Hillary: a life

IS HILLARY CLINTON fair game for Republican attacks? Of course she is. Bill and Hillary have both thrust her into this campaign: "Buy one, get one free," he used to quip, back before the cookiebaking imbroglio, when the prudent decision was made to repackage her as Ma Clinton. Beyond that, she has a twenty-year record, dating back to the Watergate investigation, of political activism and advocacy. Garry Wills has praised her as a "radical" theorist of children's rights, and Daniel Wattenberg has retraced her affiliation with radical causes in The American Spectator. She is the very model of the Washington lawyer who doubles as activist and government consultant. It was appropriate, it was wellnigh inevitable, that she should appear at the recent American Bar Association convention to proclaim her faith in Anita Hill, icon of New Class professional feminist victimhood. But it was not the act of a Harriet Nelson.

Her now-famous comparison of marriage and family life to slavery was quite in character, and in keeping with the feminist party line. No muttering about its being taken "out of context" can neutralize it. Besides, its context makes it dear that she meant it just the way it sounds.

Mrs. Clinton has spent two decades cultivating a political identity, and she can't run away from it now. If it makes voters uneasy, it should: her kind of politics leads only one way--to more government intrusion and to higher taxes. She has never pretended to be a Jeffersonian.

Indeed, she deserves respect. Her career has a certain consistency and integrity. It has been guided by principle, however narrow and wrong-headed. In this she contrasts favorably with her husband, who has been running for President since his teens, and whose career has been a series of tactical mutations. It's not a little ironic that his political exigencies now require her to perform the unaccustomed hypocrisy of disguising what she is. In playing the dutiful wife, she is standing by her man.

And her Republican denigrators are only reminding the voters that she has had, after all, a life of her own.

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COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning