HILLARY CLINTON, PSYCHOANALYST

After some hedging, Hillary replied, “Well, if all that were proven true, I think that would be a very serious offense. That is not going to be proven true. I think we’re going to find some other things. And I think that when all of this is put into context, and we really look at the people involved here, look at their motivations and look at their backgrounds, look at their past behavior, some folks are going to have a lot to answer for.”

Who knew that Hillary was referring to her husband’s grandmother! It was at her doorstep that Hillary seemed to be laying the blame for Bill’s serial adultery, when she told journalist Lucinda Franks in the debut issue of Talk magazine, “He was so young, barely four, when he was scarred by abuse that he can’t even take it out and look at it. There was a terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother.”

The press has spent the past week debating two questions: (1) What happened to Bill Clinton at age 4? Was it abuse or not, and if so, what kind? (2) What is the nature of the “scarring” that has resulted? Is the president a “sex addict”? Since neither is a welcome topic for the Clintons, it’s worth asking what on earth Hillary thought she was doing in raising the subject.

Probably, Hillary assumed that, with last January’s political exoneration by the Senate already in the bag, a parallel moral exoneration was there for the asking. If so, she misjudged. “In Christian theology,” Hillary explained, “there are sins of weakness and sins of malice.” But you needn’t have thought the president’s dalliance and lying were impeachable offenses — I didn’t — to realize that the sins he stood accused of were hardly sins of “weakness.” No: They were sins of highhanded tyranny. Enlisting a powerful man to spend weeks hunting down a job for an ex-mistress, bullying your secretary into misrepresenting what she saw, lying in court . . . that’s not the modus operandi of a shrinking violet. And those who believe the worst unproved allegations against Clinton (e.g. that he raped Juanita Broaddrick) and against the less savory members of his enforcement team (e.g. that they killed Kathleen Willey’s cat) do not chalk these sins up to diffidence, low self-esteem, or other milquetoastian flaws. “Abuse of power” — for which the president was nearly impeached in the House of Representatives — is not legalese for “To Err Is Human.”

If Hillary’s theology was flawed, her sense of psycho-dynamics was incoherent. “A psychologist once told me,” she said, “that for a boy, being in the middle of a conflict between two women is the worst possible situation. There is always the desire to please each one.” This outburst of pop psychology provoked outright laughter. Jay Leno said, “Now, men — men, please, don’t try these lines at home, okay? . . . You thought O.J. had the lamest alibi in history?”

That was just the beginning. Not only was the link between the president’s psychological development and his Oval Office satyriasis received with snickering scorn. It also undermined the Clintons’ claim — repeated in policy contexts from welfare reform to job-retraining — to stand for “personal responsibility.” So the first lady, in mid-listening tour in upstate New York, quickly backtracked, spinning her own sob story. “I am,” she said, “a very strong proponent and believer in personal responsibility.” So is her spokeswoman Marsha Berry, who added that Hillary “did not say the president’s childhood in any way caused his behavior, nor does she believe that. I think she was basically stating some feelings about his childhood, but that they do not excuse his behavior.”

Just to muddy the waters, James Carville offered a $ 100,000 reward for anyone who could produce evidence that Hillary had linked the abuse to Clinton’s adult misbehavior. That’s exactly what she was doing, of course. What else could she have meant when she said the president “has become more aware of his past and what was causing this behavior”? Carville, as usual, was insisting on a standard of nit-picking literalism. But that wasn’t helpful to Hillary, either. Because once you adopt that standard, many of the face-value statements she gave to Franks became as unparseable as her husband’s notorious averral to Jim Lehrer that “there is no improper relationship” with Monica Lewinsky. When Franks asked Hillary about her feelings towards Bill, she replied, “We have love.” Whether they’re in love, or whether she loves him is all a matter of what the definition of the word “have” is.

Not that the president didn’t have it tough as a boy. According to David Maraniss’s biography First in His Class, Clinton’s maternal grandmother Edith Cassidy was impressive in many ways. She taught herself nursing through a correspondence course — and taught young Bill Clinton, for whom she was responsible much of the time, to read. She was also “independent” and “headstrong” (as we today describe women who are mean, selfish, capricious, and unreasonable), “a yeller and a thrower,” as Maraniss puts it, given to beating her children and grandchildren, always screaming at her philandering husband, and fond of thrashing her daughter with a whip.

There’s a lot to be said about Bill Clinton’s upbringing, like: It produced an extremely tough cookie, whom you mess with at your peril. But that’s not what Hillary was saying. Hillary was talking about child abuse. The week the story broke, she was visiting Elmira, New York, the birthplace of Healthy Families, an anti-child-abuse “home-visitation” project that is a staple of her stump oratory and the centerpiece of her idea of positive social change. Healthy Families is a government surveillance program for “at risk” — i.e., poor — families, and Hillary’s visit left her in an awkward position. On the one hand, child abuse is the polestar, the ne plus ultra, of the evils her vision of government means to correct. On the other hand, if her story was correct, she had been covering up a secret history of child abuse in her own family. Soon the White House was backing off the abuse claim altogether. Within 48 hours, Joe Lockhart was insisting the abuse of young Bill Clinton was “psychological, not physical.” In other words, it was not so much abuse as what earlier generations of American parents called discipline.

Lockhart, like Carville, missed the point. What made the Talk article most damaging was not the hints that Clinton had been abused, or that such abuse had had any effect on his life. It was Hillary’s contention — the more damaging because she seemed not to realize she was making it — that her husband was a sex addict. “He’s responsible for his own behavior, whether I’m there or 100 miles away,” she said. “You have the confrontation with the person, and then it is their responsibility, whether it’s gambling, drinking, or whatever.” This is a description of what’s called in the addiction industry an intervention (“You have the confrontation with the person . . . “). But it also links his behavior to two very different vices that, if taken to excess, routinely get classed as addictions. It is here that her statement “He has become more aware of his past and what was causing this behavior” arose as the most damaging one in the article. Non-addicted people just behave (or misbehave); they don’t have things “causing their behavior.”

You now have a political catastrophe on your hands. Because to call someone an addict is to call him, literally, irresponsible. If a heroin addict would give away his mother’s engagement ring for a fix, if a gambling addict would risk his house on the roll of the dice, wouldn’t a sex addict trade nuclear secrets for a romp in the sack?

Alarmingly, Franks then elaborated, “Public office has prevented the president from seeking therapy, but friends told me they expect him to after leaving the Oval Office.” Whoa, Dobbin! Therapy — particularly if we’re to believe the impromptu lecture series Tipper Gore has offered the nation in recent months — is a strictly medical issue. It’s a way of treating something that’s wrong. Either the president needs therapy or he doesn’t. It’s optional only if you don’t care whether your problem is fixed or not. In this case, it’s optional only if we don’t care if the president is able to act responsibly at the most basic level — or not.

What accounts for Hillary’s clumsy deployment of the abuse excuse? Mrs. Clinton, planning a run for office, must have felt trapped between two constituencies. She had to choose between looking like a traditional martyr-wife who baked cookies and stood by her man, and a Machiavellian schemer who was suffering her husband’s male piggery just to ride his coattails. Neither was satisfactory, of course, so she tried to use abuse and addiction to find a middle way. Her husband’s sex addiction would heighten the martyrdom that had won her so much adulation from traditional wives; and his childhood abuse would turn him into a victim, excusing (in the eyes of feminists) her most un-assertive loyalty and making her look a bit less like a doormat.

What she didn’t anticipate was that the idea of an addict in the Oval Office would scare the country out of its wits. If Hillary couldn’t see that, it is because she is anchored in ideology, not pragmatism. This, after all, is the woman who, when looking for a Washington sinecure to give her Arkansas cronies, came up with a really bright idea: Let’s fire the people in the travel office, who are friends with, and make their living doing favors for, the powerful journalists who distrust us. When Paula Jones came forward with her sexual-harassment lawsuit, Hillary had another bright idea: Don’t settle out of court under any circumstances; how likely is it, after all, that my husband would make an “unwanted sexual advance”? Now, on the eve of her first political campaign, she has done it again.

Franks tells us early in the article that Hillary has “always regarded Washington with suspicion.” That’s wrong. Perhaps she should, but Hillary doesn’t hate Washington and its ways. She’s just bad at them.

Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.