Empty Heart of Hillary

Empty heart of Hillary
By Barbara Amiel, Evening Standard
23 June 2003
The Hillary Clinton phenomenon is a mystery to me. She bounds from calamity to scandal only to emerge ever stronger. Elected Senator for New York State in 2000, she is now mooted as a presidential candidate. Her memoir, Living History, with its emphasis on her years in the White House, will be heavily promoted when she arrives here in Britain next week.

In fact, it is not a book at all but her business plan for gaining the highest office in the contemporary world. For those of us who find her speeches and writing disingenuous and full of cant, the book's unstated agenda makes her career trajectory doubly depressing.

It is as if we are living in the wrong world when a country as great as America can produce someone with so limited a mental landscape and yet - given Mrs Clinton's career record - entitled to some genuine expectation of landing that top job.

Her book is set in " Hillaryland", a place full of loyal, wonderful people - five pages of whom she thanks. It is the ambience here that enables her to want both to "wring the neck" of her adulterous husband and dedicate her book to him. When her life gets tough, Hillary Clinton has "healing times". She also "sobs" a lot.

She is surrounded by " wonderful, loyal staff and friends." She wants to "relieve the anguish of working people" and treat "her adversaries in life and politics with decency".

Wherever she looks there is a problem; when she tackles it, her message "resonates" and quite often "becomes a manifesto for women all over the world".

Mrs Clinton did not get an $8 million advance, however, to write only of high-minded matters. Her publishers expected her to give a bit on what really went on between her and her philandering husband as they careened through the Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky affairs - Kathleen Willey doesn't even rate a mention. Soapopera aficionados might also have hoped for a few more names of Clinton conquests.

As one of his close acquaintances who had wilted through the sexually frugal years of the Reagan and Bush Sr presidencies predicted happily to me after Clinton's election: "There's going to be a lot of pussy in Washington again."

Hillary's response to questions about her husband's infidelity shows the reticence of a vestal virgin. Such issues, she tells us, are in a "zone of privacy". The one interesting point she could make is never discussed: namely, that people have known from the first days of arranged marriages that continued sexual attraction and fidelity should not be the exclusive plank on which a marriage is built; that the Clintons developed some sort of arrangement or understanding as early as the 1970s that has allowed this partnership to function very well.

Given that Clinton's alleged womanising had been headline news for months, it is impossible to swallow Hillary's version that she knew nothing of these matters, she believed them to be the lies of his political enemies.

Hillary's great talent is to turn all to her advantage. It is not her fault that she has a husband who so publicly breaks his marriage vows but few people could make that into political capital, even in an age that so loves victims and survivors.

Everything, from her unearthly ability to make money in the fiendishly difficult commodities market to the nearly two-year-long inexplicable disappearance of her documents subpoenaed in the so-called "Travelgate" affair to her utter mishandling of health-care reform - the one official job she held under the Clinton presidency - seems only to have catapulted her ahead.

In America (unlike Europe), Bill Clinton has become a faded, almost pathetic figure. His wife seems to have drained the aura and power from him. How does she do it?

One can see that she is one of those interesting human beings who are more attractive when older than younger. This is not simply due to the advice of couturiers, fashion editors and dermatologists, though I dare say it has a lot to do with their skill and her ambitions.

The Hillary Clinton who ran for Senator had her hair blown dry every day without fail. Once elected she stopped that double-quick and reverted, rather winningly, to her frowsy look.

Napoleon used to say, when choosing a general for promotion, "Is he lucky?" Hillary is. It was "luck" that she ran against a helpless, inexperienced candidate in NY after Mayor Giuliani had to pull out of the race due to cancer.

People are swayed and impressed by a lucky person's success, though in assessing actual ability, luck and success may not be the best indicators.

On television or at a podium, Mrs Clinton is a winner. She can amass dozens of information points and link them together persuasively.

She cannot explain or justify her ideas a millimetre below that façade of surface knowledge, but she is rarely if ever asked to do so. Her notions are a mixture of half-digested, semi-socialist nonsense leavened with goody-goodness. Women need more rights. Children need more love - and legislation.

After spending time in South Africa, Tanzania, Uganda, Zimbabwe and Eritrea, Hillary writes that "No issue is more critical in Africa than stopping the ongoing conflicts - tribal, religious and national."

Few people writing about so unhappy a continent would dare pen quite so pedestrian a conclusion.

IN the end, one wonders what sort of a life does Hillary really have? She has been a fine mother but her daughter is now of age. She and her husband appear to pretty much go their own ways. In person, the attractive, animated face of this woman with the splendid laugh has a pair of dead calculating eyes.

One almost hopes that they conceal a clever Machiavellian mind, that behind this book and its author is a shrewd political operator and that underneath the political clichés there is a much more interesting person.

Surely, one thinks, in the privacy of her bedroom or talking to her closest friends, there is something more to her than she ever reveals? Can it be that one can achieve so much with nothing much more in her head than this?

One almost longs for a malevolent intelligence, but having said that, you turn the page and get the sinking feeling that maybe there just isn't anything else.