The thing about Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, they say, is you are either for or against her. It is such an accepted truth of political life that everything written or said about Hillary is colored by that fact. Thus, to attempt a column that deals fairly with Sen. Clinton is seen only as a ruse to bury or praise her. This column is an attempt not to dismiss, but to deal with that reality.
I don’t pretend to come to the debate over Hillary’s fitness to become president with virginal pen. It is hardly possible to write about American politics these last 15 or so years without going on record with an opinion about Mrs. Clinton. So let’s start with a full disclosure: Although I voted twice for Bill Clinton, I became bitterly disappointed after the Monica Lewinsky scandal with Hillary as well as Bill. I saw her not as victim, but enabler. I seized upon another writer’s analogy to describe the presidential couple as Tom and Daisy Buchanan of "The Great Gatsby" — people who destroyed other lives and then walked arm-in-arm away from the wreckage.
Despite my misgivings about Hillary’s character, I became impressed with her serious work as a senator. When even Republicans such as John McCain and Newt Gingrich sing praises about her work in the senate, you must sit up and take notice. To give Hillary her due, among the three leading candidates for the Democratic nomination for president, her credentials are the most impressive. But if a resum� were the only criteria, then Joe Biden or Bill Richardson would be leading the polls. What Hillary has going for her is, as a woman, she is making a historic run at the presidency. She also leans heavily on the successes of the Clinton Presidency. Unfortunately for Mrs. Clinton, both of those issues also cut the other way.
In my admittedly limited and unscientific polling on the attitude of voters toward Sen. Clinton, I find her as divisive a political figure as any in my memory. Women seem split over her run with college-educated women largely being for her and the rest being largely opposed. Many of the visceral feelings both pro and con seem based on emotion rather than a serious assessment of her strengths and weaknesses.
Many of her female supporters want her to win simply because it is time we elect a woman president. If not someone as qualified as Hillary, then when will it ever happen, they ask. Mention legitimate criticisms of her qualifications, such as the Clintonian tendency to parse her words and, as a male, you find yourself being accused of bias against a female president. Yet the reports about Hillary’s tenure as first lady are replete with stories of her leading the attack to discredit females who came forward with charges of sexual harassment against her husband. By all reports, her administration would likely repeat the tendency toward intense distrust toward any but close loyalists, in other words, an extension of the paranoia and secrecy surrounding the current Bush administration. Be that as it may, criticize Hillary and you are "picking on her." The idea of Hillary as victim is a card even the candidate plays when she is pressed too hard for specific answers.
At the same time, much of the opposition, both male and female, is devoid of logic. Let us be candid: Many American males are not ready for a woman president, nor will they be in the foreseeable future. It is male chauvinism, pure and simple. They see Mrs. Clinton as a threat to what they perceive to be the sole province of the male, holding the highest office in the land. Surprisingly, it appears many housewives, and to a lesser extent some of the female workforce, are equally opposed to Hillary. It is the same phenomenon we witness among some minorities when one of their own aspires to something higher, the idea they are somehow "better than the rest of us."
There also is the fear of retribution by a male world if a female screws up in the White House. Along these lines, I have heard from a female friend in a post 9/11 world, Hillary is a risk we can not afford because she is a female. This opinion posits the theory other nations will not respect a female American president. Yet other western nations are way ahead of us on this issue and have elected female leaders. As far as Muslim nations not respecting a female American president, we can’t let the cramped tradition of those countries dictate who becomes our president. They had to accept the reality of Golda Meir and Margaret Thatcher; eventually they would have to accept Hillary Rodham Clinton.
In reality, the biggest challenge Mrs. Clinton would face is the feeling she has to show the rest of the boys she is at least as tough as they are. We have seen some indication of this in Sen. Clinton’s vote to originally support the war in Iraq and her recent vote to support Bush in branding the Iranian Guard as terrorists.
Judging Hillary is a lot more complex than most of us are willing to admit. She is not my favorite candidate, but if she is the candidate in November, on balance I’m likely to be for rather than against her.
