Hillary Clinton
by Matthew North

Who is Hillary Clinton?

It's probably not wise to try to establish someone's identity based on one article, and the profile of Hillary Clinton in September's issue of Talk Magazine is somewhat curiously written, to boot. However, it's the only public statement the First Lady has made about her private life in quite some time, and since it seems to be the fad among opinion columnists right now, I'm going to take a shot at it. Here goes:

Hillary Clinton is some sort of android.

This is a bit harsh, but it's the shortest way to express the feeling you get about Bill's wife after reading Lucinda Franks' supposedly intimate look at her. She's not human. She may have been, once, but it's as if through some bizarre pseudoreligious process she has, and pardon the New-Agey terminology, emptied herself of herself, making her a perfect vessel for power. She's consecrated herself to politics, to public life. She is not Hillary Clinton, public persona/private woman, candidate/wife and mother. She is Hillary Clinton. Period. Oh, and if you live in New York she wants to be your senator. She has so much integrity, such internal coherence, that she is downright frightening.

At one point in the profile, Franks quotes something Hillary said in a conversation the two had a few years ago while on vacation on Martha's Vineyard: "I was cutting Bill's grapefruit this morning, and we had the best idea we ever had about day care, and all of a sudden there's this flapping at the window and it's a seagull— a seagull at our window!"

To Hillary, it seems, these three things— a moment of quotidian life, a revolutionary idea about a national problem and a bird at the window— are of equal everyday-ness, as it were. New public policy ideas are just as much a part of a vacation-day breakfast as grapefruit and seagulls. The point of this anecdote within the profile was apparently to illustrate that Hillary was very relaxed at that moment, but the middle clause about day care makes it clear that she has no such gear, so to speak, but only the one: drive.

It doesn't help humanize her, either, when she's quoted saying things like "The best way to judge an administration is not by the way they feel, but what they do, how they learn from their mistakes. Personal feelings are not a useful way of judging. Watching people is. That is how I judge people — by their actions." Ah. Feelings are useless, actions are what counts. One wants to ask her: and your husband's actions?

Her indirect response: "And what is so amazing is that Bill has not been defeated by this. There has been enormous pain, enormous anger, but I have been with him half my life and he is a very, very good man. We just have a deep connection that transcends whatever happens." Later on she describes her husband's adventure with Monica Lewinsky as "a sin of weakness", and eventually compares herself, apparently unconsciously, to Jesus. At one point she describes a series of pictures of the Clintons at various stages of their political climb as " ... the story of our life", a phrase others might use to describe a series of pictures of their children, or houses they've owned.

Hillary Clinton is not, like Bill, a politician who presents an image to the media; she is her image in the media. Many politicians act, present, project; the First Lady simply is. Well, "is" is something of a passive verb to express exactly what it is that she does — if it weren't such an ugly neologism, "bes" would be the best word. She has no unfortunate vices, like her husband, or if she does she supresses them. She makes public life a part of her private life to a point where there's no longer any division. Blame this on the fact that she's been living under a media spotlight for several years now, but there are lots of people who live with that kind of attention and still maintain some kind of private persona. Hillary does not seem to have any desire to do so — in fact, her only desire seems to be becoming a U.S. Senator representing the state of New York.

Again, in the final analysis of the Talk profile, Hillary does not come across as human. The final line of the piece describes she and her husband strolling down a hallway hand in hand, but in the same paragraph there is an account of an animated discussion of Kosovo and the President asks Elie Wiesel to go to Macedonia for him. Politically speaking, as every commentator is saying, the publication of this article is an astute move for the First Lady— she's gone public a little over a year before elections, and in a magazine that's bound to attract attention among a certain class of New Yorkers if only because it's the new Tina Brown project. However, in terms of softening or humanization, the article's not going to help much. One comes away from the profile with the slightly unnerving thought that this is probably as human as Hillary Clinton gets.

E-mail Matthew North at northm at gusun dot georgetown dot edu.