Defending Chris Matthews (?!*)
I can't believe I'm going to get between Chris Matthews and a punch, but I don't think he's a Hillary hater at all; here is a recent clip of him describing her as sweet, sexy, delightful, charming and on and on... Unlike Meghan, he even called her mellifluous! And at the time she was elected to the Senate, saying she got there thanks in part to some post-Monica sympathy votes was no more controversial than complaining about partisan gridlock in Washington. Here, for instance, is an ABC News story quoting a pollster on Hillary's favorables: "In the impeachment scene, Clinton emerged as a much more favorable person during the period in the victim role.'' Here is Harold Evans, opining in the Guardian in the middle of the Senate race that Hillary needed to remind women just how awful they'd felt for her as a wronged woman, and fearing that she might lose unless she played the victim card again: "Hillary has a problem with women, just the kind of women you would think she would attract. She has slipped from a 50% approval rate among women in 1998, during the Monica affair, to 44%...Suburban women could give Rick [Lazio, her lame opponent] the Senate seat. It is puzzling. So many of them look and talk like Hillary and think more like her than Lazio on abortion and guns and education.'' Sound familiar?
Here, too, is a BBC story about how voters were won over anew after mean Tim Russert brought up Monica in Clinton's Senate race debate with Lazio. A debate in which her opponent lost a ton of support by crossing the stage to hand her some nonsense pledge or other - a move that women in particular saw as threatening and way out of line. So where did anyone get the horrible, sexist idea that New York voters - women in particular - liked Hillary Clinton better specifically as a result of her husband's philandering? Sorry, but from New York voters who cited it as a factor at the time.
If we're obsessed with HRC -- and lots of people are -- it's because she is so endlessly complex that there is always another layer. (Although she has also on occasion made me think of that Sondheim lyric about another complicated woman, from the Follies song Ah, But Underneath: "Sometimes when the wrappings fall, there's nothing underneath at all.'') I hesitate to say this, because I see that Slate is running an ad for the paperback release of Carl Bernstein's A Woman in Charge, and I never want to let it be said that I wrote anything that pleased an advertiser. But of all the Hillary books I've read over the years - and oh, there have been many - this is the one that taught me the most. It convinced me that some of that feeling that we don't ever really know her is not only a function of her obfuscation -- though there's that, too -- but might also come from Hillary herself not knowing which version of her persona is really really real.
We all have our contradictions, of course, but there she was, the president of the Republican Club at Wellesley, attending the Republican convention in 1968 in some official capacity or other, and then, for good measure, sneaking downtown in Chicago with a girlfriend to hang with the anti-war protesters at the Democratic Convention that summer, too! Anyone who thinks she's posing when she espouses some pretty conservative views just doesn't know much about her. Which is understandable, because there is so much biographical ground to cover, and I sometimes think there have been so many Hillary books because she is Zelig meets the Three Faces of Eve; it's hard to believe that everything she's lived through happened to just one woman. It's wildly unfair to call her just another lawyer from a middle-sized city who also did volunteer work: She darn near single-handedly saved Legal Services from Ronald Reagan when she chaired the LSC in the early 80s. Then again, for every "wow, she did that?'' there seems to be an "oh no, she did that, too?'' It's kind of rich, for example, for her to deplore the politics of personal destruction when, according to Bernstein, she pushed hard during the '92 campaign to go after Poppy Bush as a....(supposed) philanderer!
So it's typical that while on the one hand she's the right-wing's prototype Feminazi, it's also true that her feminist credentials have been questioned throughout her adult life. Even now, she is hardly universally beloved by right-thinking, left-leaning women; Jane Fonda went so far as to call her "a ventriloquist for the patriarchy with a vagina and a skirt.'' She is not a sister plagued by self-doubt, though, as far as I can tell, even when she might ought to be. Which is one reason she hasn't found her voice -- as an orator, anyway. A friend of mine who is in Democratic politics herself and supports Clinton says the senator is just not breathing right. She told Hillary's people this, too, ages ago, and offered to give her a free breathing lesson that she claimed could have solved the problem in 40 minutes. But, Hillary's peeps thanked her for the feedback and never got back to her. Until this week, I think Hillary liked her voice fine the way it was.