God and Hillary Clinton (13 page)

Now, after all of these years, Mrs. Clinton candidly credited her father for giving her values and the gift of “unconditional love that I think every child deserves to have—and one of our problems is that too many of our children don't have that.”
²⁶

Hugh had given her several foundations. Indeed, some of his values were things that had pushed Hillary to where she was today. Though their politics had hardly been eye-to-eye, he continued to love his daughter, continued to believe in the system of values that he had instilled in her. As she took on new duties unlike any she had experienced before, it was becoming increasingly clear that the Methodism which Hugh was always so passionate about would remain part of his daughter's life. Despite the discrepancies in their practices and party, despite the fact that Hillary's strain of belief would always be more about social salvation than Hugh's rugged individualism, thanks to him she still felt a passion for God.

Amalgam Politics

While Hillary was coping with more than the death of her father, new rumors of her husband's infidelities began to pop up—this time recent infidelities in no less than the Oval Office, where the Clintons had assured everyone the bad behavior would stop for good. As Hillary was out of town, Bill hosted singer-activist Barbra Streisand, who
had gone to the White House to give Clinton a private demo of a cut from her upcoming album. Here again, the details are terribly sloppy. Nonetheless, we know that Streisand spent the night in the Lincoln Bedroom. Gail Sheehy suggests that she did not sleep alone. Soon after Hillary's return, says Sheehy, Clinton emerged from his morning jog with a claw mark along his jawline. Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers later sheepishly admitted to Sheehy that she was the “idiot” who covered for the caddish Clinton by saying he had cut himself shaving—before she saw the mark on his face. “Then I saw him,” said Myers. “It was a big scratch, and clearly not a shaving cut. Barbra Streisand was clearly around at the time.”
²⁷

Reports like this—founded or unfounded—were not what Hillary needed as she suffered through the demise of her father. In response to the rumors about Bill and Streisand, says Sheehy, Hillary barred Streisand from further overnight appearances at the White House.
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Beyond Hillary, the rumors were extremely damaging, regardless of their legitimacy, and a great setback to women on the left who viewed Hillary as a political heroine, the first
real
first lady since Eleanor Roosevelt. It was four months into the presidency, and the Clintons were already a soap opera. Hillary, however, battled for Bill's respectability and her own intellectual recognition.

To that end, the first lady's interest in the politics of meaning became a subject of intense curiosity in the press, forcing her to quickly defend and even try to define herself. “My politics are a real mixture,” she explained. “An amalgam. And I get so amused when these people try to characterize me: ‘She is
this
, therefore she believes the following 25 things.'…Nobody's ever stopped to ask me or try to figure out the new sense of politics that Bill and a lot of us are trying to create. The labels are irrelevant.”

Hillary insisted that she could not be placed in a box politically or ideologically: “And yet, the political system and the reporting of it keep trying to force us back into the boxes because the boxes are
so much easier to talk about. You don't have to think. You can just fall back on the old, discredited Republican versus Democrat, liberal versus conservative mindsets.”

To a degree her plea was valid, but it was also disingenuous, as she could have candidly admitted that she was not a conservative Republican. Indeed, when she described herself in a
Parade
magazine interview that April as “conservative in the true sense of that word—not in the kind of radical, ideological, destructive way that term is often used,”
Newsweek
's writer Eleanor Clift rightly criticized her for trying to disguise her true self.
²⁹
This trend would continue throughout Hillary's career, as she consistently lunged for the rhetorical middle and tried to frame herself as a moderate.

Nonetheless, as Martha Sherrill noted in the
Washington Post
, Mrs. Clinton thought herself “a citizen” who spoke of “virtue” and “personal responsibility” and “being connected to a higher purpose.” The first lady even offered a surprising nod to the religious right: “Much of the energy animating the responsible fundamentalist right,” she said, “has come from their sense of life getting away from us—of meaning being lost and people being turned into kind of amoral decision-makers because there weren't overriding values that they related to. And I have a lot of sympathy with that.” She added: “The search for meaning should cut across all kinds of religious and ideological boundaries. That's what we should be struggling with—not whether you have a corner on God.”
³⁰

To her credit, Mrs. Clinton was at least attempting to elevate the public discourse when it came to religion, trying to move away from the one-size-fits-all generalizations about the religious right by many Democrats. Thus, she and her staff were shocked when, on May 23, 1993, the
New York Times Magazine
ran an influential analysis of her and her ideas by Michael Kelly, mockingly titled, “Saint Hillary,” with those words irreverently scratched next to a photo of Hillary in a white dress, for which she had posed, to the initial delight of her staff, which was suddenly no longer pleased. She had talked openly
and honestly of her values and her faith, and now this headline?
³¹

Kelly began by stating that since she was a teenager, Mrs. Clinton had long aimed to help, to see that people live by the Golden Rule. Now her goal was to achieve these things on a larger scale, to “make the world a better place—as she defines better.” Kelly noted that although most first ladies have a general warmth and compassion, there was a major difference in the case of this First Lady: She was serious and she had power.

Kelly correctly added that Hillary's sense of purpose stemmed from a worldview rooted in the Don Jones Christianity of her youth and grew from the belief that the baby boomer generation was meant to inform the world of its flaws. These two halves of the coin formed the “true politics of her heart.” Yet that was simply the motivation. Where was all this leading Mrs. Clinton? Kelly answered:

Kelly reported that the first lady was seeking a way to marry conservatism and liberalism, capitalism and state-ism, to join together the myriad state, religious, social, economic, and class problems—from the end of communism to unwed mothers to aggressive panhandlers—into one idea that could be addressed by her theory. He quoted her: “It's not going to be easy. But we can't get scared away from it because it is an overwhelming task.” And that difficulty, Kelly
assessed, was bound to be doubled by the apparent reality that a good deal of what Mrs. Clinton perceived as wrong with the American way of life could be traced to the liberal baby boomers' failed social experiments to redefine society on their terms.

Kelly dubbed this “the Crusade of Hillary Rodham Clinton,” which he said had commenced on April 6 in Austin, Texas. The piece conceded that it was “easy to mock this sort of thing.” Yet it did not help, said Kelly, that in their interview Mrs. Clinton continued to “grope” for a better articulation of her thinking. “I don't know; I don't know,” she admitted to Kelly when asked to define her philosophy. “I don't have a coherent explanation. I hope one day to be able to stop long enough actually to try and to write down what I do mean, because it's important to me that I try to do that, because I have floated around the edges of this and talked about it for many, many years with a lot of people, but I've never regularly kept a journal or really tried to get myself organized enough to do it.”

As she continued to wax philosophical with Kelly, she became more concrete, though Kelly ironically took a few extra shots once she finally seemed to find some bearings. “The very core of what I believe is this concept of individual worth, which I think flows from all of us being creatures of God and being imbued with a spirit,” she said. “Some years ago, I gave a series of talks about the underlying principles of Methodism. I talked a lot about how timeless a lot of scriptural lessons were because they tied in with what we now know about human beings.” Among those was the Golden Rule and Christ's greatest of all commandments: “If you break down the Golden Rule or if you take Christ's commandment—love your neighbor as yourself—there is an underlying assumption that you will value yourself,” added the first lady, “that you will be a responsible being who will live by certain behaviors that enable you to have self-respect, because, then, out of that self-respect comes the capacity for you to respect and care for other people.”

At this point, Hillary offered to Kelly some specific examples of how this philosophy could and should play out in everyday life:

Kelly judged this passage “rambling” and said that it seemed to validate
The New Republic
's demand of Hillary's politics: “What
does
it all mean?” Kelly was frustrated that this politics of meaning was “hard to discern under the gauzy and gushy wrappings of New Age jargon that blanket it.” Then he was more frustrated, as he asked the first lady if there was one unifying idea at the heart of the politics of meaning, only to have her answer: “I don't think there is one core thing. I think this has to be thought through on a variety of planes. I don't think there is one unifying theory.”

Overall, Kelly's profile suggested that she was not entirely sure exactly what she meant. On the other hand, Kelly rightly grasped that below the New Age veneer of Mrs. Clinton's musings was an old and fundamentally American dedication to values. He also discerned
that this Hillary Rodham Clinton was a big surprise to the electorate, who had seen her as the radical feminist lawyer, the breadwinning wife of Governor Clinton, and not the moralist who had promoted Methodist teaching from Arkansas pulpits in the 1980s.

And the left and the right were surprised at Kelly's inclusion of her endorsement of calling evil “evil.” She told Kelly about a moment when she was sitting in a law school in the early 1970s observing a hypothetical discussion about the motives of terrorists. “And I remember sitting there listening to the conversation as so many people tried to explain away or rationalize their behavior,” said Mrs. Clinton. “And I remember saying, ‘You know, there is another alternative. And the other alternative is that they are evil. I mean, you know? There
are
evil people in the world. And they may be able to come up with elaborate rationalizations to attempt to explain their evil, and they may even have some reasonable basis for saying their conduct needs to be understood in the light of pre-existing conditions, but their behavior is still
evil.
” 32

The impact of the piece was substantial as the perceived formlessness of Hillary's ideas put her squarely in the crosshairs of public scrutiny. Here Hillary's politics of meaning had been laid bare for everyone on the right and the left, exposing them to dissection and leaving them wide open to criticism from both sides of the aisle. While Republicans might be seeing a value system in the first lady that they did not know about on Election Day, Democrats were seeing the same thing—and the results on both sides were not necessarily a good thing.

Though Hillary with her newfound visibility was, in some sense, wearing her faith on her sleeve, the question of political cost remained. She had created a hybrid belief system, incorporating ideas from both the right and the left, but without enough of either to gain true supporters or make her an actual moderate. The end result was that the more people seemed to uncover about the intersection of her faith and politics that existed in her politics of meaning, the less they seemed
to like it. Unfortunately for Hillary, this was a trend that would only increase.

Michael Lerner Speaks Up

While there was certainly an inspiration of Methodist social gospel in Hillary's controversial new political-spiritual thinking, there was more the influence of something else—actually,
someone
else. Where had this politics of meaning come from?
Who
had it come from?