Anger Binds Hillary to Her Supporters

Hillary and Rudy--what a crazy pair. Next year’s New York Senate race is the setup for a sitcom.

She’s the overachiever in the family, counting the days till she can spread her wings and get away from all the annoyingly immature men in her life.

He’s the stern father delivering his tough-love message through gritted teeth, so determined to do right that he doesn’t notice the steam coming out of his ears.

But the real steam is in Hillary, in her anger--an anger that binds her to her supporters.

One who sees more drama than comedy is psychologist-turned-liberal radio talk show host Ellen Ratner. “This is Hillary’s third breaking away,” she says. The first breakaway was from her father, a hard-driving man with an arctic-sized cold streak. In Hillary’s own book, “It Takes a Village,” the author recalls coming home from junior high school with straight A’s. As she tells it, “My father’s only comment was, ‘Well, Hillary, that must be an easy school you go to.’ ”

The second breakaway, of course, was from her husband. A new book, “Bill and Hillary: The Marriage,” by Christopher Andersen, describes a quarter-century relationship that is one part puppy love, one part power-coupling--and one part “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” His philandering is old news, of course, but if Mrs. Clinton hurled even a fraction of the swearwords and projectiles at her husband that Andersen writes about, then the true miracle of their marriage is that he has survived with his hearing intact, not to mention his nose. If Andersen is to be believed, Mrs. Clinton told one of her friends that she couldn’t “see the point of being married if you can’t mix it up a little . . . politics is conflict, and so is marriage.”

And that, of course, has been the secret to Hillary and her support all along. Her fans follow her not so much because of her ideas but because of her enemies. Mrs. Clinton’s conservative critics like to lambaste, for example, her 1994 national health care plan, but her proposal was as much a big-business giveaway as it was socialism. The true-believing far left had wanted a Canadian-style “single payer” plan, and that approach she never considered.

But for a certain group, Hillary’s greatness is defined by what she demeans--the barefoot-and-backward life path not taken. In her 1992 “60 Minutes” interview, she defended her husband with a diatribe of her own: “I’m not sitting here because I’m some little woman standing by my man like Tammy Wynette.” Later that same year, she unloaded yet again on homemakers: “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas,” but she continued, she wanted a career as a lawyer.

To be sure, working for banks and real estate developers at the Rose Law Firm in Little Rock didn’t exactly place her in the vanguard of “progressive” change, but such nit-picking was paved over once and for all on Jan. 27, 1998, when she told Matt Lauer and “The Today Show” audience that a “vast right-wing conspiracy” was out to get her husband.

That was not a correct description of Newsweek, which had the lead on the Monica Lewinsky story, but it was the call to arms that her frustrated fans had been waiting for. Author Andersen quotes a White House aide: “Whenever things got really rough, Hillary always blamed it on dark forces conspiring to get them. It was almost Nixonian.”

In terms of effective us-against-them politics, it was Nixonian. And like Mrs. Clinton, Nixon was no great ideologue; he was defined by those who hated him, and that was good enough for those who loved him.

So it is with the first lady. Ratner, an all-out Clinton supporter, recalls with fondness the “Don’t Pillory Hillary” buttons that were in vogue a few years ago. “The more that the right wing goes after her as a co-president, the more that Democratic women support her,” she adds.

Now, Mrs. Clinton, a victim looking for vengeance, confronts yet another man, Giuliani, the New York mayor, who, even after winning a surprise endorsement from New York Republican Gov. George Pataki, is still a frowner and a fumer.

Stay tuned: The upcoming Senate election will make the blood feuds between those other New York-area players, “The Sopranos,” look like light comedy.