Hillary may have made it on her own

WASHINGTON — As Hillary Clinton gave the speech of her life last Tuesday night, I found myself wondering how her life would have proceeded had she not married Bill Clinton. It was a strange response on my part, I admit, but there it was.

She has never performed better. We’ve had enough of her incessant Mao-era pantsuits to last a Chinese lifetime, but this one was a blazing orange — and she was quite funny about it, talking about her campaign and “my sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits.”

Indeed, Hillary looked downright pretty, without her handsome face taut with the resentment and anger that has so often toughened her. She was forceful without being grating, humorous without being sarcastic and impassioned about women’s rights without being tiresome. She had, after all, come further than any woman in American history — she actually COULD have become president of the United States, if ...

Bill watched from the packed arena, his handsome smile without the resentment that too often defines HIM. He had what seemed to be real tears in his eyes. (Cynics would say he was teary about getting his own chance to speak.) One gets the idea that he really loves her and that he truly wanted her to succeed, despite all he has done to destroy her chances.

I kept thinking, She married the man she had to in order to gain her goal of the presidency, and he became the very one who, in the end, kept her from it.

Western suburbs

First of all, think about this young girl from the West Side of Chicago. Everybody at the convention seemed to be from the South Side of Chicago (I am too — this is the first time it’s become fashionable), but Hillary is from the western suburbs. In terms of the Windy City, where each neighborhood dictates a different personality, there is an indefiniteness about the western suburbs.

But Hillary early on high-stepped out of that indefinition to become one of those female exceptions of our times. She became a stellar student at Wellesley College and was always, according to just about everyone who met her, “the” woman of the future.

The stories have been told about how, as she motored South to see and then marry Bill in Arkansas, she stopped at Monticello with a friend and ruminated aloud in that historic and beautiful place about becoming president of the United States. But then she headed for Arkansas, married the guy instead of investigating the world and her chances, taught law instead of practicing it and fell into his world, as so many of us still do, despite all the changes, with the men we love.

That would have been OK, but, well, we know too much about his world. At this point (at every point, unfortunately), the attractive Bill Clinton could not keep his hands off of just about every girl in sight. And it is here, I think, that Hillary’s luster as a potential politician and eventual presidential candidate began to tarnish as her ambition overcame her integrity.

Nasty role

Close friends will tell you off-the-record how she, in a seemingly helpless position, would act to protect her husband and to sully the reputation of “his women,” all of which she had to know about. (One affair, after all, went on for 12 years, and the state police who had to protect him talked rather too openly about it.) It was not nice, to those around them, to see her take this subservient and often nasty role of destroying the reputations of others.

We all know what happened in the White House with Monica Lewinsky. This time, Hillary was raging mad and left for New England until he followed her and, again, they made up. Her own “presidency,” not helped by the mess she made of the health care plan she was put in charge of, receded; and in the end, even her excellent performance as a senator from New York was not enough to gain her the glowing, golden goal of her life’s struggle.

When one looks at her life, one has to hope that loving Bill was worth it. Of course, they have a lovely daughter, Chelsea, and that ups the ante considerably. But I would argue that it was Bill, at least this time around, who cost her the presidency, despite her honestly impassioned speeches and her clear populist goals.

Universal Press Syndicate