Subject: Who Is Hillary Clinton?
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http://www.thenation.com/doc/20070709/ehrenreich comment | posted June 26, 2007 (web only)
Who Is Hillary Clinton?
Barbara Ehrenreich
One theory, which functions as a kind of cargo cult among some American liberals, is that behind the bland, smiling, exterior and the thick gauze of platitudes, crouches a fiery liberal feminist, ready, when she has finally amassed enough power--say in her second term as President--to spring forth and save the world.
If Carl Bernstein's exhausting 600-page biography, A Woman in Charge: The Life of Hillary Rodham Clinton, accomplishes anything, it should be to euthanize this touching hope. Hillary Rodham Clinton was always a moderate, given to centrist, technocratic. In her lifetime, she has glided effortlessly from one side to another on key issues--the death penalty, for example, or entitlements for poor women and children--all the while maintaining the self-righteousness granted, supposedly, by her Methodist God.
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In Bernstein's account, which strives nobly for fairness, Hillary's early behavior as First Lady was stunningly arrogant. She disdained the press, alienated the White House staff, turned on her close friend Vince Foster (who responded by committing suicide) and appalled Al Gore by trying to claim the West Wing office suite traditionally reserved for the Vice President. She demanded a cabinet position, and when that was overruled, insisted on leading Clinton's efforts at health reform, despite the objections of Health and Human Services secretary Donna Shalala, who was no less a feminist than Hillary.
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Hillary's attempt to create a national health insurance system--which she will have to undertake a second time as a presidential candidate--was a disaster in every way. Procedurally, she screwed up by conducting the planning under conditions of extreme secrecy, not even bothering to reach out to potentially supportive members of Congress, never mind the usual populist trimming of few televised town meetings. What Bernstein omits is her out-of-hand dismissal of the kind of single-payer system the Canadians have, which led to a tortured, 1300-page piece of legislation that almost no one could comprehend. The bottom line, unnoted by Bernstein, is that, despite the right's charges of "socialized medicine," her plan would have maintained the nation's largest private insurance companies' death grip on American health care.
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Worse, she has dodged the question of whether she ever actually read the full text of the 2002 National Intelligence Estimate, which was offered as a casus belli despite its equivocations on the subject of Saddam Hussein's purported WMD's. "If she did not bother to read the complete intelligence reports," Gerth and Van Natta observe, "then she did not do enough homework on the decision she has called the most important of her life. If she did read them, she chose to make statements to justify her vote for war that were not supported by the available intelligence." Since the start of her candidacy, antiwar Democrats have implored her to admit that she made a mistake on Iraq, which she stubbornly, even childishly, refuses to do.
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