Rodham in Gomorrah

She also, Ingraham writes, espouses a “sisterhood” that is divisive and partisan: that defines ideas she dislikes as anti-woman and tries to rally women around liberal causes and candidates, while showing no interest in stay-at-home mothers, would-be owners of businesses, and female victims of liberal Democrats, such as Kathleen Willey, Juanita Broaddrick, and Paula Jones. Thus, her ideas “set women back rather than forward,” protecting “public schools that don’t teach our children core subjects or . . . values, . . . a workplace constricted by government edicts, . . . [and] a permissive sexual culture that tolerates rampant infidelity and divorce.”

So much for Hillary, maker of policy. Hillary the feminist, new-model woman is also a fiction, most dependent when she claims to be strongest, taking the health care brief in 1993 as a gift from the husband she backed in the face of adultery charges; most dependent of all in her race for the Senate, which rests in part on her husband’s fund-raising abilities, runs on the perks that she gets from the White House (foreign trips, ceremonial exposure, the assaults on her rivals from federal agencies), and was made possible in the first place by her fame in the impeachment drama as the put-upon wife. Cannily, Ingraham fingers Hillary’s kinship with “that woman,” the one with whom her husband claimed not to have had sex. Her Senate run and the rise of Monica Lewinsky as celebrity, author, and designer of handbags rest in whole on the pull of their own private stories, their personal doings with Bill. “Without the backdrop of her husband’s sordid tale . . . Hillary’s fame would fade,” Ingraham tells us, correctly. “With Hillary as the reigning role model, you can count on groupies like Monica to be found not far behind.”

But Hillary the policymaker and careerist takes a backseat in oddness to Hillary the wife. No one can have failed to notice in the feminist reaction to earlier scandals about Gary Hart and Ted Kennedy an underlying note of condescension to their wives. Homemakers all, they were not killer lawyers. This humiliation happened to stay-at-homes, not to thoroughly modern women. But Hillary Clinton proved that it could happen to them too, and when it did, she sank to new lows in abasement, not only forgiving her renegade husband, but moving herself out in front to defend him.

Thus the Clinton marriage, which was sold in the 1992 campaign as breaking new ground in mutual respect and equality, turned out worse than the old kind, blending the double standard of the past with the free-for-all, no-standards-at-all mores of the present. Ingraham calls it “the modern view that moral values are relative, sexual misconduct is trivial, and being ‘judgmental’ is the worst sin of all.”

Ingraham writes of the political Hillary and does not touch on the subject of corruption. Peggy Noonan writes about nothing else. She is a conservative who became famous crafting lyrical speeches for President Reagan, but her view is not that of a partisan. She dedicates her book to Eleanor Roosevelt, and it soon becomes clear that her affection is for the heroic figures — the cross-partisan lovers of country and causes. Her concern is not with the liberal Hillary, the feminist Hillary, or even Hillary the non-role model for women, though she does note that Mrs. Clinton’s one public achievement was a health care proposal on which Congress never voted and that her life-long record of working for children consists mainly of saying she wants to. She also notes Hillary’s “antic belligerence,” unpromising in one who hopes to work in a collegial legislative body. Her concern is with Hillary, the consort of Bill, co-author with him of a corrupt and tawdry regime.

Noonan’s book is a story about this corruption, and the tale that she tells us is this: The Clintons are people of talent (not as much as they think, but still genuine talent), with an abnormal hunger for worship, unchecked by any countervailing attachments to things or causes beyond themselves. The pair, she quotes an unnamed Clinton intimate, “have a great need to be loved and admired by others. . . . They have an overinflated view of themselves, but . . . they can’t maintain that unless they get the adulation of an individual, or . . . in her case and his case, a crowd.” And she quotes from a text on narcissistic disorders, “They have little enjoyment of life other than the tributes they receive from others or from their own grandiose fantasies, and they feel restless and bored when the external glitter wears off.”

Thus, they seek public office not really for power, but to give themselves a platform from which to seek tribute. The platform itself, not what they do with it, becomes the overriding object of their lives. “If it serves their advantage to take an action that is in the good of the country, they will certainly take it. . . . If not, not. . . . If defending and advancing left-liberalism will serve their purpose at any given moment, they will defend and advance [it]. . . . If not, not.” Thus, they will be for large, and then for small government; be both the New and the oldest of the Democrats; pass welfare reform, and then run on the claim that only they can prevent its terrible consequences. Facing a weak opponent, as in 1996, they will tweak laws to amass vast sums of money by means that degrade their office. Faced with investigations into possible law-breaking, they will launch scorched-earth attacks on their critics. Faced with impeachment, they will smear, threaten, and slander their enemies; distract the country for a solid year from its business, launch armed attacks upon foreign countries, and, of course, lie.

And for what? Not to do much, not to preserve their party’s agenda, but simply to continue their hold on high office, where they can strut and perform. It is why he talks about running in Arkansas; why she is running in New York; why (Noonan says) if she loses, she will run in Illinois later. “They’re going to need a lot of therapy when this is over,” Noonan quotes a Clinton friend saying, to wean them of the adulation that they seem to be hooked on. But they have no intention of letting this ever be over. “He cannot live a genuinely private life,” Noonan tells us. “Neither can she. . . . Left to himself, he is bored, anxious. . . . She cannot live a life without the promise, the hope, of power and admiration. . . . If she did, she would collapse and blow away.”

All this can sound rather like psychobabble; and it is tempting to project diagnoses onto those we don’t know and don’t like. But this said, it should be said also that those denying Noonan’s conclusions should be asked to tell us in detail where she is wrong — and also to tell us why the Clintons behave as they do.

What, beyond themselves (and abortion), can this couple be said to believe in? What administration has ever been so utterly guided by polls? Why is it that the only big things the Clinton administration has done — welfare reform and the balanced budget — were forced on it by polls and the Republican Congress? Why is it that serious people have said so often that Clinton deals largely in blue smoke and mirrors, that he pushes hard choices off into the future, that he prefers the illusion of movement to genuine progress and the appearance of peace to security? Why have Bill Clinton’s biggest successes been in his talk, not his acts? And why have his speeches had so little meaning? Other men — the Roosevelts, Reagans, and Kennedys — have courted and basked in public approval, but their speeches were made to change minds and had long-lasting resonance. Clinton’s speeches, which wow those who hear them, vanish next day into air. People remember and still quote those other men’s phrases. Except for “the meaning of is” and “I did not have sex with that woman,” no one remembers a word Clinton has said. Never before have so many boffo performances added up to so little. But for Clinton, they have served their critical purpose. They have made him feel important, and vital, and glowing. And for him, as Noonan says, this is the point.

Noonan says also that the Clintons do not love their country, an explosive charge to level at any first couple and one that, again, is hard to prove. And yet, on a cold-eyed assessment of what they have done while in office, one would be hard-pressed to show that they do. Rather, from Bill’s dodging of the draft in 1969 to his multiple perjuries thirty years later, through the desecrations of office that happened between them, they seem to have established a pattern of using the country to pleasure and further themselves. Can anyone name any instance of either Clinton’s taking any risks to advance the national interest? Has either ever challenged an audience? Taken flak for something important, as Reagan did on his defense agenda and Kennedy and Johnson did on civil rights?

Noonan takes offense at the famous photo of two Clinton friends (sitcom queens Markie Post and Linda Blood-worth-Thomason) jumping on Lincoln’s bed, finding in it a shortage of reverence. Doubtless, it is the same sensibility that led Clinton himself to think it would be a gas to put up affluent strangers for cash in that bedroom, to serve coffee to convicts for cash in the Map Room, and to receive oral sex from a college-age intern while discussing troop deployments with congresspeople on the phone.

Further clues to the Clintons’ affections are the things on which they spend their energies and time. Since health care tanked before the 1994 elections, the Clintons’ attention to issues has not been intense. In 1995 and 1996, the president moved swiftly and skillfully against the Republican Congress to keep from being dumped in the ash bin of history. From January 1998 through February 1999, the Clintons and their staffs were in continual overdrive, to counter the menace of early retirement. But when the threats to their persons are lessened — as in 1997, and from early 1999 through the present — the Clintons tend to drift. The country’s interests alone do not seem to engage them. Free of threat, free of pressure, free to address the hard problems without fear of voter reprisal, Clinton has done what he likes: He plays golf, hangs out with sports stars and film stars, and raises money from the mega-rich. Picking his audiences carefully, he can gorge himself on praise and tell himself he is wildly popular — the belief that he needs to go on.

Bill Clinton has probably been like this forever, but for the first lady, adulation may be an acquired taste: As the evidence closed in that summer and fall of the impeachment, she would go to fund-raising events in the Hamptons and be the woman courted, not the woman scorned. “She owns New York!” crowed the state chairman, as the buyout kings and makers of sex-and-violence epics showered tributes upon her. As it turned out, this was not wholly accurate, but Mrs. Clinton may well have decided on her run for the Senate in the hopes it would mean more of the same. The formal announcement of her candidacy was a spectacle, televised live nationwide, with its huge podium, crowds, songs, and entertainment, placards shouting “Hillary!” (like “Evita!”), and unhappy-looking rows of state officeholders hauled in to pay due homage to the queen.

The usual assortment of Clinton friends have criticized Noonan’s book as over the top and extravagant. Judging by the record, however, this charge is inaccurate: It is the Clintons themselves who are over the top; so much so that an objective account of their doings seems extreme. The common defense of the Clintons’ apologists is to take each discrete sin of theirs and match it against some other discrete sin — Kennedy had many women; Reagan had Iran-Contra — so that it all seems quite normal. This can work for a time, until you suddenly realize that you have to pool the sins of a great crowd of people to match what the Clintons have done all by themselves.

Other administrations have had their scandals, but none had so many. Other presidents have had shady associates, but few before this have had quite so many. Other presidents have had other women, but none has ever been accused so often of assault and harassment, from exposure to groping to rape. The Clinton defense against this is not, as Noonan says, the “big lie,” but something quite like it: the multiple lie, the simple overwhelming weight of so many lies that in the aggregate they at least come to seem too much to untangle, and the country at large is left stunned.

Thus, where a single lie or scandal might merit outrage, the overload lessens the impact. Thus, when the rape charge finally surfaced — which would have blown a huge hole straight through a less tainted figure — the country was too numbed to absorb it; which may have been part of the strategy. “The Clintons know that many Americans find it very hard, even impossible, to see them clearly,” writes Noonan. “They know people wrestle with who they are, throw up their hands, and in time stop thinking about it, because of the sheer impossibility of seeing them for what they are.” Their brazenness itself becomes their shield.

This, Noonan says, is the core of the Clintons’ corruption: In making us accept them as leaders, even tarnished ones, they have forced us to lower ourselves. Because of them, all sorts of thresholds have been subtly lowered. Because their offense was not one large thing, like Watergate, but a cluster of smaller ones, none of which by itself reached that level of outrage, they have forced us to tolerate a kind of coarseness, a kind of deceit, and perhaps even a kind of criminality we had not before bent to. “They left behind a country . . . whose political life has been distorted. . . . They have damaged America’s culture by bringing a new level of indecency to our public discourse, and into our living rooms. . . . They have compromised the national character by forcing the country to choose between the trauma and dislocation of the removal of a president and seeming to accept [his] low actions. . . . And in all of this, she has helped him. She was his partner in power; they did it all.” Hillary and her husband have damaged this country to serve their ambitions. And, like her husband, she seems neither to know nor to care.

Noemie Emery, a frequent contributor, lives in Alexandria, Virginia.