[Mb-civic] Loving to Hate Hillary - Richard Cohen - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

Loving to Hate Hillary
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By Richard Cohen
The Washington Post
Saturday, March 25, 2006; 12:00 AM

In order to understand what's going on with Hillary Clinton, it helps to 
recall a woman who lost her head and therefore her life in 1793: Marie 
Antoinette. She is probably best remembered as the spoiled 
princess-cum-queen who said, "Let them eat cake" -- a remark (the 
"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" of its day) that would have 
shown how callous and out of touch she was, if she had ever said it. She 
did not.

In her own time, though, it was not merely what she supposedly said that 
defamed her and made her so unpopular, it was also her alleged behavior. 
She was manufactured into an Austrian-born slut who, as Stefan Zweig put 
it in his classic biography, was (falsely) "guilty of every crime, every 
form of moral corruption, every perversion." It was necessary to have 
someone like her to embody the greed and corruption of the upper 
classes. It was necessary, in fact, to have a woman because male 
sexuality is, let's face it, not all that interesting. Contrast her, in 
fact, with her husband. Louis XVI was king and he, too, died on the 
guillotine but he, sad fellow, is mostly forgotten.

My feminist credentials have been impeached of late, but whatever I am, 
I am struck by the Marie Antoinette-ish treatment of Hillary Rodham 
Clinton. More than 30 books have been written about Clinton, some of 
them as vituperative and ugly as any written about the late Queen of 
France. They have questioned Hillary's honesty, sexuality, parenting, 
wifing and just about everything else. Just as Marie came to personify 
all that was wrong with the aristocracy, so Hillary has come to 
personify all that is wrong with Bill, the Democrats, liberals, working 
women, independent women and women of a certain kind -- which is any 
kind you don't happen to like. No man could possibly match her in that 
department -- or departments.

It is, of course, Hillary's very wifeyness that titillates. All wives 
are mysterious to others (even to their husbands, I suspect) since their 
relationships to their men are not based on merit, as we know it, or 
patronage, as we know it, but on love and sex (at first), children 
(after a while) and then something else. Since we do not know our own 
marriages, we cannot know anyone else's. This engenders endless 
speculation about the distribution of power and the importance of pillow 
talk. (Somehow, it's OK for the unelected Karl Rove to advise Bush, but 
if Laura did it, some people would go nuts.) Did Nancy Reagan actually 
tell Ron what to do? What about Eleanor Roosevelt -- especially Eleanor? 
She was even more vilified than Franklin and all she ever did was go 
down into a coal mine, invite Marian Anderson to sing on the Mall and 
make some speeches in that high, squeaky voice of hers. Hardly worth 
hating, you'd think. But, oh, she was certainly hated.

Hillary, of course, is a very famous and very mysterious wife. We need 
not enumerate the reasons. They were more or less impeachable. Did she 
know? How could she not have known? Was she complicit? Is she an 
enabler? And now that she is a public official in her own right, even 
more mystery attaches to her. Who is she? What, exactly, are her 
politics? Is she a Cubs or a Yankees fan?

It's true, of course, that Hillary is widely considered a presidential 
candidate and so a certain amount of attention is warranted. In the last 
month alone, though, The New York Times has mentioned her about 60 times 
compared to 45 for her more senior colleague, Sen. Charles Schumer, the 
uncrowned (but undisputed) heavyweight champion of publicity until 
Clinton came along. Some of the Times' stories are merely about her 
existence -- they say little more than that -- and in this they are 
similar to those in other papers. It's obvious some people think that 
Hillary sells newspapers, although as we all know, nothing does anymore.

Some scrutiny of a possible president, even a mere senator, is expected, 
even required. But for one person to be so loved, so hated, and of such 
compelling interest -- so much more a celebrity than, say, John McCain 
-- suggests that more than politics is involved. Like Marie Antoinette, 
Hillary has emerged as the repository of so many fears, so much dread, 
such aspirations -- so much good and bad -- that we have to look past 
her office or her ambitions and suggest, strongly, that something deeply 
Freudian is at work. It was Freud, after all, who spoke for all men (and 
many women) by asking, "What do women want?" Now -- some fear, others 
hope -- we may finally have the answer.

The White House.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/03/24/AR2006032401279.html?nav=hcmodule
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