IT WAS A STEREOTYPE CONSTRUCTED by friend and foe alike: Hillary Clinton was the smarter of the Clintons. She was the efficient one, he the charmer. She focused while he empathized. The stereotype allowed her admirers to elevate Hillary Clinton to the status of feminist icon, and her enemies could depict her as a ruthless and intelligent ice queen.
It’s pretty clear by now that the stereotype is wrong. Hillary Clinton is not smarter than her husband. She can master a brief and organize information, but anybody who falls first for Michael Lerner’s “politics of meaning” and then for the New Age spirit-babble of Jean Houston possesses limited abilities as a critical thinker. And Mrs. Clinton is not ruthlessly efficient. Every task she has undertaken, from organizing the health-care task forces to responding to Whitewater allegations, has been accomplished with maximum inefficiency, maximum heaving and bother.
Looking beyond the polarizing hype, Hillary Clinton seems remarkably ordinary by high-level Washington standards. Her reactions to the vicissitudes of life at the top have been utterly banal. She says she was shocked to discover the difficulty of living in a fishbowl. Has there ever been a leading politician who hasn’t said that? She feels persecuted, is offended by the way the complexity of her life is reduced to 800-word articles. She leads a fantastically cushy life, but experiences waves of self- pity, believing herself a struggling soul in a hostile town. Like most politicos surrounded by teams of adoring aides, she is self-absorbed. Like Newt Gingrich and so many others, she can be grandiose, imagining herself on the stage with World Historical Figures. And yet she can also be strangely casual, as in her habit of responding to queries with “Okey-dokey, artichokey. ”
And like many people in public and private life who combine mushy spiritualism with personal ambition, she goes in for New Age solipsism. For what is New Age but religion with obligation replaced by flattery, humility by self-esteem? Jean Houston is only a few steps down from the mass gurus who fill time on PBS fund-raising drives: Leo Buscaglia, Joseph Campbell, Deepak Chopra, Yanni at the Acropolis. Up in the White House solarium, eyes closed, communing with Eleanor Roosevelt and Gandhi, Mrs. Clinton was only doing what thousands of corporate executives and troubled private citizens have been doing for years.
Bob Woodward’s account of her sessions with Jean Houston led me (as it probably did many others) to the bookshelf to look through the late Christopher Lasch’s brilliant book, The Culture of Narcissism. Phrases from the book leapt out and illuminated Mrs. Clinton’s behavior: “the ideology of intimacy . . . the grandiose self . . . the romantic cult of sincerity and authenticity . . . self-absorption defines the moral climate of contemporary society . . . he praises respect for rules and regulations in the secret belief that they do not apply to himself.” Mrs. Clinton’s brand of narcissism is so commonplace that a bestselling book written 17 years ago captures it perfectly.
One phrase, a chapter heading, stands out: “The Banality of Pseudo-Self Awareness: The Theatrics of Politics and Everyday Existence.” Only a mixture of pseudo-self awareness and a habit of theatrics could allow Mrs. Clinton, brought to the pinnacle by her husband’s electoral success, to sit among an audience of aides and listen with a straight face while a court favorite called her the most important woman since Joan of Arc.
In these ways, Mrs. Clinton embodies the zeitgeist of her generation. Her 1969 Wellesley commencement address was a Zelig-like summation of the different threads of that era — the rudeness to elders, the politics of ecstasy, the liberationist demands — and typically it included this grand call: “We’re not interested in social reconstruction; it’s human reconstruction.”
As with most other members of her generation, she has dropped some of the 1960s baggage. What has not been dropped is the ambition to understand all and to reform all — what might be called her set’s spiritual greed. “Let us be willing to remold society by redefining what it means to be a human being in the 20th century, moving into a new millennium,” the first lady said in a speech 24 years after her Wellesley remarks. Throughout the years, she has preserved as in amber certain notions of her youth: that American society is crippled by “alienation and despair and hopelessness”; that it suffers from ” a spiritual vacuum . . . a sleeping sickness of the soul”; and that it is her mission to help produce a transformation. Many conservatives talk this way, too; and those who do usually had their consciousnesses forged by the 1960s.
The traditional religions call on holy men to renounce worldly ambitions and practice humility. But for those up from the 1960s, spiritual life can, does, and should coexist with worldly ambition, religious understanding with high self-esteem. This desire to have it all has taken 1960s types on notoriously restless journeys. The cries for social revolution in the 1960s have been domesticated into the fuzzy New Age spiritualism of the 1990s, made more organic but no less utopian. Jerry Rubin went through guerrilla politics, gestalt theory, Esalen, Reichian therapy, health foods, networking, yuppieism, and who knows what else in search of total peace and complete understanding before he was hit by a car. We’ve all known people who go off on crazy kicks in search of higher consciousness, and we have learned to tolerate their phases. If Hillary Clinton were our friend, we’d smile indulgently as she enthused over the gifts of Jean Houston.
And we’d know she’d soon be on to something else. Even Hillary Clinton could not long stomach the lunacy at the center of A Mythic Life, the book Jean Houston shared with the first lady. In A Mythic Life, Houston says she destroyed an orange-sized tumor in her breast by going into a trance. She claims to have visited “the chamber of the great pattern keepers in the time beyond time” where our destinies are laid down. Mrs. Clinton doesn’t go in for that weirdness. The only real overlap between Houston and the first lady is their common spiritual pride, their desire to understand all and change all (Houston claims she has already found the secret key).
“My hypersensitive availability to others’ wounding,” Houston writes, ” makes for a constancy of inner pain that belies the outer merry face that I present to the world. As I travel around the world, for example, especially in countries where people have little hope, I am haunted by the eyes of children.” That self-aggrandizing claim to selflessness is another manifestation of the 1960s style that Mrs. Clinton too often embodies.
At Wellesley, Hillary Rodham was a revolutionary. At Yale, she preached what the Yalies preached. In Arkansas, Hillary Clinton did business the Arkansas way. In Washington, Hillary Rodham Clinton strives and suffers the same as everybody else who’s at the top of the pecking order. Far from being a world-historical figure, she is a clichet product of her time, so completely representative it’s weird.
by David Brooks
