God and Hillary Clinton (14 page)

The source of these ideas was a man named Michael Lerner, who on June 8 flew into Washington to explain himself, his ideas, and his and Hillary's meaning. He needed to do so, since over the last two months he had been called Hillary Rodham Clinton's “guru” (and much more) amid the ensuing “press riot,” as he called it. Even normally sympathetic sources on the left were puzzled.
The New Republic
had asked, “What on earth are these people talking about?”
Time
magazine seconded, “The politics of what?” And a
Los Angeles Times
piece employed the word “psychobabble.”
³³

Lerner was the editor and publisher of the progressive
Tikkun
magazine, what Henry Allen of the
Washington Post
described as “a leftish bimonthly published out of the fifth floor of a synagogue on New York's Upper West Side,” and whom Allen described as “a scruffy hypomanic left-wing New York intellectual.”
³⁴
Lerner grew up in Newark, went to a private school, was the son of a lawyer and a mother who worked for Senator Harrison Williams. John F. Kennedy was a family friend, so much so that he wrote Lerner's college recommendation for Columbia.

By 1964 he made his way to Berkeley, where he became part of the free speech movement and Students for a Democratic Society. He got a Ph.D. in psychology at Berkeley and went on in 1977 to help start the Institute for Labor and Mental Health, where he focused on the “psychodynamics of the working class.”
³⁵
Lerner was a self-described
psychotherapist and researcher studying “working-class consciousness.”
³⁶
More than one biographer noted that at his wedding to his first wife, in a reportedly nonlegal ceremony, Lerner cut into a cake with the inscription “Smash Monogamy,” after the couple exchanged rings hammered out of metal from downed U.S. military aircraft.
³⁷

With this résumé, Lerner was a peculiar choice of a spiritual-political mentor to help Hillary shape public policy. In a time when both she and her husband were trying to regain the center and convince America that a New Democrat could lead this country more effectively and moderately than a Republican, Lerner was a curious throwback to the Clintons of the 1970s. He was progressive, but in an eccentric way that seemed to cast his ideas far on the left, while leaving both him and the first lady vulnerable to caricature.

On June 8, 1993, he held an invitation-only press conference at a Jewish student center at George Washington University. About six reporters accepted the invitation.
³⁸
At the conference, Lerner talked openly about his special relationship with Hillary. After the University of Texas speech, he saw Hillary at a White House reception on April 21, 1993, the day before the dedication of the Holocaust Memorial Museum. Hillary looked directly at Lerner and said with a big grin, “Am I your mouthpiece or what?” Lerner told her that he had specific ideas about how to turn the politics of meaning into actual policy. According to Lerner, the first lady responded, “Great, let's talk about it. Well, can you come back soon?”
³⁹

The following Monday, said Lerner, they were meeting in the first lady's office, where they spent about half an hour together. Said Lerner: “The conversation was quite amazing…almost like in half-sentences because she had read everything. I mean she had understood everything.”
⁴⁰

Lerner informed the reporters that this was hardly their first contact: Bill Clinton had been reading Lerner since 1988, when he sent Lerner a letter from the Arkansas governor's mansion, telling him he had “helped me clarify my own thinking.” Hillary confirmed
to Lerner that “Bill is just as interested in the politics of meaning as I am.”
⁴¹
Later, in 1993, once Bill became president, Lerner went directly to the new president with his policy ideas. In a memo to President Clinton, according to Henry Allen, Lerner sweepingly proposed that every government office be required to justify budget requests by answering questions like: “How do our programs foster caring, concern for others, ecological awareness, spiritual sensitivity, and a sense of mutual responsibility?” For example, “the Department of Labor should create a program to train a corps of union personnel, worker representatives and psychotherapists in the relevant skills to assist developing a new spirit of cooperation, mutual caring and dedication to work.” In the memo, he proposed a “summit conference on ethics, community, and the politics of meaning.”
⁴²

Here were some specifics, some flesh to the bones of the politics of meaning. On June 13, 1993, Lerner went further in an op-ed piece in the Outlook section of the Sunday
Washington Post
, in which he explained:

Lerner then explained that the politics of meaning was his, and by implication Hillary's vision for the 1990s, an idea that might come to define the whole of the Clinton administration. Here he seemed to be venturing toward the same territory that Hillary had traveled
on when she spoke to Michael Kelly. Lerner articulated the politics of meaning as something that transcended all problems and struck at the heart of all Americans' struggles. It was about the activities that people engage in—drugs, TV, exercise—to distract them from the problems in their lives. It was about how these solutions were merely approximations. It was about the weakening of connections between people and in relationships. And it was about how the marketplace was laughing all the way to the bank.

From these generalities, Lerner went on to highlight specific policy goals that could be implemented; whereas Hillary had avoided tying her politics of meaning to individual proposals, Lerner dived into these headfirst. He suggested offering financial incentives to encourage companies to be more socially and ecologically conscious. He recommended the creation of worker health committees to ensure that the stress levels of workers remained in check. On the education side, he proposed that schools put as much emphasis on teaching empathy as they do on teaching math.

While Lerner's ideas might have been far-fetched, they were beginning to bring the politics of meaning into greater focus, and many people did not like what they saw.

The bigger picture was not simply a “hunger for larger purpose,” but a sudden fear by many that the political left, which had failed to mold society through the public sector, was now seeking a giant step beyond the New Deal and Great Society; it looked like the left might now be seeking to use the power of the federal government to force the private sector into achieving the left's vision. This was a legitimate interpretation of Lerner's details.

Lerner did not acknowledge such a goal, or state it that way, and neither did the first lady, but that was a practical effect. The politics of meaning could place all of society behind a blueprint for a desired social model, one that would presumably give meaning to the lives of the “society shapers” on the left who felt morally impoverished.

In short, the politics of meaning was a signal that while the reli
gious right was content with churches and faith-based organizations changing the culture and society, the religious left—or at least Lerner and Mrs. Clinton—seemed to want a spiritually motivated “caring” government to do the job at every level. Though neither Lerner nor Hillary addressed how such an expansion would take place, there was no doubt that the sweeping reform they discussed would usher in an era of federal power potentially more grandiose than even the New Deal. This was the kind of thing that most Americans—distrustful of overly expansive government—were not likely to embrace. And by the end of the midterm elections in 1994, the public would make this point all too painfully clear for the Clinton administration.

Perhaps the most interesting political-religious relationships for Hillary and Bill Clinton in the 1990s came not with Michael Lerner but with the world's two most prominent Catholics—Pope John Paul II and Mother Teresa. What made these relationships interesting—at times almost contentious—was the subject of abortion.

As many of the top pro-life Protestants were kept out of the Clintons' orbit, the pope and Mother Teresa were the two highest-level pro-life ambassadors with whom the Clintons met in the 1990s. The very positions and profile of these two leading Catholics meant that the Clintons could not and did not refuse to meet with them, nor could the Clintons refuse to at least listen to the messages on abortion that they insisted on delivering, directly and with no apologies.

Meeting John Paul II

The first of their encounters with John Paul II came in August 1993. From August 12 to 15, 1993, the pope came to America for the fourth international World Youth Day, held in Denver, Colorado—his first trip to America during the young presidency of Bill Clinton. On Thursday, August 12, the pontiff stepped off the plane at Denver's Stapleton International Airport, ready to speak to a throng of faithful. He was greeted by President Clinton, the first lady, and the first daughter. The president offered welcoming remarks.

According to his biographer, the pope departed from his prepared text after hearing what Clinton had to say, and did so in a pointed way.
¹
He first thanked the president, Mrs. Clinton, and Chelsea for their “kind gesture in coming here personally to welcome me,” and then expressed gratitude to the young people who were present. The pope said that this would be a World Youth Day for “serious reflection on the theme of life: the human life, which is God's marvelous gift to each one of us.”

The pontiff then got to the essence of what he felt was the critical message that America and its first family needed to hear: He said that America had been founded on the assertion of certain self-evident truths concerning the human person, including the inalienable right to life of every human being. Now, with the Cold War over, said the pope, all the “great causes” led by the United States “will have meaning only to the extent that you guarantee the right to life and protect the human person.” He said that the “ultimate test” of America's greatness was the way that Americans treated “every human being, but especially the weakest and most defenseless ones. The best traditions of your land presume respect for those who cannot defend themselves.” He then raised his voice: “If you want equal justice for all, and true freedom and lasting peace, then, America, defend life!” There was no doubt by anyone in the crowd that the words were
aimed not just at the nation but at its president and first lady standing at the pontiff's side.
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As one of the major forces in the fall of communism, John Paul II was announcing that his role in that great drama would not be his only legacy. The civilized world still possessed other battles that needed fighting, other work that needed to be done. The answer came in the mid-1990s with the publication of his encyclical
Evangelium Vitae
, the
Gospel of Life
.
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The Western cultures that had legalized abortion were now speeding toward euthanasia—killing unwanted, “inconvenient” human beings at the other end of life—and embryonic research, destruction at an even earlier stage of human development. Pope John Paul II coined a phrase that he believed summed up the crisis: The next great moral battle, the next crisis spearheaded by the forces of secular atheism, was the struggle for life; the world was confronted with a choice between a “Culture of Life” and a “Culture of Death.”

For his part, Bill Clinton, in August 1993, surely understood that he was presiding through a major transitional era.
⁴
Given their pro-choice views, there is no evidence or reason to suspect that he or Hillary shared the pope's diagnosis. Notably, however, the pope spoke in language that must have struck Hillary, pushing all her social justice buttons. To protect human life, the pope said, was for America to serve its noblest ideals, its destiny as one nation, under God, “that protects and extends liberty and justice to all.”
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These were tough words for Hillary to swallow, as they so closely mirrored her belief in justice for all classes and ethnicities that she extrapolated from her own faith. In this case, however, the pope opened the social justice umbrella to encompass unborn human life, an expansion that she was unwilling to replicate.

Asked afterward if he and the pontiff had much discussion, Bill Clinton said that they had discussed “social issues.” Neither he nor the first lady cared to elaborate. This would be the first of many
times that faith and values would collide for the Clinton administration and the Vatican—always they would split over these life issues; always the pope would remain steadfast.

The First Lady and the Lady from Calcutta

A few months later came another prominent Catholic to bring a similar message that the Clintons did not want to hear: Mother Teresa. Nevertheless, this was a Catholic with whom Mrs. Clinton would develop a somewhat close relationship, even a working relationship in one case.

A key development had occurred on the abortion front in the intervening months between John Paul II's trip to America and Mother Teresa's scheduled visit six months later: Mrs. Clinton, by then full throttle in her efforts to revolutionize the American health care industry, said in an October 1993 televised forum that, under her plan, abortion services “would be widely available.” This prompted anxieties over the prospect of taxpayer-funded abortions, sparking the Coates Amendment in the U.S. House of Representatives, which sought to strip abortion funding from the plan. Mrs. Clinton's intentions sent pro-life Democrats like Pennsylvania governor Robert P. Casey into such a rage that Casey considered a run for the presidency to dislodge the Clintons.
⁶

In her remarks, the first lady allowed for a “conscience exemption” in which doctors and hospitals would not be forced to perform abortions.
⁷
Pro-lifers were relieved on that; still, they could not fathom that their tax dollars might be used to fund what they saw as the deliberate destruction of innocent human life. More, they feared the “abortion clinic mandate” in Mrs. Clinton's plan, which would suddenly require the availability of abortion services in many of the 87 percent of United States counties that did not have clinics at the time.

Mrs. Clinton's words in October also ignited fears among moderate and conservative Christians over the availability of the abortion pill, RU-486, under her health care plan. One of her husband's first acts in office was to push the pill to market through an expedited FDA approval process that was criticized by pro-lifers as allegedly too quick for the safety of the women who would take the pill.

This had been a longtime goal of abortion advocates like Ron Weddington, who with his wife, Sarah Weddington, had presented “Jane Roe” to the Supreme Court. Ron Weddington sent a four-page letter to President Clinton, urging: “I don't think you are going to go very far in reforming the country until we have a better educated, healthier, wealthier population.” The new president could “start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country.” “No, I'm not advocating some sort of mass extinction of these unfortunate people,” wrote Weddington. “The problem is that their numbers are not only not replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true, but we only whisper it.” By “we,” Weddington said he meant “liberals,” like himself and the Clintons.
⁸

There is great irony in Weddington directing these sentiments to the Clintons: Consider, after all, that those “unfortunate people” who could not afford to have babies once included Hillary's maternal grandmother and Bill's own widowed mother, both of whom, by choosing life under financially difficult circumstances, allowed Hillary Rodham and Bill Clinton to enter this world. Weddington pointed to the Clintons themselves as the “perfect example” of how to reproduce responsibly, unlike the baby-birthing “religious right”: “Could either of you have gone to law school and achieved anything close to what you have if you had three or four or more children before you were 20?” he asked, urging passage of RU-486. “No! You waited until you were established and in your 30's to have one child. That is what sensible people do.”
⁹

Bill Clinton did something else that Weddington considered sensible: He authorized RU-486. Mrs. Clinton was thrilled with the move.

To Mother Teresa, these were tragic victories for what her pope would call the Culture of Death. In February 1994, they stoked her worst fears about where American health care policy was headed under the Clintons, as she prepared to meet the partners. The occasion was the annual National Prayer Breakfast, a popular gathering of ecumenical worshippers and officials from Washington. As president, Bill Clinton attended every one of them, with Hillary usually (if not always) accompanying him.
¹⁰
This particular year, on February 3, 1994, the keynoter was Mother Teresa, a Nobel winner and saintly figure who had come all the way from the most impoverished area of the planet, the slums of Calcutta. According to Kathryn Spink's later authorized biography, the reluctant nun was invited and encouraged by President Clinton himself.
¹¹

Held at the Hilton, the breakfast was attended by nearly three thousand people packed into the huge room—Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Catholics, all forms of Protestants, even agnostics and atheists, and the press, including C-SPAN's cameras. Near the dais were the president and first lady, along with the vice president and his wife, and a select few VIPs, including Supreme Court justices and the highest ranking members of Congress. Unlike in typical years, when the keynoter sits among the assembled and waits for others to finish before his or her turn, Mother Teresa emerged from a curtain behind the platform only when she was called, and then slowly hunched her way to the microphone. Hillary was struck by how tiny she was, wearing only socks and sandals in the bitter cold.
¹²

The title of her talk was, “Whatever You Did Unto One of the Least, You Did Unto Me.” She began by talking about Jesus and John the Baptist in utero, about their mothers, Mary and Elizabeth, and how the “unborn child” in the womb of Elizabeth—John the
Baptist—leaped with joy as he felt the presence of Christ in the room when Mary entered to speak to Elizabeth.

Hillary might have seen what was coming, since she herself might well have employed the same imagery at a United Methodist venue, the same story, but it would have been to make a point about child care or even discrimination or economic fairness. That was not the direction where Mother Teresa was leading.

She next spoke of love, of selfishness, of a lack of love for the unborn—and a lack of want of the unborn because of one's selfishness. Jesus, who, said the nun, had brought joy while still in the womb of Mary, had died on the Cross “because that is what it took for Him to do good to us—to save us from our selfishness in sin.”
¹³

Mrs. Clinton could relate to this; in Michael Lerner's
Washington Post
op-ed laying out his politics of meaning, he had explained that both he and Mrs. Clinton insisted that “society can and ought to move from an ethos of selfishness to an ethos of caring and community.”
¹⁴
So, yes, Hillary understood Mother Teresa's point. Again, though, she would have applied the parable to something like race or class, not abortion.

Peggy Noonan, the former Reagan speechwriter and a pro-life Catholic, was there. She says that by this point in the talk, the attendees began shifting in their seats, as a lot of what the lady from Calcutta had to say was striking too close to home. Then the nun said something that made everyone very uncomfortable: “But I feel that the greatest destroyer of peace today is abortion, because Jesus said, ‘If you receive a little child, you receive me.' So every abortion is the denial of receiving Jesus, the neglect of receiving Jesus.”
¹⁵

Here, Noonan described a “cool deep silence” that enveloped the room, but only for a very brief moment, and then applause started on the right side of the room, and then spread throughout the crowd, as people began clapping and standing; the ballroom was swept up in a nonstop applause that Noonan says lasted for five to six minutes.
¹⁶

Yet some did not clap at all. Hillary Clinton did not, and neither did her husband, nor Vice President Al Gore and Tipper Gore. They sat there, in the glare of the hot lights, all eyes in the crowd fixed upon them as they tried not to move or be noticed, conspicuous in their lack of response, clearly uncomfortable as the applause raged on.

Their lack of approval was puzzling. Though pro-choice, the Clintons and the Gores had said many times that abortion is regrettable, a terrible choice, and even wrong, and should be limited. So on some level, they must have agreed with what Mother Teresa said, or at least one would think so. She condemned abortion, said Jesus would abhor it, but she did not call for repealing abortion laws, even though she would support such action.

The tiny, weak, aged lady was only warming up. She had seen and experienced real suffering and could not care less about making momentarily uncomfortable a crowd of a few thousand financially comfortable people who had never known real material deprivation, and whose only crisis each morning was traffic or a line at Starbucks. She returned to that selfishness point: “By abortion, the mother does not learn to love, but kills even her own child to solve her problems.” Abortion was “really a war against the child, and I hate the killing of the innocent child, murder by the mother herself. And if we accept that the mother can kill even her own child, how can we tell other people not to kill one another?…Any country that accepts abortion is not teaching its people to love one another but to use violence to get what they want. This is why the greatest destroyer of love and peace is abortion.”