Let Hillary Be Hillary : * Politics: The attacks on the first lady are much ado about nothing.

Through the looking glass. The pillorying of Hillary Rodham Clinton has taken such exaggerated leaps, one wonders how her antagonists can manage to keep up the attack with such straight faces.

Imagine William Safire, former speech writer and all-around apologist for Richard Nixon, daring to call anyone a “congenital liar.” The wildly disproportionate outrage of his column attacking the first lady read like a wicked giggle of shame, as if the burden of guilt of those Nixon years could now be lifted by exaggerating the transgressions of others. It won’t work.

Hillary Clinton is not Richard Nixon; she’s not even the president, and the tempest of the travel office is not Watergate. It is equally absurd to suggest that the finaglings of the Whitewater deal before Bill Clinton came to the White House are somehow comparable to Nixon’s abuse of the power of the presidency. Neither Hillary nor her husband illegally invaded and bombed Cambodia, audited the taxes and tapped the phones of U.S. citizens, created a goon squad operating under White House cover to break into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist, overthrew the democratically elected leader of Chile or burglarized the Washington offices of the Democratic Party and then paid hush money to cover it up.

Lying of the Nixon magnitude may not have been “congenital,” the word Safire applied to Mrs. Clinton, but it certainly was compulsive.

Why won’t Safire and other critics of the first lady fight fair? They have every right to attack her policy role in the administration if they disagree with her on the issues. She is quite consciously attempting to emulate Eleanor Roosevelt’s activism, first in health care and more recently in child welfare issues and, as with her predecessor, presents a legitimate target for those who want a figurehead first lady.

At first, the Republican right delighted in hammering the first lady as the bleeding heart liberal of this administration, but that is no longer as much fun. Beating up on poor kids has not turned out to be as attractive as the framers of the “contract with America” had anticipated. The first lady, with her considerable experience as an advocate for children in need, holds the high ground morally. On such matters, she seems to be the conscience of the president, and an increasing number of people are quite happy that he has one.

Nor are her critics any longer so quick to mock Mrs. Clinton’s exhaustive work on health care, which the president officially delegated to her and which clearly has been her main contribution to his administration. The much-maligned “Hillary Health Plan” used to be a very inviting target, so why has it now been replaced with inordinate attention to the extremely minor matter of the White House travel agency?

The answer is obvious. While Clinton’s health care task force may have taken on too much too soon, the public is more than ever aware that the current system is in trouble and that big changes are required. All that the congressional right has to offer are attempts to limit the two major federal programs that work: Medicare and Medicaid. The cost of those programs is at the nub of the budget debate, and the failing strategy of the Gingrichites is to pit those who immediately benefit from those programs against those who don’t: the poor against the middle class, the young against the old.

Hillary Clinton provided a prescient warning that the costs of medical care could not be equitably controlled unless we moved to more comprehensive and publicly monitored systems of health care delivery. True, she did not bite the bullet by endorsing single-payer health care, available in most advanced societies, but she deserves enormous credit for daring to raise these issues at all.

But some people have always been loath to grant Hillary Clinton any credit. She is in many ways a disturbing presence: brittle, brilliant, unpredictable, contradictory, ambitious and yet caring. She doesn’t suffer fools lightly and she is uppity. So was Eleanor Roosevelt, and as a result we scored much of the progress of the New Deal that, even Gingrich concedes, still sets a high standard.

My only complaint with Hillary Clinton is that in the past year she has pulled back from that challenging role. I’m not clairvoyant, but I suspect that if FDR could get a message to Bill Clinton, it would be: Let Hillary be Hillary and you and the country will be better off for it.