Thursday, March 20, 2008 - Posts
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Noooo... it wasn't Monica.
It was the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, of course, joining Bill and Hillary for a breakfast with "religious leaders" on Sept. 11, 1998. There is a lovely photo, too.
Q. Does this mean Bill & Hillary are closet Wright parishioners who share Wright's every opinion?!
A. Nope. But I think now we can all stop talking about Jeremiah Wright. If Wright was good enough to be considered a major national religious leader by the Clinton White House, then maybe Barack Obama wasn't uniquely obtuse in his decision to stay on at the church where Wright presided. And maybe Hillary Clinton's campaign should stop trying to use Wright to discredit Obama.
Just a thought.
And in case you were wondering what Bill, Hillary, the Rev. Wright, and the other religious leaders chatted about over their coffee and muffins: Bill took the occasion to repent. Even the absent Monica got an apology from Bill, at least in passing: "It is important to me that everybody who has been hurt know that the sorrow I feel is genuine. First and most important, my family, my friends, my staff, my Cabinet, Monica Lewinsky and her family, and the American people."
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Rachael, I don't think your sympathy for Hillary is misplaced. But I think perhaps you are not cynical enough. I've always assumed that the Clintons had a purely political marriage. So when you ask, "Wouldn't it be easy for Hillary to pop down to the Oval Office and see how Bill's doing or ask him if he wanted to serve the red wine or the white at their dinner that night, on a quiet Sunday afternoon?" I wonder, what if she had? Would she care if she found "that woman, Ms. Lewinsky," under Bill's desk? I always assumed she would not in the same way that you or I would care if we walked in on our husbands with another woman, except that it would be a pain in the butt for Hillary in political terms. (How to keep it quiet? How to explain it? etc.)
Do the Clintons love each other in the way that married people love each other? I just assumed they were still together for political reasons only.
Why does a man, or woman, have to be married to be successful in politics? Why couldn't Hillary have ditched Bill then and gone on to have her political career? Sadly, I don't think she stuck around for love.
Also, I do find it mean-spirited for the AP to cross-reference Hillary's public schedule with the Starr Report. After all, she did nothing wrong.
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Hillary Clinton released her "public schedules" from her days as first lady, and Ann Althouse has a good riff on how Hillary was a very "First Lady-y First Lady." But—and I suppose it was bound to happen—the AP went through Mrs. Clinton's schedules and apparently cross-referenced the Starr Report, and the result is a half-dozen or so incidences of Bill Clinton trysting with Monica Lewinsky while Hillary was at the White House.
I had two immediate reactions. First, I felt sorry for poor ol' Hillary. Bill is such an unrepentant philanderer that he had no qualms mocking his marital vows right under his wife's nose. Plus, Hillary's lived with this elephant in the room for the whole campaign. And now, boom, here it is out in the open. But then, a more cynical reaction: Could it be that Bill didn't worry about getting caught because Hillary was aware and lived with it because a scandal could have tainted her political future? Even when I'm feeling cynical, though, I still feel for her.
For some reason, this particular encounter really stands out for me: "Jan. 7, 1996: On a Sunday afternoon, Lewinsky and the president spent most of the afternoon in the Oval Office. The first lady and the president had a small dinner with 20 people at ‘the Old Family Dining Room' at the White House." Was that particularly daring of Bill? Wouldn't it be easy for Hillary to pop down to the Oval Office and see how Bill's doing or ask him if he wanted to serve the red wine or the white at their dinner that night, on a quiet Sunday afternoon?
So, colleagues, is my sympathy for Hillary misplaced? Or is my cynicism?
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I love that Woolf quote, Judith, and it's sadly apt, lo this century later. And I think you're right that's both Hillary's own doing and a product of how she's been treated. But I wonder about your claim that she has weathered horrors and Obama's hasn't. Yes, she wore the straitjacket of being the first lady, which was never more strangling than in Bill Clinton's White House. But Obama is a 46-year-old black man with an amazingly unconventional and also difficult past; see his autobiography. Forgive me if you were talking about their public and recent political personas and experiences rather than their whole selves and lives, but since I don't like the race-and-gender-suffering one-upsmanship, I can't help pointing out that Obama knows a real trial when he sees one. His have been different kinds of crucibles, and maybe that explains why he's sunny Jane Austen, but maybe it's more apt to think of him as a black writer with a light and wry side, like Langston Hughes (who Rosa reminded us of the other day.)
I'm curious: Does the comparing of your racism as worth than my sexism, and vice versa, distress any one else? Or is it just me who sees this as singularly unproductive?
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In "A Room of One's Own," Virginia Woolf talks about how the struggle to be heard and taken seriously by a dismissive and mocking world leaves ugly traces in a writer's work-- how it distorts reasoning, undermines arguments, sharpens the tone. Woolf is talking about novels written by female writers of the past, but it seems to me that she could be talking about books by Germaine Greer or sermons by Jeremiah Wright or, I can't help thinking, the shifting self-presentations of Hillary Clinton:
One has only to skim those old forgotten novels and listen to the tone of voice in which they are written to divine that the writer was meeting criticism; she was saying this by way of aggression, or that by way of conciliation. She was admitting that she was 'only a woman,' or protesting that she was 'as good as a man.' She met that criticism as her temperament dictated, with docility and diffidence, or with anger and emphasis. It does not matter which it was; she was thinking of something other than the thing itself. Down comes her book upon our heads. There was a flaw in the center of it. And I thought of all the women's novels that lie scattered, like small pock-marked appes in an orchard, about the second-hand bookshops of London. It was the flaw at the center that had rotted them. She had altered her values in deference to the opinion of others.
[Then Woolf says of the two writers she feels have managed to wriggle free of these conditions, Jane Austen and Emily Bronte:]
What genius, what integrity it must have required in the face of all that criticism, in the midst of that purely patriarchal society, to hold fast to the thing as they saw it without shrinking. ... They alone were deaf to that persistent voice, now grumbling, now patronising, now domineering, now grieved, now shocked, now angry, now avuncular, that voice which cannot let women alone, but must be at them, like some too conscientious governess...
If we were to contrast Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama we'd have to say that Clinton is one of those forgotten novelists, with an edge of rage warring in her with a penchant for excessive deference to the "divisive" politics of the past, and Obama is Jane Austen, speaking as Woolf said she did, with "freedom and fullness of expression." But I'd also have to say that what Clinton has weathered is far more horrifying than anything Obama has weathered—think of all the mean articles about her hair, about her glasses, about her name, about her every utterance and deviation from the well-scripted role of first lady. Given all this, I think it's a miracle that she has emerged as unscarred, as clear-thinking, as politically effective as she has.
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Good for Huckabee. Here's what he had to say yesterday on MSNBC:
On Obama's speech:
... I think that, you know, Obama has handled this about as well as anybody could. And I agree, it’s a very historic speech. ... And I thought he handled it very, very well.
And on the Rev. Wright:
... One other thing I think we've got to remember: As easy as it is for those of us who are white to look back and say, "That's a terrible statement," I grew up in a very segregated South, and I think that you have to cut some slack. And I'm going to be probably the only conservative in America who's going to say something like this, but I'm just telling you: We've got to cut some slack to people who grew up being called names, being told, "You have to sit in the balcony when you go to the movie. You have to go to the back door to go into the restaurant. And you can't sit out there with everyone else. There's a separate waiting room in the doctor's office. Here's where you sit on the bus." And you know what? Sometimes people do have a chip on their shoulder and resentment. And you have to just say, I probably would, too. I probably would, too. In fact, I may have had a more, more of a chip on my shoulder had it been me.
Funny how you don't see Mark Penn or Howard Wolfson or Hillary Clinton saying things like that.
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