In The Aftermath Of Monicagate Hillary Is Once Again Ascendant
First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton is feeling frisky. Last Wednesday, she made news with a bold break from U.S. Middle East policy. Speaking by satellite to a gathering of young Israeli Jews and Arabs, she declared: 'It would be in the long-term interests of the peace in the Middle East for there to be a state of Palestine a functioning modern state on the same footing as other states.'
Much ink has been spilt trying to interpret what these sentences tell us about U.S. foreign policy. In fact, their real importance is what they tell us about Mrs. Clinton herself.
Mrs. Clinton's power within her husband's administration has rollercoasted up and down. She earned a big IOU in February 1992, when she appeared by her husband's side on 60 Minutes and nodded her head vigorously as he denied (untruthfully as we now know) his affair with Gennifer Flowers. Clinton paid the IOU handsomely in 1993: people whose primary loyalty was to Hillary, not Bill, were given powerful jobs on the White House staff and in the Justice Department, and Hillary herself commandeered control of the most important initiative of Clinton's first term, health-care reform.
Alas for Hillary, she made a total botch of her job. Hillary's friends all too often proved either incompetent or ethically tainted. And Hillary's own carefully cultivated image of rectitude was stained by revelations of her abuse of power in the White House and her troubling business transactions in Arkansas, from her inexplicable $ 100,000 cattle futures windfall to the Whitewater deal itself. Hillary's explanations of her conduct repeatedly fell a good distance short of the full truth. By 1994, she had achieved the distinction of becoming the first First Lady in history to have lower poll numbers than her husband, and her catastrophic health-care failure helped the Republicans win control in November 1994 of both houses of Congress for the first time since 1952.
So, for the next 30 months, Hillary went underground. She wrote an anodyne book and was sent out of town on long trips to Central Asia and other remote places. She relinquished much of the substance of her power and even more of the appearance of power. By early 1996, the president's popularity had rebounded and his re-election was in the bag. Hillary's poll numbers, by contrast, remained dreadful.
Clinton's 1996 triumph seemed to have liberated Bill from Hillary's tutelage once and for all. Hillary herself appeared to understand that her stock had fallen as her husband's had risen. I happened to hear Hillary Clinton speak in the spring of 1997. The talk was off the record and before a friendly audience. Even so, she chose her words with remarkable care: never once did she talk about what she thought or which policies she preferred. It was always, 'My husband's administration has done this,' or 'My husband thinks that.'
Perhaps not so coincidentally, Clinton celebrated his new independence by reverting to his old taste for reckless sexual adventure. And here comes the big irony of the story. Once again he was caught. For a week, his political fate hung in the balance. And then, once again, Hillary saved him. Had she kept silent, Monicagate would probably have destroyed him. Instead, she gave interviews to both NBC and ABC, to affirm she believed her husband. The public decided, 'Well, if she has no problem with her husband's behavior, how is it any of our business?' It was 1992 all over again.
And once again, there was a price to pay. Since the NBC and ABC interviews, according to numerous reports by White House insiders, Hillary has enjoyed something close to operational control of the presidency. Even in her 1993 glory days, Hillary stayed away from foreign policy. Not any more. And the purpose of her comment on Wednesday was to announce her new and astonishing power to the entire world.
It's an alarming state of affairs. Alarming because the lawful chief executive has in effect been replaced by an unelected and unaccountable freelancer.Ê Alarming, too, because that unelected and unaccountable freelancer has shown such consistent bad judgment, both at home and now abroad.