The Hillary Cult
Caldwell, Christopher
The Hillary Cult by Christopher Caldwell Last week, as Hillary Clinton turned 50, a film crew from the Arts & Entertainment channel tailed her, gathering footage for a special to air this month....
...As Hillary told a Time journalist, "Perhaps it would be easier . . . if we could be handed a pattern and cut it out, just as our mothers and grandmothers and foremothers were...
...Growing is what being 50 is all about, and as Caputo implies, it comes down to a basic modesty...
...Christopher Caldwell is senior writer for The Weekly Standard...
...I saw how a proposal could be terribly misrepresented to people and distorted beyond all belief...
...Sam Donaldson and Cokie Roberts sent a "video birthday card...
...Hillary replied, "I certainly learned a lot from that experience...
...It helped that at this moment in history Hillary's popularity was at an all-time high...
...She's learned a lot about herself and her limitations...
...Couric asked...
...Says her former press secretary Lisa Caputo: "She's learned a lot about how to just let things roll off of her...
...Because Hillary's not like that...
...That brings us closer to the reason that all of us are so spontaneously, so honestly, so un-self-interest-edly pouring out our gratitude to her...
...Ruth Mandel of Rutgers was more specific: "What we see in her is a heightened, intensified image of a struggle and a transition and a challenge and an opportunity that women are encountering at this moment in history...
...And when Hillary's current press secretary, Marsha Berry, said, "She's not one to sit and pontificate about herself," she spoke for the first lady's entire staff...
...And, boy, were they kept busy...
...The town renamed her old neighborhood "Rodham Corner" and declared Monday, October 27, "Hillary Rodham Clinton Day...
...Hillary has indeed tested the waters of public policy once more, this time with a daycare initiative...
...As Hillary said of her home block, "I think we need to re-create this in our country today...
...Honesty is a big thing for Hillary...
...For it turns out that Hillary's mission is more challenging than any work any woman has ever done at any time anywhere...
...After all, the dishonesty, the cowardice, the self-interest of other people are the only things that have ever stood in her way...
...Not the crassest gift ever to come from a politician, but surely the most eucharistic...
...Hillary humbly acknowledged Park Ridge and the "lasting values" she absorbed there...
...Hillary's Arkansas chum Linda Bloodworth-Thomason described the week as "just a simple, uncomplicated outpouring of love...
...Can you blame her...
...She's grown...
...At one point she said, "I had a village of adults, at school, at church, in the neighborhood—all that it takes to raise children...
...One's first reaction is: What's a "foremother...
...Hillary is far more representative of the baby-boom generation, whose 50th birthdays are seen as a "national turning point" by virtually the entire spectrum of white, Ivy-educated feminists between the ages of 49 and 51...
...One friend, the comedienne Jane Condon, points up Hillary's deep instinct for self-effacement by noting that she will even say, in mid-conversation, "Oh Jane, I get so tired of talking about me...
...According to U.S...
...Hillary stressed her Chicago upbringing: I know from happy children, she seemed to be saying...
...On Monday, Hillary flew to her hometown of Park Ridge, Illinois...
...Hillary's birthday wound up being the most pageant-filled week of personalized adulation in living memory...
...As Time noted, "She promises to lay out the problem's complexities with her customary intellectual rigor...
...You have to put the issue in front of the American people and get them to look at it honestly,'" she told the magazine...
...Chicago, too, held a day in her honor, and its chamber of commerce issued a 20-page booklet called Hillary: The Early Years...
...The whole thing, Hillary has said elsewhere, might be best implemented by executive order...
...Time ran a cover story...
...But I also learned how important it is that we look for ways to bring people along in a debate, and not permit those who are ideologically opposed or financially involved in an issue to dominate the debate...
...Even better for her, the number of those who "hate her viscerally," according to internal White House polls, had fallen from 35 percent to a mere quarter of the nation...
...She told the Chicago Tribune that "she hoped each spring their blooms would represent her presence in the city when she is unable to be here...
...At the various shindigs, she and the friends of her youth remembered "the innocence of their childhoods...
...As for what she's learned, we have to go back to Couric: "Do you think you've learned from the experience of trying to reform the health-care system...
...When Couric noted Republican fears that Hillary's upcoming child-care conference "would lay the groundwork for massive government spending and regulation," Hillary replied, "Well, I think it's unfounded, and I hope that rather than just voicing their fears, which they have done, that they will listen and watch what happens...
...Let's talk about you...
...Peter Jennings took due note...
...At the Chicago dedication of "Hillary Rodham Clinton Women's Park," the first lady was ready with a donation of tulips from the White House garden...
...Hillary, they said, was taking the approval she'd won by bowing out of politics in the first place and misreading it as an invitation, a clamor, a groundswell to get back in...
...She had to...
...Hillary is a listener, the kind of person who, as many tributes put it, "keeps growing at 50...
...But things were only getting started...
...On Friday afternoon, the entire first lady's office was herded into an East wing surprise party, each employee wearing the Time cover as a Hillary mask...
...And her qualifications for overseeing the nation's child care...
...On Sunday, staffers were back at the White House for another party (there goes the weekend in Rehoboth), this one a "state fair" of Hillary's life, with booths representing every decade...
...Saturday night saw a gaudy tribute at the National Italian-American Dinner...
...For some reason, no one else would speak for the record...
...Sheryl "All I Wanna Do Is Have Some Fun" Crow arrived to sing "Happy Birthday...
...A sure sign of a shrinking violet...
...Other people don't learn, but she does...
...As she told Katie Couric, "Everyone should be willing to look fearlessly at the implications of all of these challenges...
...But there was also a larger point...
...Yet there was a deeper reason that the first lady's 50th was celebrated with many times the fanfare of, say, the president's just last year...
...One's first reaction is disbelief at Hillary's claim of a generational monopoly on indepen— Oops, sorry ...that's one's second reaction...
...And she's going to see to it that all tomorrow's kids get an upbringing just like hers, even if they have to be roped into reindeer-teams by agents of the National Office of Daycare to do it...
...The plan is still vague, but it appears to consist of three tracks, as the first lady told Katie Couric in a birthday interview: licensing ("Certainly, licensing is a big improvement over not licensing"), raids by social-service agencies ("They ought to take perhaps the model of the military and do unannounced inspections"), and high-tech surveillance of anyone who fits the profile of a child-abuser—or whatever ("It's not only criminal convictions ...but it also may be other proceedings of accusations concerning the care of children...
...No wonder we're so grateful to her...
...She won't make that mistake again...
...Then a party at the Fairfax Hotel for 75 guests, thrown by power wives Ann Jordan and Buffy Cafritz...
...News, 67 percent approved of the job she was doing...
...Her public appearances and photo-ops, up to eight of them a day, sometimes took on the tones of Albanian war poetry: This soil is the noblest soil, because it gave rise to me...
...A handful of cynics explained the birthday celebrations as an act of political opportunism...
Vol. 3 • November 1997 • No. 9
