GyG'sMailbag: Sleaze, The Sequel (It's Up To You, NY!)

Sleaze, The Sequel
By George F. Will

Thursday , March 30, 2000 ; A21

Clinton may not be the worst president America has had, but
surely he is the
worst person to be president. There is reason to believe that he
is a rapist
("You better get some ice on that," Juanita Broaddrick says he
told her
concerning her bit lip) and that he bombed a country to distract
attention
from legal difficulties arising from his glandular life, and
that. . . .
Furthermore, the bargain that he and his wife call a marriage
refutes the
axiom that opposites attract. Rather, she, as much as he,
perhaps even more
so, incarnates Clintonism.

"To understand her you have to understand him" is the thesis of
"The Case
Against Hillary Clinton," Peggy Noonan's slender, scalding
book--a broadside,
as such polemics were called when Tom Paine and Emile Zola
penned them. It
answers with a resounding "No!" the question of whether the
passions swirling
around New York's Senate race are disproportionate.

Noonan, a speechwriter for President Reagan and now a Wall
Street Journal
columnist, calls Mrs. Clinton's candidacy an act of "mad boomer
selfishness
and narcissism" shocking even in a Clinton. Noonan concedes that
there is
something admirable in Mrs. Clinton's "toughness." But a Noonan
compliment,
like a scorpion, has a sting in its tail: "Never has the
admirable been so
fully wedded to the appalling, never in modern American
political history has
such tenacity and determination been marshaled to achieve such
puny purpose:
the mere continuance of Them."

There is an almost magnificent banality to Mrs. Clinton's
campaign. ("Our
children are our future." "Governments must put children first."
"Every time
we pay tribute to art, particularly to art in a public place, we
know it will
cause a lot of thoughts to be thought and words to be spoken and
ideas to be
sparked.") But the banality echoes the utter emptiness of the
record of what
she calls her lifetime of "public service."
The service includes being a rainmaker for a remarkably dodgy
Little Rock law
firm, representing interests in front of regulators appointed by
her husband.
Her "public service" does not include any public accomplishment
other than
making a baroque (600 people in 38 subgroups, operating in
illegal secrecy)
debacle of health care reform.

Noonan's diagnosis of Mrs. Clinton's emptiness (of everything
but staggering
self-importance) accords with Elizabeth Kolbert's unenthralled
report in the
New Yorker ("Running on Empathy," Feb. 7) in which Kolbert says
Mrs.
Clinton's "listening tour" of New York state "tried to elevate
nodding into a
kind of political philosophy." Her candidacy, Kolbert writes, is
based on
"the quality of her concern, the heartfeltness of her
convictions, and the
depth of her feelings." By basing her campaign on an attitude
("sincerity"),
Mrs. Clinton reduces questions of policy to questions of her
disposition.

Noonan's book is not "balanced" and does not contain fresh
facts. But it is
no more imbalanced than "Common Sense" or "J'accuse," and her
worthy purpose
is to distill the meaning of the acid rain of facts about the
Clintons' behavi
or with which we have been deluged.

"This highly credentialed rube," says Noonan in summing up, is
"too corrupt
for New York; she is too cynical for the place that gave birth
to Tammany
Hall." Noonan is one angry New Yorker, and although anger can
be, and in this
case is, a whetstone for sharp writing, it can subvert judgment.
Did Noonan's
anger do so? Consider.

Mrs. Clinton (like her recently announced Jewish
step-grandfather?) is a
longtime Yankees fan. She did not even know who Craig
Livingstone, keeper of
the FBI files, was--although a White House intern told House
investigators
that he heard her address Livingstone by name, in a friendly
manner. Never
mind staff notes indicating otherwise, she had nothing to do
with the travel
office firings, smearings and groundless prosecutions. She says
she talks to
her husband about everything--but had no inkling of his offer of
clemency,
over the vehement objections of the FBI and Bureau of Prisons,
to 16 Puerto
Rican terrorists.
Like the photograph of two Clinton friends holding hands as they
jump up and
down on Lincoln's bed, images of Clintonian vulgarities are
vivid, and more
are being produced. Recently there was the sheer fakery of Mrs.
Clinton's
successful struggle to answer David Letterman's questions about
New
York--questions she had been told in advance. Today Mrs.
Clinton, who put
Chelsea's nanny on the Arkansas payroll as a security guard, is
chiseling
taxpayers by her use of government planes for campaigning.

Will it--Clintonism--ever end? As the song says, it's up to you,
New York.