same things we see. He"s trying to blame the Los Angeles riots and blame the social problems in this country on a TV sitcom."*18 That wasn"t it at all. In attacking values disseminated weekly by the producers, writers, and directors of the Murphy Brown program, Quayle took to task a popular emblem of Hillary"s own philosophy. He pointed to a growing body of empirical evidence that children raised by single parents--by a nontraditional family structure, in other words--are exposed to higher risks for everything from drug abuse to suicide and teen pregnancy.
Quayle had the full weight of social science and the facts on his side. Hillary had a sympathetic press and Saul Alinsky"s tactics.
She had picked her target, frozen it, personalized it, and polarized the debate, crushing Dan Quayle like a can of Tab.
Soren Kierkegaard foresaw Hillary"s political tactics--of achieving radical aims under moderate-sounding New Democrat rhetoric--with an almost uncanny prescience. "A pa.s.sionate, tumultuous age will overthrow everything, pull everything down," Kierkegaard wrote, "but a revolutionary age that is at the same time reflective and pa.s.sionless leaves everything standing but cunningly empties it of significance."
Hillary would likewise empty the oldest of human relations--the family--of its significance and its independence. Her crusade is not rooted in Blackstone or even John Wesley. It appears principled, but it is really tactical. It has a spiritual appeal, but it is really about the temporal achievement of power.
It is Saul Alinsky to the core.
SIX.
WATERGATE TO WHITEWATER.
"Ethical standards must be elastic to stretch with the times."
-- SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS.