Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, January 29, 1995 TAG: 9502010005
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: B1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: DAVID MARANISS THE WASHINGTON POST
DATELINE: WASHINGTON LENGTH: Long
But with Hillary Clinton's office, as with the woman herself, things are not necessarily as they appear. She is, halfway through Bill Clinton's term as president, the first lady of paradoxes, a woman who is seen as both old-fashioned and postmodern, prone to remodeling and redefinition, revered by some as the epitome of modern womanhood and equality in marriage, and reviled by others as arrogant and domineering.
Inside the White House, she is aware that some of the president's men do not like her, a reality she said she has accepted. Many of them do, but some do not. They fret about her under the familiar cloak of anonymity. Their disdain can be fueled by fear: They worry that she will regard them as incompetent and say so to her husband. One called her self-righteous.
There is no backbiting of that sort from the first lady's predominantly female staff. Her assistants seem to adore her. They describe themselves as a functional family within an occasionally dysfunctional place. Her policy aides are separated from her physically; they work on the second floor of the Old Executive Office Building, which cannot be reached from her office without a quick walk outdoors, but they are bonded to her by loyalty and a pride that is personal, professional and to some degree a matter of gender.
The contradictory perceptions of the first lady within the White House are modest reflections of the way she is viewed by the outside world, where, for better and worse, she has been a larger-than-life figure since the presidential campaign of 1992. It has been said of Bill Clinton that he tries to be all things to all people, and now, increasingly, Hillary Clinton is encountering a variation on that theme. She is, intentionally or not, countless different things to countless different people, and many of those things have taken on negative connotations.
From her tribulations with the Whitewater controversy to her central role in the health care defeat, her public image has suffered to the point where she ends the second year of the Clinton administration as a drag on her husband politically, slightly less popular than him in some opinion surveys. Frank Luntz, one of the pollsters for the new Republican leadership in Congress, said his surveys show she is ``an asset to women 18 to 34 and a liability to everybody else. She is still a role model to young women, particularly working women. But she reminds most men of their first wife - or mother-in-law.''
She said she understands that some of the contradictions are of her own making. She is at once driven to public service and averse to public scrutiny. She considers herself straightforward and aggressive, with a healthy ego, and yet inherently shy.
Members of her staff keep saying that she would be better appreciated if people knew more about her, and she often seems to be making efforts in that direction - here talking for hours at a forum on First Ladies, there inviting a friendly band of gossip columnists to lunch for an off-and-on-the-record session.
Yet she remains elusive, reluctant to reveal much, and in fact believes that efforts to define herself or to be defined by others through the means of modern American communications are inevitably futile and misdirected. There is, she said, an element of mystery in every human being, and when people try to capture that mystery and ``put it in a box,'' they are more interested in feeling better about themselves than understanding the other person.
The bits and pieces accumulate, day by day. Who is this first lady?
She is in hibernation after the health care defeat, says the Boston Globe.
She is a bitch, whispers Newt Gingrich 's mother to Connie Chung, quoting her son.
She is softening her image, says The New York Times.
She is a behind-the-scenes force in shaping her husband's ``middle-class bill of rights,'' says the Los Angeles Times.
She is just ``playing some small role in trying to help my husband and serve my president,'' she explains in the interview. Is that not being a bit overly modest? she is asked. ``Well, I don't know,'' she says, descending into the bits and pieces realm herself. ``That depends on who you talk to, and sort of depends on the day.''
All attempts to solve the riddle of Hillary Clinton eventually come around to her professional relationship with her husband. She insists, on the one hand, that her opinions carry no more weight with the president than any of his other advisers, yet notes, on the other hand, that all the first ladies she has studied have had enormous private sway over their husbands. She points out that even the quiet Bess Truman would spend her nights vetting her husband's speeches and his schedule.
With Hillary Clinton, according to Roy Neel, who served for a time as the deputy chief of staff, ``there was never any delusion that she would be anything other than a nontraditional first lady.''
\ During Bill Clinton's five terms as governor of Arkansas, Hillary Clinton evolved into not only his closest adviser but his alter ego. What he was weakest at became her strengths. She was the one to say "no" to people. He loved to waste time, she would cut to the chase. She looked out for their financial interests. She was his pro bono lawyer on controversial issues. When he decided that he wanted to define himself as the education governor, she headed a task force on education reform. The education effort was hailed as a major success, solidifying his career in Arkansas and enhancing his future on the national stage. They were at once a married couple and a political partnership, and he needed her to get where he wanted to go.
A few months into his presidential campaign, at a Democratic state convention in Florida, Bill and Hillary Clinton first heard someone utter a slogan about the Clinton candidacy: ``Buy one and get one free.'' Elect Bill and you get Hillary, it meant - two presidents. Did that provoke any discussions between the Clintons about what role she might play in the White House? ``No, not at all,'' she said during the recent interview, laughing. She ``thought it was funny. ... People started introducing me that way and stuff. It was just viewed as a humorous twist.''
But by her account, she and her husband, who talk constantly about politics and policy, did not discuss what role she would play in the White House until after the election. And then, she said, their conversation began with Clinton asking her to head the health care task force.
According to members of the first lady's staff, there was never any discussion of the risks involved in having her lead what was considered the make-or-break issue of President Clinton's tenure. No one broached the notion that placing her in charge might make it harder for those who disagreed with her position to get an equal hearing, or for Clinton himself, in case the effort failed, to distance himself from it. `
Their critics maintain that Hillary Clinton and her staff carried out their mission with a conviction that bordered on self-righteousness, if not hubris, and despite the fact that they held public meetings all over the nation and read thousands of letters from citizens, they put together a plan that seemed out of touch not only with public sentiment, but with what could be sold even to Democrats in Congress.
By most postmortems, the health care debacle was a significant factor in the Democratic defeat last November, as some voters blamed even those many Democratic members of Congress who did not support the president's plan.
Did she feel she had let her husband down? ``No,'' she said. ``I could have done things differently and in retrospect would have done things differently, but the fundamental goal was a worthy goal. There is absolutely nothing to apologize for.''
\ To the first lady's staff, any talk of how she has receded from the public fray since the health care defeat is preposterous. Hillary, says Melanne Verveer, her deputy chief of staff, is ``constitutionally incapable of being inactive.'' She has spent the last two months shaping her course for the next two years, her aides say. The new course she has begun appears, so far at least, to be a more traditional one.
She intends, Hillary Clinton said, to pursue her longstanding interests in women, children and health in another realm, concentrating less on legislation and more on the bully pulpit, hoping that she can be defined by what she talks about. She plans to write more articles like one she penned for Newsweek recently regarding orphanages and the treatment of children in the welfare debate. She intends to get on as many radio talk shows as possible, ``shows where people are willing to talk instead of yell.''
Her first mission, she said, is to take a discouraging fact she gleaned from her study of health care and try to use it to improve the lives of elderly women. She discovered last year, she said, that fewer than 30 percent of women over 65 are taking advantage of a Medicare benefit that allows them to get coverage for mammogram screenings. She intends to hold meetings with elderly women around the country to educate them on the issue, which she considers ``a definable problem that government can address effectively.''
The need for effective government assistance, rather than no government assistance, is the ideological battleground on which she wants to engage the new Republican leaders in Congress. On welfare reform, for instance, she argues that the Republican notion of cutting off payments to unwed teen-age mothers unless they live with their families is counterproductive and ignores the possibility that they often are fleeing inadequate homes in the first place. She said that she already has spoken briefly with House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., about this. She said that she also told Gingrich that she appreciates the fact that the conservatives seem eager to debate important issues on their merits.
She wants to be in the middle of the debate, making her case. When Maggie Williams, her chief of staff, is asked about her boss's future intentions, she replies, ``She's a litigator. Every day she gets up and goes to court. When she loses, she files an appeal.''
by CNB