The Case Against Hillary Clinton

Peggy Noonan

• Publisher: William Morrow Paperbacks
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780062030276
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

As the long, scandal-ridden trial of the Clinton years comes to an end--and as the first lady mounts her own campaign for independent political office--it is time for a summation. What is the legacy of Clintonism? What is there in Hillary Clinton's background, talents, or record of achievement that qualifies her to represent New York in the U.S. Senate? And, most important, what will happen if Hillary should win this fall? Where will her ambition lead her next?

Peggy Noonan, one of our most astute political observers and a speechwriter for the Reagan White House, argues in this passionate and compelling book that everyone in the United States--not just New Yorkers--must look closely at Hillary and the implications of her Senate bid. The Case Against Hillary Clinton offers an eye-opening assessment of the scandals, and failures of the Clinton years, from Whitewater to health care to the Filegate and Travelgate affairs--casting a revealing light on the first lady's motives and behavior. It poses searching questions about the difference between the citizens of New York and the Clintons of Arkansas; between public service and lip service; between the whole truth and the shameless parade of evasion and spin the first couple has marshaled throughout their White House years. And finally, in these pages Noonan calls on us to consider the climate of deception and disgrace the Clintons have left in their wake--weakening our nation's moral standing and damaging our political process in ways that will take years to heal.

Never before has the character of a first lady been so integral to the fate of a presidential administration and no writer before Peggy Noonan has had the courage to offer so uncompromising an estimation of Hillary Clinton as the one contained in this book. The Case Against Hillary Clinton takes the measure of the woman, the candidate, the striving politician--and offers a convincing argument that her calculated bid for power will be the first truly important election of the new millennium.

I thought, seven years ago, that the Clintons might turn out to be inspiring. They had guts, came from nowhere, were bright and hard-driving; he was educated, credentialed, a political moderate but not a boring one; she appeared to be something new and interesting, a modern woman who operated with confidence in all the circles of the world.... Hillary could have been a strong and encouraging presence, maybe continuing to work in the world as a lawyer, as Cherie Blair has in Great Britain--a judge, working mother, and "first lady" who is everywhere a figure of respect.

What a presidency this would have been. What a legacy they would have left.

What did the Clintons do with their two administrations? They left behind a country more damaged, more removed from its old, rough idealism; a country whose children live in a coarser and more dangerous place; a country whose political life has been distorted and lowered.... And for this reason, for all of these reasons, Clintonism should not be allowed to continue.

And if it is not to continue, the next great battle may prove to be the decisive one, and that is the battle of New York.

-- From The Case Against Hillary Clinton

CHAPTER ONE

I

THERE ARE MOMENTS WHEN I AM STILL AMAZED that a first lady of the United States is scaling down her role, in her words, to run for the U.S. Senate. I don’t know why I’m surprised—we’ve all gotten used to the Clintons’ dramas, to all the twists and turns on the hair-raising ride. But the idea that she would abandon her position, which is really a job, and an elevated one, and start hopping on government planes to come to my state and tell me what we need …

When, a year ago now, it became clear that she was going to run in New York I sat back in wonder, like everyone else.

I thought: For her to say to a state that she had no connection to, no history with, no previously demonstrated interest in—for her to say to a state whose greatest city she has used for seven years as her own personal cash machine, tying up traffic and inconveniencing millions as she trolls, relentlessly, for campaign money—for her to say to this place full of gifted residents that she deserves to be its senator is an act of such mad boomer selfishness and narcissism that even from the Clintons it was a thing of utter and breathtaking gall.

And then there came the moment when I realized: They’re never going to leave. Other presidents and first ladies do their work, leave their imprint, and make a graceful exit, departing the stage and attempting to become, if they were not already, wise, high-minded, and fair. But the Clintons—they’ll stay until the last footlight fizzles and pops, and then we’ll have to wrestle them to the floor of the stage.

I called a friend, a great liberal of the city, a Democrat of forty years, and caught her mid-sputter. “To think of all they’ve put us through—and now they won’t even go away. Who are these people, and why do they think they are necessary to us?” Another, a journalist and Democrat, e-mailed from work when I asked her reaction. “This is how I feel: Lady, keep your hands off my state.”

And they are Mrs. Clinton’s base.

I was wonderfully angry those first few days, in the spring of ‘99. I asked everyone I bumped into what they thought, and no one assumed Mrs. Clinton’s motives were elevated; there were no choruses of “She is concerned about us” or “She wants to help.” Conservatives said she was launching her candidacy to fill the vacuum in her life with our money and our freedom; liberals that she needs therapy after years with that brute, and New York makes a good couch; moderates assumed she needs a place to hang her hat while she ponders her next move.

But then I experienced what everyone experiences with a Clinton story. Within forty-eight hours I had absorbed the new reality and was calculating her prospects and imagining her strategy. It was now all… just a fact to me. Not an outrage, just a fact.

We have learned to absorb the Clintons and their many shocks; they have taught us to absorb the brazen, to factor it in and in time discount it. And I suspect they are fully aware of this, that they have learned a number of things in their life in politics, but one of the biggest is this: They can do anything. They are used to the tumbling rhythms of public acceptance: the gasps of shock, followed by the edgy discussion on Hardball followed by the earnest discussion on Wolf Blitzer followed by the enthusiastic discussion on Geraldo. The Clintons watch the news wheel turn, grinding down the pebbles in their path: Let ‘em yell, let ‘em send their anger into the air, where it dissipates. When they’re done talking I’ll still be here.

There is, always, something admirable in such human toughness. But never has the admirable been so fully wedded to the appalling, never in modern American political history has such tenacity and determination been marshaled to achieve such puny purpose: the mere continuance of Them. Would that they had marshaled their resources to help somebody or something else—their country, the poor, the national defense.

II

And of course she may well win. Republicans hope that in the rigors of the campaign her essential nature will emerge and, in the words of Grover Norquist, the soul of an East German border guard will pop out. They think her inner prison matron will escape and start disciplining the people on the rope line—No pictures here, buddy, can’t you see the sign? But I’ve seen her work rooms large and small, seen her on the campaign trail, and she will be a pro, articulate, smooth, and smiling. Babies laugh in her arms.

She is a star, and New York likes stars. She will have the passionate support of the unions and interest groups, and New York has unions and interest groups in abundance. She has a human shield in the Secret Service, a twelve-foot cordon of safety, and won’t be as exposed as other candidates. She’ll raise a lot of money with ease, especially money outside New York, and won’t even have to spend it like other candidates because she’ll put every cost she can on the public dime. “Mrs. Clinton says she doesn’t want to fly on a government plane, but the Secret Service insists.” “Mrs. Clinton says she didn’t want the pool, but the Secret Service insists.” “Mrs. Clinton says she doesn’t like the Chanel body moisturizer, but the Secret Service insists.”

There are those who say she isn’t tough enough, that she’s used to being treated like a queen and handled with kid gloves; she won’t know how to put a game face on. But a game face is what she’s been wearing for years, and she is plenty tough enough. One example speaks for many: In the 1990 Arkansas gubernatorial campaign she humiliated her husband’s opponent, Tom MacRae, by barging into a news conference he was holding at the capitol in Little Rock and taking him on for criticizing her husband. “Get off it, Tom … Give me a break!” she scolded. Paul Greenberg of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette later wrote, “Miss Hillary seemed to relish sandbagging her husband’s opponents,” and succeeded with MacRae because “Poor Tom found himself at a disadvantage: He’s a gentleman. And he didn’t quite know how to respond. But there was little doubt that Miss Hillary had savored the fight.”

She claimed that she’d come upon MacRae’s news conference by accident. Later it emerged that she’d come up with the idea to stage the confrontation the day before, during a strategy session.

She will have top-flight media. She will have a war room—the Clintons always have a war room, and it was Mrs. Clinton who ordered the creation of the first one, in Little Rock, and named it. It will be staffed by sharp-elbowed spinners making their bones before going on to reporting jobs at GMA.

She has a good shot. She will be a serious candidate. She may be the next senator from New York.

And this is not good.

Because this is not a single stray bid for public office. This is an attempt to continue in American history the ethos, style, and character of the Clinton Administration. This is the continuance of Clintonism. Hillary Clinton’s candidacy is a product being locally test-marketed for national consumption: It is the beginning of Hillary for president. It is the last big I.P.O. of the Clinton era; invest now and it will pay off in four years or eight, when we return to the White House. This is a candidacy that will decide whether the Clintons should be advanced in public life and, through that advancement, continue to have a strong impact on what happens in American life in the next century.

The Clinton camp has not attempted to hide this. Mrs. Clinton’s friends and staff have told journalists from Tim Russert to Bob Novak that she sees the Senate seat as a stepping-stone to the White House. Russert has said her friends told him it was “a first step to the presidency.” In the winter of 1999, Mrs. Clinton said that if elected she will serve all six years of her term, which would take her out of the presidential running in 2004. But Bill Clinton made the same promise to the voters of Arkansas when he ran for reelection in 1990. He said he’d serve his entire term, which would take him out of the presidential running in 1992. Then, as 1992 approached, he announced he’d tour Arkansas and ask the people if he should reconsider his promise. This listening tour, he later announced, convinced him that the people wanted him to run for president in 1992. He didn’t break his vow; he just bowed, as always, to the people’s wishes. One can well imagine Senator Hillary Clinton, in 2003, doing the same.

So New York is the battle that may decide the war. And so this Senate bid has huge implications, not only for New York State but for the nation.

III

But perhaps you view it only from a local perspective. And perhaps you are sympathetic. After all, you might say, Hillary will be only one senator of a hundred, just one voice in a large disharmonious chorus. Why not give her a pass, let her point of view be represented? She’s suffered so. But after seven years some of us think the headline on Mrs. Clinton is not that she has suffered, but that she has made so many others suffer.

And is she really the person to replace Pat Moynihan? Pat Moynihan, great old liberal, a true intellectual who actually thinks deeply about our country and its culture, whose academic monographs have entered the national consciousness, and whose ideas, such as “defining deviancy down,” have entered the language. Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy might be said to define political deviancy down, but that that is her only connection to the achievement and seriousness of Pat Moynihan.

One summer night in 1992 I stood on the floor of the Democratic National Convention in New York, and asked Moynihan what he thought of his party’s great enthusiasm for Bill Clinton, who was about to make his first acceptance speech. Clinton was new then, a wide-awake mover in a bomber jacket who crooned Elvis on Imus; the Democrats, and many others, were at his feet. Moynihan’s anger took me aback. Clinton’s welfare ideas are the worst abrogation of public responsibility since the Corn Laws, he said. They are not the beginning of a new era but the end of a world of responsibility and concern.

What he said was against the grain, at odds with the common wisdom. And that is one reason so many in New York respected and liked him, agree or disagree on his stands and policies. He brought a level of moral seriousness and an appreciation of history to the debate. He meant it. (He is also a practical man, which he showed both after the first rumors that Hillary might run began to spread—“She’ll win,” he said in February 1999—and the day he endorsed the inevitable by endorsing her candidacy. But what was interesting that summer day on his farm in Pindars Corners was his mirthless laugh as he presented the new candidate to the press corps. He said all the right things, stood beside her throughout, and yet later I thought of what he’d said one day in November 1963:

“There’s no sense being Irish unless you know that sooner or later the world will break your heart.”)

But what does Mrs. Clinton mean? What does she stand for?

IV

Who is this woman who for seven years has so preoccupied us, who is admired by so many and detested by so many? So many newspaper stories and magazine articles have been written about her, so many television stories devoted to her, and yet when you think about her, when you remove philosophy and ideology from your mind and simply summon her figure to your mind’s eye, when you imagine where this person fits in the long line of American history you are struck by this thought: She does not seem big enough to be the focus of such passion. She does not seem as big as the emotions she engenders. She lacks historical heft, is not a person of real size and authenticity. To me she seems more like an odd thing that happened to us, a person of average insights, above-average intelligence, and below-average character who somehow has come to fasten our gaze. The most interesting thing about her, and him, to me, is that they appear to be disturbed. The most important thing about them is that they have made their disturbance our disturbance; they have foisted it upon a great nation.

He thinks he is John F. Kennedy, with whom he is obsessed. He has taken to walking, head slightly bowed, from the helicopter and across the lawn after a weekend in Camp David, his hands shoved in his jacket pockets. He looks thoughtful and weighted with the problems of the world, as a president should. I watch Sunday night on the news and think: He looks exactly like the Jamie Wyeth portrait of Jack Kennedy, the one that shows him head bowed, the weight of the world on his capable shoulders. Clinton passes this portrait every morning in the hall.

I continue to watch him walk across the lawn and wonder what he is thinking, and suddenly I know. He’s thinking: I look just like the Jamie Wyeth portrait of JFK. This will be on the news tonight. The young will find me attractive and the old will make an unconscious association.

I actually suspect he has long believed, as the novelist Charles McCarry has his Clinton-like character believe in the novel Lucky Bastard that he is JFK’s unknown illegitimate son. This would be touching—lonely children who don’t understand how they came from the family they came from think things like this; when Marilyn Monroe was a foster child she made believe Clark Gable was her father—if he didn’t appear to be delusional in other ways, and if he weren’t president.

She thinks she is Eleanor Roosevelt. She is a pioneer like Eleanor, a strong woman taking a strong role in her husband’s presidency. She is “very involved, on the front lines” in the administration, “like Mrs. Roosevelt,” she has said. She has an Eleanor Roosevelt Room in the White House residence which she has filled with ER memorabilia. With the help of a Jungian psychologist she has attempted to summon the spirit of Mrs. Roosevelt—her “mythic archetype,” in the words of the facilitator, Jean Houston—and converse with her. When Bob Woodward broke this story the White House played down the ER angle, saying she talked to Mahatma Gandhi, too. But Dick Morris has told me that Hillary “has an Eleanor fixation,” and others on her staff and in her circle have said the same.

But Mrs. Roosevelt, a hero to my parents and theirs, a woman admired by generations, Mrs. Roosevelt, whatever you thought of her or think of her, had size. She had earned the admiration and derision she inspired; she was big enough to be the focus of all that love and disapproval. Her concerns were serious; she had worked with the poor when no one was looking; she had worked out a philosophy, modern liberalism, against the flow. When she died the young Gore Vidal said at her graveside, “I guess we’re on our own now.” He meant liberalism had lost its great leader. (Hillary’s graveside: James turns to Harold and says, “I hear Mandy’s going with Mark Green.”)

Mrs. Roosevelt did not think, as they say, that it was all about her. She thought it was about coal miners and immigrants and Negroes in the South. That is, she thought it was about her country, about the whole left-out family of the disrespected and shunted aside, as she, in her own wanting family, had been disrespected and shunted aside.

I do not channel Mrs. Roosevelt, but it’s not hard to imagine her in your mind, standing there in a ruffled cotton dress and stern black shoes—a fluty voice, the odd combination of heaviness and flutter, and yet something profound: a modesty. What would Eleanor think of Hillary? You can imagine her looking down and saying, “She seems a strong woman certainly, which is always a good thing to see, but one senses there is something … strange there, and I’m afraid one senses it with both of them. Tell me, what does she actually … stand for?”

CHAPTER TWO

I

TO UNDERSTAND HER YOU HAVE TO UNDERSTAND him, and to understand the Clintons you have to realize that they are exactly what he so memorably said they were in the 1992 presidential campaign: “two for the price of one.” (Mrs. Clinton sometimes called this “the blue-plate special,” and on occasion “the blue-light special.”) They have operated together for a quarter century in the same way and for the same goals.

She stands for what he stands for. Together they stand for one thing: maximum and uninterrupted power for the Clintons. What they want is self-advancement, and what fuels them is a sense of self-importance.

Richard Nixon once observed that only two kinds of people run for high office in America: those who want to do big things and those who want to be big people. The Clintons appear to be very much, perhaps completely, the latter sort.

In their way of thinking America is an important place but not a thing of primary importance. America is the platform for the Clintons’ ambitions, not the focus of them. If it serves their advancement to take an action that is in the good of the country they will certainly take it. If not, not. This is not for them a difficult choice because it is not a choice. It is now, merely, a reflex.

The Clintons have shown no consistent loyalty to any political philosophy, party, person, or ideology; they do, however, have impulses, assumptions, and beliefs that are of the left-liberal kind. If defending and advancing left-liberalism will serve their purpose at any given moment they will defend and advance. If not, not. (When you look at their history you see that they began their careers with ideology, but that very soon it was replaced by hunger.)

The Clintons behave as though they are justified in using any tactic in pursuit of their goals. These include but are not limited to misleading constituents on serious and crucial issues; evading responsibility for governmental and administration mistakes, derelictions, and scandals; taking actions that are damaging to others but beneficial to the Clintons; smearing opponents ...