Debating Would-Be First Woman’s Views

Amusing as the presidential and vice presidential debates have been, what this nation really needs to cheer it up is a good verbal battle of potential first ladies.

Problem is, the bickering would start right there: Should the debaters be called possible first ladies or first women ?

As Garry Wills reports in the Oct. 22 issue of the New York Review of Books, Hillary Clinton was pointedly introduced at the American Bar Assn. meeting this year by the latter title. And Wills doubts that the term first lady and expectations that accrue to such a position have much of a future.

“The pattern of the traditional President’s wife,” he writes, “could not be more distant from this generation’s experience and aspirations--a fact confirmed by the resistance to Mrs. Bush’s appearance at the 1990 Wellesley College commencement. She seemed, to some, a visitor from another era.”

It is, of course, a fear of this nebulous “new generation” of women that has given rise to such scrutiny of Hillary Clinton--by people who would point out that the Wellesley women gave Bush’s 1990 talk about the importance of family a warm reception.

In the October issue of Harper’s magazine, Christopher Lasch lashes out at Clinton, linking her to his familiar pet peeves.

The most worrisome thing about Clinton, judging from Lasch’s evidence, is her optimism about the child-rearing skills of government bureaucracy and her naivete about the complex dynamics of flesh-and-blood families.

As did the American Spectator’s profile last month, Lasch puts too much emphasis on Clinton’s ancient thinking--a shortcoming that owes much to the fact that she hasn’t been inclined to update her views.

Still, readers may guess that Lasch simply found in Clinton a convenient news hook upon which to hang his old ideas. Not that those ideas aren’t worth considering.

“Adults,” he writes, “are too absorbed in their own pleasures, their own business--in getting and spending--to have much time for children.”

This systemic child neglect, he contends, is endorsed by social engineering Democrats and laissez-faire Republicans alike.

Such behavior is encouraged by America’s “culture of consumption,” which not only turns children into undisciplined brats but continues to raise the definition of what it means to be middle class, enticing parents to work longer and longer hours--a whole month more apiece annually over the last 20 years, according to one of Lasch’s sources.

Meanwhile, the informal societal support system for children--family, neighborhood, church--continues to erode, creating fertile ground for notions Lasch finds dubious at best, such as Hillary Clinton’s belief that children should “organize themselves into a self-interested constituency.”

While Lasch obliquely vilifies her, Wills’ profile is as hagiographic as a candidate’s convention video. Putting more emphasis on her deeds than her words (and putting an endlessly upbeat spin on those deeds), Wills tracks the pilgrimage of St. Hillary from her own commencement address at Wellesley to the present.

As Wills portrays her, Clinton became a bright and zealous student of the human condition. As she worked her way through the legal trenches, the poor and abused children she encountered moved her deeply and drove her to fight against the people and systems that would bully them. Her work and ideas impressed those who worked with her, including such social justice luminaries as Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund.

Wills’ article shows how political ideologues can twist intricate matters such as children’s rights to suit their agendas. Pat Robertson, for instance, has hammered away at Clinton for wanting to kids to circumvent parental authority and get abortions. But Clinton says that her early study of tension between parental authority and young people’s interests showed that the exact opposite was usually the case: “The parents wanted the abortion, to avoid shame, humiliation or embarrassment.”

But Wills’ massages the issues, too. It’s doubtful Clinton is quite the saint he figures her to be, nor the puppet of Satan that Robertson imagines. More likely, her views and her priorities are in flux, as is the unofficial role she’ll assume if her husband is elected.

REQUIRED READING

* “Even in the best of times, the American family seems to be fraying. But these are not the best of times.”

So says the Oct. 19 U.S. News & World Report in its sobering cover story, “Love and Money.”

Families are falling apart at record rates, young couples are opting not to marry, and those who do are choosing not to have babies--all, at least in part, because of the recession, the story says.

Other statistics cited:

Unemployed urban men are twice as likely as those with jobs to abandon the mother of their first child.

Fifty-six percent of working women with young children would quit work if they could afford to--as would, the story suggests, plenty of working fathers.

And woe unto families that split up. Combined household expenses are likely to go up 30%, and with real estate declining in value, many families wind up selling the family home out from under the children.

* Anyone who has slogged through turgid academic pontification will find this hard to believe, but Lingua Franca, “the review of academic life,” is among the liveliest journals on the shelves. Combining the elements of a trade magazine with a touch of the scholarly journal, it offers a conversational style and gossipy tone that mitigates all that.

Of particular interest in the September/October issue are stories on anxiety at the University of Bridgeport, in Connecticut, which was recently purchased by an offshoot of Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church; a story on poet-philosopher-dog trainer Vicki Hearnes, and a profile of National Endowment for the Humanities chair Lynne V. Cheney.

* Entertainment Weekly has a penchant for periodically declaring, with utter arrogance, some sort of “Best of List.”

Such judgments are no laughing matter.

For the record, in the current issue’s “The 100 Funniest Movies on Video” list, EW is correct about “This Is Spinal Tap” (No. 3), “Duck Soup” (No. 7) and “A Fish Called Wanda” (No. 14).

But “Take the Money and Run” (49) and “Bananas” (21) should be flip-flopped, “Lost in America” (67) and “A Christmas Story” (69) deserve to be in the top 20, and it is sacrilege to bury “Monty Python and the Holy Grail” (95) beneath “Home Alone” (94).

Likewise, “It’s a Gift” (29) and “Repo Man” (32) have no business stuck beneath “Back to the Future” (22), while “Raising Arizona” (30) clearly merits a higher ranking than “Splash” (17), which doesn’t belong on the list at all.

Readers may forgive the list makers for leaving off the National Lampoon Vacation movies and for the tragic underrepresentation of Steve Martin and Eddie Murphy.

But it is inexcusable that “The In-Laws” should languish in the No. 80 position. Rather, it should ascend to the No. 1 spot occupied by “Airplane”--which does, however, deserve a place in the Top 10.

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