I can’t help but feel like Maureen Dowd is a clairvoyant. Not usually, but in the case of Bill and Hillary, she’s dead on accurate.
Our ubiquitous ex-president is playing his favorite uxorious game, and it goes like this: Let’s create chaos and then get out of it together. You ride to my rescue or I ride to yours. We come within an inch of dying and then recapture the day by the skin of our teeth. While we’re killing ourselves, we blame everyone else. We’ll be heroes.
In a couple of sentences a summary of all that is Bill Clinton. You have to LOVE Maureen Dowd for this, even if it is a statement of the obvious.
Should Hillaryland muzzle him? Give him a minder? Is he rusty? Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?
“For the first time since the Marc Rich pardon,†said a friend of the Clintons, “Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.â€
Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt. And certainly he feels that his legacy is tied to her. He suggests to Matt Bai in today’s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas that fell flat the first time.
Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?
Good Lord, we can only hope that Hillary doesn’t fixate on the failures of Bill as George has fixated on the supposed failures of “Daddy”. Where Bush Sr. failed was on his domestic agenda, yet Jr. seems to be concerned with the agenda abroad. Daddy Bush did just fine on the international front, unfortunately his economic strategies and inability to hold to a promise regarding “no new taxes”, cost him a second term. Hillary can’t be so dumb as to try to undo the mistakes of Bill… can she?
It’s hard to feel sorry for Hillary because the very logic of her campaign leads right to Bill. When she speaks of her “experience,†she is referring not to the Senate but to the White House, thereby making her campaign a plebiscite on the ’90s.
Oh good God, all the more reason to have had enough of the Bush/Clinton swap of the presidency. If it’s always going to be about eight years prior, how can it be effective TODAY?
Thanks Maureen… for clearing it all up for us.
