The Time of Our Lives

by Peggy Noonan

  This is not a woman who has to prove she’s tough enough and mean enough; she is more like a bulldozer who has to prove she won’t always be in high gear and ready to flatten you. In private, her friends say—and I have seen it to be true—that she is humorous, bright, interested in the lives of others. But as a matter of political temperament and habit of mind, she is neither patient, high minded nor forbearing. Those who know Mrs. Clinton well, and my world is thick with them, have qualms about her toughness, not doubts.

  But she is making progress. She is trying every day to change her image, and I suspect it’s working. One senses not that she has become more authentic, but that she has gone beyond her own discomfort at her lack of authenticity. I am not saying she has learned to be herself. I think after a year on the trail she’s learned how to not be herself, how to comfortably adopt a skin and play a part.

  Her real self is a person who wants to run things, to assert authority, to create systems and have people conform to them. She is not a natural at the outsized warmth politics demands. But she is moving beyond—forgive me—the vacant eyes of the power zombie, like the Tilda Swinton character in “Michael Clayton.” The Boston Globe, dateline Manchester, N.H.: “Clinton is increasingly portraying herself more as motherly and traditional than as trailblazing and feminist.” In a week of “Women Changing America” events Mrs. Clinton has shared tales of Chelsea’s childhood and made teasing references to those who are preoccupied by her hairstyles and fashion choices. On “The View” she joked of her male rivals, “Well, look how much longer it takes me to get ready.” This was a steal from JFK’s joke about Jackie when she was late for an appearance: “It takes her longer to get ready, but then she looks so much better.”

  Her fund-raising emails have subject lines like “Wow!” and “Let’s make some popcorn!” Her grin is broad and fixed. She is the smile on the Halloween pumpkin that knows the harvest is coming. She’s even putting a light inside.

  In New York this week she told a women’s lunch that “we face a new question—a lot of people are asking whether America is ready to elect a woman to the highest office in our land.” She suggested her campaign will “prove that America is indeed ready.” She also quoted Eleanor Roosevelt: “Women are like tea bags—you never know how strong they are until they get in hot water.”

  * * *

  Mrs. Clinton is the tea bag that brings the boiling water with her. It’s always high drama with her, always a cauldron—secret Web sites put up by unnamed operatives smearing Barack Obama in the tones of Tokyo Rose, Chinese businessmen having breakdowns on trains after the campaign cash is traced back, secret deals. It’s always flying monkeys. One always wants to ask: Why? What is this?

  The question, actually, is not whether America is “ready” for a woman. It’s whether it’s ready for Hillary. And surely as savvy a campaign vet as Mrs. Clinton knows this.

  Who, of all the powerful women in American politics right now, has inspired the unease, dismay and frank dislike that she has? Condi Rice, Nancy Pelosi, Dianne Feinstein? These are serious women who are making crucial decisions about our national life every day. They inspire agreement and disagreement; they fight and are fought with. But they do not inspire repugnance. Nobody hates Barbara Mikulski, Elizabeth Dole or Kay Bailey Hutchison; everyone respects Ms. Rice and Ms. Feinstein.

  Hillary’s problem is not that she’s a woman; it’s that unlike these women—all of whom have come under intense scrutiny, each of whom has real partisan foes—she has a history that lends itself to the kind of doubts that end in fearfulness. It is an unease and dismay based not on gender stereotypes but on personal history.

  * * *

  But here’s why I mentioned earlier the latent power inherent in the fact that Hillary is a woman.

  It is true that 54% of the electorate is composed of women and that what feminist sympathies they have may be especially enlivened this year by a strong appeal. It is not true that women in general vote in anything like a bloc, but it is probably true—I think it is true—that they share in a general way some rough and broad sympathies.

  One has to do with what it is to be a woman in the world. To be active on any level in the life of the nation is to be immersed in controversy. If you are a woman, the to and fro, the fights you’re in, will to some extent be sharpened or shaped by what used to be called sexism. There isn’t a woman in America who hasn’t been patronized—or worse—for being a woman, at least to some degree, and I mean all women, from the nun patronized by the bullying bishop to the congresswoman not taken seriously by the policy intellectual to the school teacher browbeaten by the school board chairman to the fare collector corrected by the huffy businessman. It happens to every woman.

  Conservative women tend not to talk about it except to each other, and those conversations are voluble and pointed. They don’t go public with their complaints because they’re afraid it will encourage liberals to pass a law, and if you wanted more laws, or thought laws could reform human nature and make us all nice, you wouldn’t be a conservative. Their problem is sharpened by the fact that some conservative men are boorish and ungentlemanly to show how liberated they are. But I digress.

  Or rather I don’t. The point is there are many women who will on some level be inclined to view Mrs. Clinton’s candidacy through the lens of their experience as women, and there is real latent sympathy there if she could tap it, which is what she’s trying to do.

  But first, or more important, she will have to credibly and persuasively address what it is in her history—in her—that inspires such visceral opposition. That would be quite something if she did, or even tried.

  Over the Top

  The Wall Street Journal: March 7, 2008

  An overview:

  From the first voting in Iowa on Jan. 3 she had to prove that Clintons Are Magic. She wound up losing 11 in a row. Meaning Clintons aren’t magic. He had to take her out in New Hampshire, on Super Tuesday or Junior Tuesday. He didn’t. Meaning Obama isn’t magic.

  Two nonmagical beings are left.

  What the Democrats lost this week was the chance to paint the ’08 campaign as a brilliant Napoleonic twinning of strategy and tactics that left history awed. What they have instead is a ticket to Verdun. Trench warfare, and the daily, wearying life of the soldier under siege. The mud, the cold, the dank water rotting the boots, all of it punctuated by mad cries of “Over the top,” bayonets fixed.

  Do I understate? Not according to the bitter officers debating doomed strategy back in HQ. More on that in a minute.

  This is slightly good for John McCain. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama hemorrhage money, exhaust themselves, bloody each other. He holds barbecues for the press and gets rid of a White House appearance in which the incumbent offers his dread embrace. Do it now, they’ll forget by the summer. The president does not understand how unpopular he is and after a year on the trail with the faithful neither does Mr. McCain. Mr. Bush confided to a friend a few months ago, as he predicted a Giuliani win, that he’ll eventually come out and campaign for the nominee big time. Talk about throwing the drowning man an anvil.

  But it is not good for Mr. McCain that when he officially won this week it barely made page three. The lightning is on the Democratic side. Everything else seems old, like something that happened a year ago that you forgot to notice.

  How did Hillary come back? Her own staff doesn’t know. They fight over it because if they don’t know how she carried Ohio and Texas they can’t repeat the strategy.

  So they figure backward. She won on Tuesday and did the following things in the weeks before, so… it was the kitchen-sink strategy. Or Hispanic outreach. Or the 3 a.m. ad. (The amazing thing was not that they lifted the concept from Walter Mondale’s 1984 run, but that the answer to the question “Who are you safer with?” was The Woman. Not that people really view Hillary as a woman, but still: That would not have been the answer even 20 years ago.)

  Did she come back because Mr. Obama’s speech
got a little boring? Was he coasting and playing it safe? Or was it that he didn’t hit her hard enough? “He hasn’t been able to find a way to be tough with a woman opponent,” they say on TV. But that’s not it, or is only half the truth. The other half is that it has long been agreed in the Democratic Party that one must not, one cannot, ever, refer to the long caravan of scandals that have followed the Clintons for 15 years. “We don’t speak of the Clintons that way.”

  But why not? Everyone else does. Yes, the Obama sages will respond, that’s the point: Everyone knows about cattle futures, etc. Everyone knows that if you Yahoo “Clintons” and “scandals” you get 4,430,000 hits.

  But what if they do need to be reminded? What if they need to be told exactly what Mr. Obama means when he speaks of the tired old ways of Washington?

  But voicing the facts would violate party politesse. So he loses the No. 1 case against her. But by losing the No. 1 case, he loses the No. 2 case: that she is the most divisive figure in the country, and that this is true because people have reason to view her as dark, dissembling, thuggish.

  * * *

  One Obama supporter on TheRoot.com apparently didn’t get the memo. That is the great threat to the Clintons, the number of young and independent Democrats who haven’t received the memo about how Democrats speak of the Clintons. Writer Mark Q. Sawyer: “If Obama won’t hit back, I will. Why aren’t we talking about impeachment, Whitewater and Osama?”

  What do I think is the biggest reason Mrs. Clinton came back? She kept her own spirits up to the point of denial and worked it, hard, every day. She is hardy, resilient, tough. She is a train on a track, an Iron Horse. But we must not become carried away with generosity. The very qualities that impress us are the qualities that will make her a painful president. She does not care what you think, she will have what she wants, she will not do the feints, pivots and backoffs that presidents must. She is neither nimble nor agile, and she knows best. She will wear a great nation down.

  In any case the Clinton campaign, which has always been more vicious than clever, this week did a very clever thing. They pre-empted any criticism of past scandals by pushing a Democratic Party button called… the Monica story. Mr. Obama is “imitating Ken Starr” by speaking of Mrs. Clinton’s record, said Howard Wolfson. But Ken Starr documented malfeasance. Mr. Obama can’t even mention it.

  * * *

  Back to Verdun. There a bitter officer corps debated a strategy of pointless carnage—so many deaths, so little seized terrain, all of it barren. In a bark-stripping piece of reportage in the Washington Post, Peter Baker and Anne Kornblut captured “a combustible environment” in Hillary Headquarters. They cannot agree on what to do, or even what has been done in the past. And the dialogue. Blank you. Blank you! No blank you, you blank. Blank all of you. It’s like David Mamet rewritten by Joe Pesci.

  These are the things that make life worth living.

  As for the Clinton surrogates, they are unappealing when winning. My favorite is named Kiki. When Hillary is losing, Kiki is valiant and persevering on the talk shows, and in a way that appeals to one’s sympathies. “Go, Kiki!” I want to say as she parries with Tucker. But when Hillary is winning they’re all awful, including Kiki. By memory, from Tucker, this week: Q: Why won’t Hillary release her tax returns? A: It’s February. Taxes are due April 15, are your taxes done? Q: No, no, we’re talking past years, returns that have already been prepared. A: Are your taxes done? Mine aren’t.

  Wicked Kiki! This is my great fear, in a second Clinton era: four, eight years of wicked Kiki.

  I end with a deadly, deadpan prediction from Christopher Hitchens. Hillary is the next president, he told radio’s Hugh Hewitt, because, “there’s something horrible and undefeatable about people who have no life except the worship of power… people who don’t want the meeting to end, the people who just are unstoppable, who only have one focus, no humanity, no character, nothing but the worship of money and power. They win in the end.”

  It was like Claude Rains summing up the meaning of everything in the film “Lawrence of Arabia”: “One of them’s mad and the other is wholly unscrupulous.” It’s the moment when you realize you just heard the truth, the meaning underlying all the drama. “They win in the end.” Gave me a shudder.

  Pity Party

  The Wall Street Journal: May 16, 2008

  Big picture, May 2008

  The Democrats aren’t the ones falling apart, the Republicans are. The Democrats can see daylight ahead. For all their fractious fighting, they’re finally resolving their central drama. Hillary Clinton will leave, and Barack Obama will deliver a stirring acceptance speech. Then hand-to-hand in the general, where they see their guy triumphing. You see it when you talk to them: They’re busy being born.

  The Republicans? Busy dying. The brightest of them see no immediate light. They’re frozen, not like a deer in the headlights but a deer in the darkness, his ears stiff at the sound. Crunch. Twig. Hunting party.

  The headline Wednesday on Drudge, from Politico, said, “Republicans Stunned by Loss in Mississippi.” It was about the eight-point drubbing the Democrat gave the Republican in the special House election. My first thought was: You have to be stupid to be stunned by that. Second thought: Most party leaders in Washington are stupid—detached, played out, stuck in the wisdom they learned when they were coming up, in ’78 or ’82 or ’94. Whatever they learned then, they think pertains now. In politics especially, the first lesson sticks. For Richard Nixon, everything came back to Alger Hiss.

  They are also—Hill leaders, lobbyists, party speakers—successful, well connected, busy and rich. They never guessed, back in ’86, how government would pay off! They didn’t know they’d stay! They came to make a difference and wound up with their butts in the butter. But affluence detaches, and in time skews thinking. It gives you the illusion you’re safe, and that everyone else is. A party can lose its gut this way.

  Many are ambivalent, deep inside, about the decisions made the past seven years in the White House. But they’ve publicly supported it so long they think they… support it. They get confused. Late at night they toss and turn in the antique mahogany sleigh bed in the carpeted house in McLean and try to remember what it is they really do think, and what those thoughts imply.

  And those are the bright ones. The rest are in Perpetual 1980: We have the country, the troops will rally in the fall.

  “This was a real wakeup call for us,” someone named Robert M. Duncan, who is chairman of the Republican National Committee, told the New York Times. This was after Mississippi. “We can’t let the Democrats take our issues.” And those issues would be? “We can’t let them pretend to be conservatives,” he continued. Why not? Republicans pretend to be conservative every day.

  The Bush White House, faced with the series of losses from 2005 through ’08, has long claimed the problem is Republicans on the Hill and running for office. They have scandals, bad personalities, don’t stand for anything. That’s why Republicans are losing: because they’re losers.

  All true enough!

  But this week a House Republican said publicly what many say privately, that there is another truth. “Members and pundits… fail to understand the deep-seated antipathy toward the president, the war, gas prices, the economy, foreclosures,” said Rep. Tom Davis of Virginia in a 20-page memo to House GOP leaders.

  The party, Mr. Davis told me, is “an airplane flying right into a mountain.” Analyses of its predicament reflect an “investment in the Bush presidency,” but “the public has just moved so far past that.” “Our leaders go up to the second floor of the White House and they get a case of White House-itis.” Mr. Bush has left the party at a disadvantage in terms of communications: “He can’t articulate. The only asset we have now is the big microphone, and he swallowed it.” The party, said Mr. Davis, must admit its predicament, act independently of the White House and force Democrats to define themselves. “They should have some ownership for what’s going on. They control
the budget. They pay no price… Obama has all happy talk, but it’s from 30,000 feet. Energy, immigration, what is he gonna do?”

  * * *

  Could the party pivot from the president? I spoke this week to Clarke Reed of Mississippi, one of the great architects of resurgent Republicanism in the South. When he started out, in the 1950s, there were no Republicans in his state. The solid South was solidly Democratic, and Sen. James O. Eastland was thumping the breast pocket of his suit, vowing that civil rights legislation would never leave it. “We’re going to build a two-party system in the South,” Mr. Reed said. He helped create “the illusion of Southern power,” as a friend put it, with the creation of the Southern Republican Chairman’s Association. “If you build it they will come.” They did.

  There are always “lots of excuses,” Mr. Reed said of the special-election loss. Poor candidate, local factors. “Having said all that,” he continued, “let’s just face it: It’s not a good time.” He meant to be a Republican. “They brought Cheney in, and that was a mistake.” He cited “a disenchantment with the generic Republican label, which we always thought was the Good Housekeeping seal.”

  What’s behind it? “American people just won’t take a long war. Just—name me a war, even in a pro-military state like this. It’s overall disappointment. It’s national. No leadership, adrift. Things haven’t worked.” The future lies in rebuilding locally, not being “distracted” by Washington.

  Is the Republican solid South over?

  “Yeah. Oh yeah.” He said, “I eat lunch every day at Buck’s Cafe. Obama’s picture is all over the wall.”