Who Let the Dogs In? (11 page)

What, I have no idea. But his work confirms my long-held belief that we live in a great nation.

Three of my correspondents actually sat down and figured out their own plans for closing the budget deficit, which is three more than have done so in Washington, D.C. I shall forward their oeuvres to the next occupant of the White House. One bright fellow proposed a progressive income tax, table enclosed.

My least favorite writers are those who are on the government teat and also demanding that the government do less for everyone else and more for them. I regret to report that many on Social Security fall into this category. No, you did not pay in every nickel you are getting from Social Security. No, you did not earn the payments you are getting. You are, however, correct about the inadequacy of Medicare and the need for a long-term-care bill.

Instead of demanding more for yourselves, why not support national health insurance?

No sooner do I make a wish like that than, lo, I find the people are ahead of me again. The American Association of Retired People, a mighty lobby, is now concentrating some of its firepower not just on helping old folks, but on helping children as well, setting up programs for seniors to help kids and supporting the agenda of children’s rights organizations. Bravo!

One modest suggestion I have to help people get a grip on how all this works is that the government begin printing Social Security checks in red after the brief period in which each recipient is in fact drawing out only what he or she has paid in, plus interest. Shouldn’t be difficult to design a computer program for this purpose.

Now those moved to poetry by our electoral follies are a hardy breed. To make song out of madness requires much intestinal fortitude, but still the poets persist. I have received sonnets, lyrics, and limericks and heard from one poet “lariat,” who writes in cowboy meter:

That’s nothing: I once received a poem rhyming Attorney General John Mitchell with “Twitchell, Twitchell.”

Parody is another favorite election-year form: “George Bush is my president; I shall know want. He maketh me to stand in unemployment lines; He leadeth me beside polluted waters. He restoreth my taxes, etc.”

Several correspondents have reinforced another long-held conviction, which is that people who get their economic knowledge by reading the editorial page of
The Wall Street Journal
would be better off if they had remained in blissful ignorance, rather than coming to believe so much tripe and piffle.

Religion is a topic that touches off strong passions, pro and con. The wisdom of the founders (“Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof”) is constantly demonstrated anew.

The family values correspondents fall into three categories, one of which I did not expect. Those who buy into the Republican presentation of family values are furiously angry. Those who think it’s all a crock are given to giddy hilarity and rather rude suggestions about Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown. There are also a largish number of quite thoughtful letters on this topic, so thoughtful that I wish someone other than Quayle had introduced the subject for other than political reasons.

All in all, the mail reminds me of something that occurs to me quadrennially as we go through the electoral festivities: This is a pretty wonderful country, and there sure are a lot of people in it who care about what happens to it. That they seldom agree with one another, or me, is beside the larger point. Good on you all, and keep coming up with those amazing ideas and observations. Thank you.

October 1992

Hillary Clinton I

B
OSTON
, MASS
.
— Seems to be de rigueur to be in a tizz about Hillary Clinton these days. Everyone has an opinion about what she’s doing, what she should be doing, and what she should not be doing.

Hillary Clinton has become the functional equivalent of a national Rorschach test of our attitudes toward the changing role of women. All the doubt, guilt, anxiety, and confusion we feel are being projected onto Mrs. Clinton, who is being made to stand for everything from a role model for working mothers to some fang-dripping militant feminist.

From my own brief acquaintance with Hillary Clinton, I’d say she’s not only exceptionally bright, but also a kinder, funnier, and nicer person than is generally perceived. As we all get to know her, I suspect much of the controversy will die away.

For the nonce, however, she is in a bit of a pickle. She has heretofore been a person in her own right, not just a “wife of.” But there is no practical way Hillary Clinton can continue to practice her profession in Washington—the potential for conflict of interest is just too great. Likewise, she cannot be appointed by her husband to any paying post in government—it’s against the law. So Hillary Clinton, like Barbara Bush, Nancy Reagan, Rosalynn Carter, and Betty Ford before her, will become an unpaid, but clearly Very Important Counselor to the president.

Better Hillary Clinton than Joan Quigley. Joan Who? you say. Ah, how quickly they forget. Joan Quigley was Nancy Reagan’s astrologer, the woman who cast the horoscopes that determined the precise minute at which President Reagan’s plane would take off for summit meetings and other diplomatic trips. I’d rather have Hillary Clinton’s brains and experience weighing in on the national fate than the alignment of Jupiter and Mars.

Hillary Clinton has two areas of special expertise—children’s issues and the law. Seems to me Bill Clinton would be a fool not to listen to her on both. Hillary Clinton is an outstanding lawyer. If Bill Clinton were married to an outstanding physicist, I’d expect him to consult her about a good national science adviser and such topics as whether we’d be better off funding big science or a greater variety of research. Why ignore free expertise available right there in the home?

I also expect Mrs. Clinton to function as an extra pair of eyes and ears for her husband, as did Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Roosevelt, who was better able to get out and around than her husband, brought matters to Roosevelt’s attention he might otherwise have missed. Seems to me that’s a good deal for Bill Clinton and the country.

As a long-standing Barbara Bush fan, I think Hillary Clinton should take a page out of her book. One reason Barbara Bush is such a comfortable first lady is because she’s always just herself, not trying to be somebody else—she’s not slim, she’s not gorgeous, and she’s not a great intellectual. So what? Likewise, I don’t think Hillary Clinton needs to try to fit anyone else’s idea of how a first lady should behave. She’s a nice person, and we’ll get used to the idea of a first lady who occasionally wears blue jeans and who can be mordantly funny.

As for the rest of us, perhaps we should stop with all the shoulds and shouldn’ts and let Hillary Clinton be herself. And we might also examine how our own prejudices and predilections are affecting our views of Mrs. Clinton.

I’m still startled when I think of the uproar during the campaign over the fact that Mrs. Clinton once put marriage in the same sentence with Indian reservations and slavery as an example of a legal dependency situation. Do you know anything about the legal history of marriage? Wives, until relatively recently, had no civil rights, no legal rights, and no property rights. Marriage in the nineteenth century was a classic example of a dependency relationship. And yet people carried on as though this simple statement of historical fact were some evil, anti-family view. And why beholdest thou the mote that is in thy brother’s eye, but considerest not the beam that is in thine own eye?

November 1992

Hillary Clinton II

O
NCE
UPON A
midnight dreary, as I staggered weak and weary, out from under twenty-seven pounds of analysis of Bill Clinton’s first one hundred days, it occurred to me that I actually had read something new in there.

I raced back to
Time
magazine’s exegesis of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s first one hundred days—when I get
The Weekly Reader
dissection of Chelsea’s first one hundred days, I’ll plow through that, too—Lord, why do I abuse myself like this?—and sure enough, there it was:

Excuse me, but when did this become common practice? I don’t think I’m naïve—I’ve covered several Jim Mattox races—but this is a new one on me. Did the Democrats have someone assigned to discredit Barbara Bush? Did the seventies Republicans assign someone to go after Amy Carter?

Maybe it’s because Hillary Clinton has an openly acknowledged policy-making role? Do the R’s have someone assigned to discredit Robert Reich? Lloyd Bentsen?

I am especially interested because several journalistic colleagues passed along to me the phony “genuine, bona fide, straight from the Secret Service” tale about Hillary Clinton having heaved a lamp at her husband. Actually, that story was originally told about another political wife. When I inquired as to how they knew, I was assured “everybody in Washington is talking about it.” Maybe they need to come to Texas to take a refresher course in political rumor-mongering.