The Little Woman

The Little Woman
Hillary Clinton plays the victim. Is she really as clueless as she'd like us to believe?
BY CLAUDIA ROSETT
Thursday, September 21, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT

NEW YORK--The latest uproar in the Empire State's increasingly racy Senate race centers on candidate Rick Lazio describing the campaign tactics of his opponent, Hillary Clinton, as "sexist."

Would that it were so simple.

Mr. Lazio is right that there's something askew in the sexual cosmos of Mrs. Clinton. But Hillary--who has accused Rick of bullying her in last week's campaign debate--is not exactly sexist. What she keeps underscoring in her Senate race is that she's something much more manipulative, and much worse. She is a woman busy peddling by example the notion that women don't have to be fair, don't have to be responsible, don't have to show good judgment, don't have to measure up to the standards we expect of men--even when they run against them for high political office.

When the going gets tough, Mrs. Clinton seems to be telling us, women turn into victims. They are in too much pain--over their husbands' infidelities, over their own mistakes, over the possibility they might ever be called to account--to be held accountable. Voters exist to serve as one big support group, expected en masse to shoulder the blame and pay the bill.

This is an ugly message for Mrs. Clinton to send, not least because there are plenty of women out there who have labored with integrity for years to earn status and respect in the workplace. They aren't married to the president, flying around the Eastern Seaboard to the tune of $1.2 million of tax money--which was the cost of Hillary's travel to and from New York aboard government aircraft between June 1999 and August 2000, according to White House records.

They are more like 31-year-old Lisa Akers, the hard-working co-owner of a bed and breakfast in upstate New York, who told me recently that she "would like to see a strong capable woman" represent New York, but has doubts about Hillary because of "the dishonesty" of the Clinton administration. "I don't know what her role is exactly, but it seems there's been a lot of covering up going on," says Ms. Akers.

Every time Hillary ducks her own record by playing damsel-in-distress, she is chewing through the capital of women who act on the principle that equal rights entail a full measure of honesty and responsibility.

You'd hardly know this from the bulk of the media reaction to last week's debate. Typical of the tone has been New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd's conclusion that "the Republicans should stop worrying about Hillary as the angry women [sic], and start worrying about Ricky as the angry man." Or another Times columnist, Gail Collins, telling how Mr. Lazio was supposed to be "likable" but in mid-debate "morphed into a political predator" who went "stalking" across the stage toward Hillary as he "invaded her space." Gosh, poor Hillary all alone up there, trembling in her royal-blue pantsuit while Rick turned into the Incredible Hulk. Is that what we're supposed to make of this?

Further sympathy is apparently owed Mrs. Clinton because the debate moderator, Tim Russert, played a clip of one of her own television performances during the early days of the Monica scandal. The defining moment of that clip was Mrs. Clinton's claim that where there's smoke, "there isn't any fire," and her insistence that we should all trust her husband's denial of his latest affair.

Mr. Russert asked Mrs. Clinton, "Do you regret misleading the American people?"

"Well, you know, Tim," she said, "that was a very--a very painful time for me, for my family and for our country." Now, said Mrs. Clinton--here she is, the hapless damsel invoking her support group--she is "very hopeful that we can go forward in a united way."

In the interest at least of respecting the integrity of American women, and perhaps of Americans generally, could we set aside all the Clintonian psychobabble about pain and personal space for a minute and look at where Hillary wants us all to go?

If we assume that Hillary, instead of using her sex as a getaway car, is actually dealing and talking straight, then we are looking at someone so touchingly innocent and perpetually victimized that it would be nothing short of cruelty from her caregivers--the voters--to land her in the Senate.

This is a woman who after living with Bill for years apparently knew so little about him that she advised the nation--warned us, in fact--that we'd better trust his denial of the Monica affair. Maybe that makes Hillary a stalwart spouse for a guy like Bill. But it also suggests a crippling inability to judge character.

This is a woman so naive she apparently didn't understand that earning $100,000 on a $1,000 investment in cattle futures is an event unusual enough to warrant questions. This is a woman so disorganized she couldn't keep track of vital billing records from her own law firm. This is a woman so clueless she had no idea what produced the scandal surrounding the 1993 firing of the White House travel office staff .

This is a woman who in 1993-94, thanks solely to her husband's job as president, had the extraordinary opportunity to head a vast national health-care reform effort. And at a cost of huge amounts of national time and attention and millions in taxpayer dollars, she made a complete botch of the job. In last week's debate, Hillary shrugged this off, saying, "as everyone knows, this was not successful. But we learned a lot, and I in particular learned a lot."

If we take Hillary at her word, we have to conclude that she's a woman who just doesn't get it, and now expects the country's voters and taxpayers to chip in for her continuing education, sharing her pain but never her podium, because she is--a woman? A president's wife? A victim?

Either that, or Mrs. Clinton knows just what she's doing. In which case the real victims are the people--especially the women--on whose alleged behalf she is now soliciting sympathy and a seat in the Senate. That's not precisely sexist. It's plain nasty.

Ms. Rosett is a member of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board. Her column appears Thursdays on OpinionJournal.com and in The Wall Street Journal Europe as "Letter From America."