Hillary and Pillory

Lots of people like Hillary Rodham Clinton. Unfortunately for her, it’s the ones who don’t who seem to snag book contracts.

Clinton isn’t just first lady or a candidate for the U.S. Senate--she’s become a cottage industry, a veritable nonfiction sub-genre. In the last year, five books about her have landed in mainstream bookstores, and the Library of Congress lists more than three dozen published. With the exception of Gail Sheehy’s psychologically oriented biography, “Hillary’s Choice” (Random House, 1999), the recent Clinton catalog has been written by conservative women, some of them, like former Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan, well-known enough to have public profiles of their own.

They blame Clinton for everything from the death of feminism to the spread of ugly hat wearing. Comedians have indulged in Hillary-bashing for a while, but now that she’s a candidate, the jokes have become increasingly acidic. For example, when New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani dropped out of the New York Senate race, shortly after his relationship with a former staff member was revealed, Jay Leno quipped that Clinton’s reaction was, “One cheating husband down, one to go.”

The latest anti-Hillary tome is “The Hillary Trap: Looking for Power in All the Wrong Places,” by Laura Ingraham (Hyperion, 2000). Ingraham, a lawyer turned pundit, is an NBC news analyst and, until recently, host of her own political talk show on MSNBC.

In a telephone interview from her home in Washington, D.C., Ingraham said her book’s argument is one of politics, not personalities. “What motivates the Clintons [to stay together] is a subject of lurid fascination in Washington, New York and L.A., but where do you really go with that conversation after five minutes? What’s more interesting is the effect of the Clintons’ political choices on the culture, and whether Hillary’s celebrity/role model/icon status is deserved and what it says about the progress women have made.”

Never mind that Clinton was a law-firm partner before moving to Washington, Ingraham still judges her a poor role model for working women, especially married ones, because she’s found scraps of power and authority chiefly in her husband’s wake. Elizabeth Dole, who achieved two Cabinet posts on her own and was an official with the Federal Trade Commission when she married Bob Dole, is Ingraham’s idea of a better example.

The policies Clinton advocates should be anathema to a real feminist, Ingraham maintains, because they “keep women dependent--on lawmakers, unions, the police, even the United Nations. Clinton’s actual policy prescriptions depend on liberal big-government solutions that have a 30-year record of failure.”

It’s predictable that Clinton and Ingraham would be on opposite sides of the classic liberal-versus-conservative struggle. Ingraham blasts Clinton for supporting more laws, more lawsuits, more affirmative action, more federal edicts.

In her book, Ingraham wants to direct attention that’s been stuck on the Clintons’ personal lives toward issues that affect American women. The Hillary Clinton biographies, even the critical ones, spent too much energy on armchair psychologizing and not enough, for Ingraham’s taste, on Clinton’s ideology.

“Many conservatives became obsessed with scandal,” she said, “and many of the ideas she stands for were unexamined, which is what she wants. She won’t debate. As a candidate, she hasn’t made herself available for any situation that isn’t strictly controlled. I don’t think all her critics are conservatives. She isn’t having an easy time with the female electorate in New York.”

Ingraham set out to write a book about women’s political and cultural status. It became a Hillary Clinton book, she said, because “I was looking for a thread to hold the theme together and the more I delved into issues like family politics, sexual harassment and discrimination in the workplace, the most interesting person on the scene was Hillary Clinton.”

Ingraham concludes that Clinton’s personal decisions and political agenda have undermined most of her gender’s hard-fought gains. “I believe in the original instinct of the feminist pioneers, which is to make women feel they’re empowered to enter the work force and have educational opportunities that were once only enjoyed by men. A lot of the policies that Hillary Clinton supports [such as affirmative action] let women count on a bureaucracy to bail them out.”

The rampant voyeurism of the Clinton scandal made public sport of the first marriage. Ingraham, who is single, thinks that younger women are quicker to see serial infidelity as a deal-breaker than their elders. “I’m 35, and people my age say, ‘I would put up with that for about five seconds.’ Women today are tough. They don’t want to deal with a husband who cheats. It’s one thing if your mother had to put up with it. She didn’t have opportunities of her own. But Hillary? I’m not so interested in her personal motivations for staying in the marriage. I’m more concerned with what her tolerance of serial philandering does to the rest of us. I think it makes it harder for a woman who isn’t famous whose husband cheats.”

The young, independent and intolerant women Ingraham believes would kick ole cheating Bill to the curb would seem to be in conflict with family-values conservatives, who decry the high divorce rate.

But, she said, “Even family-values people acknowledge that a marriage that permits serial infidelity is corrosive to children. One or two instances of infidelity are one thing, but I don’t think women are required to stay no matter what, no matter how they’re treated.”

Clinton’s marital messes wouldn’t be anyone’s business if she weren’t looked to as a role model, Ingraham says. She fears that Clinton forgiving a straying husband will become an acceptable response to marital infidelity. And while some marital therapists believe an extramarital affair can be overcome, Ingraham grants men who cheat no pardons.

“Forgiving him worked for her. But most women can’t take a lifetime of infidelity and turn it into a Senate candidacy. In similar situations, most women end up financially harmed, abandoned or with terrible self-esteem. Feminism was supposed to be about standing up on your own two feet, not tolerating abuse of any kind--abuse of trust, emotional abuse or physical abuse.”

Feminism, in the political year 2000, seems also to be about withstanding abuse between hard covers.