Earth Tones in the Balance

That was the very month Al Gore began discreetly paying Wolf a $ 15,000 monthly retainer for campaign advice. If there’s a legitimate controversy over the arrangement, it’s not because Wolf is a “controversial feminist,” as she’s inevitably described. Wolf may have a gift for purple prose and a weakness for (as they used to say in the Catskills) “working blue.” But what’s controversial about her writing or speaking? Where’s the constituency for lousier orgasms and less love? Who would be up in arms about Wolf’s insistence that sexuality be “a source of pleasure and strength, not of shame and vulnerability”? Not even the pope.

Wolf came to public attention in 1991 with The Beauty Myth, an updating of half a dozen feminist classics that claimed women were tyrannized by physical expectations. Two years later, in Fire with Fire, she argued that women should seek political and financial power. Her best book, Promiscuities (1997), a sexual autobiography of the seventies and eighties, has keen vignettes of the time: the girl at hippie camp whose friends taxonomized each other’s new breasts as either “nuzzies,” “squeeners,” “dudleys,” or “bonkers”; the pornography of the Ohio Players rock record covers; sleepless nights of panic in the weeks and months after AIDS was discovered. Promiscuities was lampooned all last week for its urging of “sexual gradualism.” But, really, what could be more sensible, and less “controversial,” than proposing that teens and pre-teens would be well-advised not to proceed directly to coitus on the first date?

Wolf calls her philosophy “power feminism.” Ruder critics call her a “lipstick feminist,” a “bimbo feminist,” even a “do-me feminist.” It’s perhaps better to say that Wolf’s thinking is a matter of “having it all” in the field of logic: She wants everything and its opposite. Beauty is a means to power, and power is the most important thing — but beauty is unimportant. Sexual freedom of choice should be strengthened — and so should sexual-harassment law. Women who have abortions should realize they are killing a human being — in order to strengthen their pro-choice convictions. As Katie Roiphe once wrote, Wolf, like Walt Whitman, “contains multitudes.”

It has often been called “ironic” that Wolf’s good looks and media savvy were keys to her success with The Beauty Myth. But there’s nothing ironic about it in the least. Wolf is like those precocious people who can’t get off the subject of youth, or famous people fascinated by the topic of fame. It’s not that she’s bragging: It’s just that beauty is something Wolf really likes to talk about. As a young professional in New York, Wolf started an exclusive coterie of media movers and shakers she called the “Culture Babes.” Yasmin Alibhai-Brown of London’s Independent described her last summer as “the luscious Naomi Wolf, who has never let feminism interfere with her bum-hugging wardrobe.” And who likes most to talk about luscious women and their bum-hugging wardrobes, not to mention read about crazy love in the seventies?

A Scottish journalist put it bluntly: “Most of Wolf’s fans are men.”

It’s Wolf’s most prominent man fan, not Wolf herself, who is now in big trouble over their association. This is not an intellectual scandal. Granted, taking money in secret from a political campaign is a sneaky act for one posing as an independent intellectual. Granted, Wolf has been paid $ 15,000 a month through Bob Squier’s consulting firm so her checks don’t show up on Federal Election Commission reports. But Wolf has been forthright in saying she doesn’t want to be thought an independent intellectual. She told the New York Times, “I wanted to make a transition in a respectful way from being a journalist to being a partisan.” That ought to be clear to anyone who has followed her career. Her husband David Shipley worked in the Clinton White House, and Wolf explained to Fox News this fall, “I consider our whole family unregenerate partisans.” Katha Pollitt of the Nation calls Wolf a “Clintoholic.” (In 1996, Wolf put in long hours for the Clinton campaign — but for free.)

Wolf is better suited to the role of political adviser than independent essayist. She has spent much of her time in recent years at the Woodhull Institute in upstate New York, which she co-founded to teach women political power. That she also thinks her seminars can teach twenty-somethings “how to be kind, how to be honest” shows that she shares some of the Gore team’s liberal sanctimony. Wolf herself appears to be honest, as good political advisers should be. For all her Clintoholism, she was forthright in condemning Clinton during the Lewinsky affair, even if it was on the truly wacky grounds that women have a semi-constitutional right to a purely meritocratic workplace. (As if Monica Lewinsky would have come anywhere near the White House under such a regime.)

And in many ways, Wolf is a perfect adviser for Gore. She herself has devoted a good deal of mental energy to looking snappy and appealing to viewers on TV, both of them areas in which Gore is in dire need of counsel. Her failings as an intellectual — her illogic, for instance — may be strengths for an adviser. A modern-day politician in a democratic society needs a schmoozer like Dick Morris who can brainstorm with him, not a systematizer like Richelieu who can think for him.

What’s more, Wolf’s writings have a New Age — y tinge. She’s even seen a “consultant” to deal with her writer’s block. This gives her real common ground with a politician who kept a “facilitator” on the White House payroll, who arranged the embarrassing Camp David group-therapy sessions for the incoming Clinton cabinet, who has a hobbyist’s fascination with birth order and a superstitious interest in exercises one can do to determine one’s baby’s gender. (It also places the Gore-Wolf pairing squarely in the tradition of Nancy Reagan’s relationship with her astrologer Joan Quigley, or Hillary Clinton’s attempts to channel Eleanor Roosevelt’s ghost through the medium Jean Houston — but we’ll leave that for another time.)

People sense that Wolf is right for the vice president. That’s why they are projecting their own misgivings about Gore onto Naomi Wolf’s advice, about which they ultimately know little. The early report that Wolf fretted over Gore’s being a “beta” male to Bill Clinton’s “alpha” turns out to be accurate — even if Wolf, in a non-denial denial, claims only to have mentioned it. But it’s important not because Wolf said it but because we all know it to be true. Same with the “earth-tone” jackets and shirts Gore is now sporting. Wolf says it wasn’t she who recommended the Gore wardrobe, and maybe it wasn’t. But we also know the conscious or subconscious calculation by which the campaign arrived at its sartorial strategy. It came from comparing women’s rock-solid loyalty to the goatish Clinton with their indifference to the family man Gore — and then trying to bridge that gap by appealing to something in the soul of the American woman voter that most of us would rather not contemplate. Gore’s supporters can claim he’s trying to look “reassuring” or “casual.” But we all know that the look he’s attained is that of the aging gigolo prowling the cafes of the Vieux Port for young talent.

By the way: How Bill Clinton must be reveling in this scandal!

The scandal lies not in Wolf’s being on board, but in the $ 15,000 a month she was getting paid — which comes to $ 180,000 a year, more than the vice president himself makes. Again, this is a problem not for Wolf but for Gore, as Gore’s campaign manager Donna Brazile understood when she cut Wolf’s retainer to $ 5,000 a month.

It’s a problem that Gore has compounded with needless secretiveness. On This Week on Halloween, Gore was asked by Sam Donaldson, “Are you really paying her $ 15,000 a month, as reported?”

Gore replied, “No . . . It’s a third of that.”

Gore’s spokesman Roger Salazar was delighted with the exchange: “When asked about it, he answered it directly,” Salazar said. “That doesn’t look to me like someone trying to hide something.” Really? It does to me. Gore was able to tell Donaldson exactly what Wolf was making. Was he ignorant of what she’d been making a week before?

You can, of course, take the line that presidential-campaign advisers, many of them bringing considerably less value-added than Wolf, have been paid outrageous sums for decades — and often off the books. “It’s quite common to pay consultants the way Carter, Shrum, and I are paid,” Wolf explains. Yes, but if Donna Brazile had tried to cut by two-thirds the pay of top strategist Carter Eskew and top media man Bob Shrum, they would have quit the campaign by the time she finished her sentence. By staying, Wolf has assented to a valuation of her consulting services at $ 60,000 a year — an indication that she had heretofore been overpaid to the tune of $ 120,000 a year. What psychic reinforcement was she providing for that $ 120,000? What is it in Naomi Wolf that Al Gore values so much and needs so badly?

Clinton biographer David Maraniss of the Washington Post speculates that Wolf “presented a younger, hipper, probably sort of new-age type of advice.” In that light, it is hard to remember seeing Gore quite so aglow as when his nomination was seconded at the 1996 convention by 28-year-old Michela Alioto, a wheelchair-bound beauty who went from a job in the veep’s office to running for Congress against Frank Riggs in California’s first district. “She described Gore not only as ‘my boss, my friend, and the very best vice president we have ever had,’ but, more important, as a ‘very cool guy with his own e-mail address.'”

Gore shows a keen need to be taken as a very cool guy by younger women. What is troublesome is that he clearly thinks of his career as a personal drama that implicates his sexual self-image deeply. Over the course of a life, that may be true of most politicians, even most people. But whether we think of this in an old-fashioned moralistic way simply as “growing up,” or in a Freudian way as successful “sublimation,” most voters hope that this particular problem will be, if not resolved, then at least handled to the point where we don’t have to think about it.

But we are thinking about it constantly and, worse, so is the Gore campaign. The normally demure Tipper has been trundled out to tell us, in so many words, that her husband is a veritable tornado in the sack. Wolf’s friendship with Gore’s daughter Karenna is invoked to ward off speculation about any possible wandering eye. Gore is being dragged through embarrassing personal speculation, as President Clinton has been for seven years — and treated to none of the winking, oh-you-dog-you, gotta-hand-it-to-the-guy for-bearance that the president was granted by his close associates.

The secrecy, the money, the young lady tucked away in New York, the intimate anguish over his manliness . . . This is a feat only Al Gore could pull off: getting caught in a sex scandal that doesn’t even have any sex in it.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.