What was ‘right’ for Hillary

Living History

by Hillary Rodham Clinton

Simon & Schuster $28

562 pages, Illus

A presidential candidate has to have money, name recognition, a power base, an overwhelming ego and a passionate conviction in his (or her) personal ability. Hillary Clinton has all that. If only she would toss one of her unfashionable hats into the ring next year. (Maybe she has.)

She’s going to be with us anyway. If she runs she would get the dissection she deserves, not simply suck-up questions from Barbara Walters, Katie Couric and Larry King. She would unite Republicans of all persuasions, bring out a knuckle-baring debate from those hapless Democratic candidates who can’t get traction. We would all enjoy it a lot more than a ghost-written, self-serving book that teases with anecdotes of her salad days but leaves us with Walter Mondale’s famous question: “Where’s the beef?”

No one’s buying “Living History” to learn why Hillary Clinton made such a hash of her husband’s health-care initiative. Nor do we expect her to dump on her husband. We’re all sick of that. We already knew how she wanted to wring his neck. She’s got all her lines down pat.

She says she stood by her man because it was “right” for her. I believe her. Everything Hillary does she does because it’s “right” for her. Even her ridiculous assertion that the stories about Bill and Monica were the fantasies of a “vast right-wing media conspiracy” was “right” for her. It accomplished exactly what she wanted it to do — defuse the moment when the “Bill and Monica story” went public.

The truth was irrelevant. That’s the way it always has been with the Clintons.

Hillary is a phenomenon for our times. She’s lived more lives than Shirley MacLaine. She catalogues some of them in her first paragraph: Democrat, lawyer, advocate for women’s rights, wife, mother. Now she’s a senator.

Watching Hillary during her days of humiliation in the White House, I was convinced that she had to hate her husband. He made a sick joke of their marriage and cheapened the Oval Office as a sordid chapter in the history of his presidency. But watching her shill for “Living History” persuades me that her Faustian bargain with Bill is as strong today as it was when she went on “60 Minutes” to (apologies here to Tammy Wynette) stand by her man.

I can’t imagine two people more suited to each other than Bill and Hillary. He wiggles around the meaning of “is,” making legalisms of his lies about his love life, and she characterizes him as an irresistible Viking lover.

Neither shows the slightest interest in asking questions of an ethical nature. The medieval morality play meets reality television. In both morality play and reality television, characters wear masks hiding their lusts, titillating audiences with larger-than-life venalities. Moral understanding resides in the audience, not in the players. They act, we watch.

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