All About Hillary. - Review - book review

The Case Against Hillary Clinton, by Peggy Noonan (Regan Books, 181 pp., $23)

RECENTLY I watched a television biography of Hillary Clinton and found myself startled, as I always am, by the number of times she has radically changed her look. It's not just her hair (during the first year of the Clinton administration I lost count after eleven styles), it's her whole persona. In the space of that first year, she went from the hair-banded, suit-wearing tough campaigner of 1992 to the frumpy, polka-dot-dress- wearing June Cleaver of her health-care crusade. In the blink of an eye, she's Madison Avenue Barbie, stretched out across the cover of Vogue. Now, back in campaign mode, she has adopted the look of a New York local- news anchor: "Hillary Clinton: She's On Your Side."

These changes are so dizzyingly frequent that even the most nonpartisan observer is left to wonder: What is she up to? Who is she really? And what does she want?

Depending on your viewpoint, she's one or several of the following: (a) a good woman who made a bad marriage and has made the best of it; (b) the smart cookie behind Bill Clinton's rise to the presidency; (c) the blameless victim of highly partisan political attacks; (d) the heroine in a feminist fairy tale, finally breaking free to realize her own identity; (e) a power-mad Black Queen, willing to do anything and walk over anyone to hold on to power.

Even those closest to Hillary Clinton admit to being baffled by her. Hillary herself has wisely refused to speak candidly to any would-be Boswell. Mean while, every available legal document has been parsed; virtually every friend and acquaintance willing to speak on the record has been interviewed.

It's hard to imagine that yet another book about Hillary wouldn't simply pose the same questions and rehash the same incidents: the Wellesley commencement speech that got reprinted in Life magazine; Hillary's work on the Watergate impeachment committee; her first encounter with Bill in the Yale Law School library; their Arkansas years; the couple's appearance on 60 Minutes, defending their marriage; her involvement in the travel-office firings; her failed health-care bill; Whitewater; Vince Foster's suicide; the reappearance of the missing billing records; her "vast, right-wing conspiracy" comment on the Today show; her announcement that she will run for senator from New York. Ho-hum. Can't we have something new?

Well, now we do. Peggy Noonan's The Case Against Hillary Clinton is so breathtakingly original-in its writing, its observations, and its wit- that it will mesmerize even the most wearied and oversaturated Hillary observer. Just when you thought you couldn't read another word about the First Lady-surprise!-you will relish every clever, gossipy, funny, moving, indignant page of it.

Noonan, a former speechwriter for Ronald Reagan, recognizes that others have made the political case against Hillary (Barbara Olson in Hell to Pay best of all). She recognizes, too, that the market for sympathetic biographies has been fully sated by Gail Sheehy and David Brock. Instead, Noonan sets out to make the moral case against Hillary Clinton.

She does this, she writes, at the invitation of the First Lady herself. "[Mrs. Clinton] has been asking to hear the views of New Yorkers as she proceeds on her listening tour," and Noonan, a native New Yorker, is prepared to give her an earful. But Noonan does it in her own patented way-sharing the meditations she has while lying on the sofa watching Hillary on TV and crafting, with the art of a novelist, the scene of Hillary's victory speech should the First Lady win.

At one point Noonan evokes the typical female New York voter Hillary is trying to reach: the sort of woman who feels uncomfortable about judging the First Lady too harshly, and may even be considering voting for her. This voter reminds Noonan of a friend she grew up with in Massapequa, Long Island-a place where "the women work in restaurants and own delicatessens, work in real estate offices and teach kids, are nurses and stay-at-home mothers, and most of them look like mothers and grandmothers because they are."

Noonan imagines this woman at Jones Beach, circa August 2000. She has just settled her kids in the sand and finally has a moment to lie back on her towel next to her husband. She opens a magazine:

[Hillary's] on the cover. And you look at it. And you think what you always think when you see Hillary, which is that you don't really know what to think. If the piece you're about to read is highly critical, a real slam, you'll suspect it's exaggerated and partisan and mean. But if it's complimentary you'll think it's some puff piece, and you'll feel unsatisfied because you know, you can tell, there's something . . . not so great there.

And you don't think you're an important person but you are. Because what you're thinking as you look at the picture on the magazine at the beach . . . will determine the future of Clintonism in America.