HILLARY CLINTON, PSYCHOANALYST

...Because to call someone an addict is to call him, literally, irresponsible...

...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...

...Jay Leno said, "Now, men—men, please, don't try these lines at home, okay...

...That was just the beginning...

...He's responsible for his own behavior, whether I'm there or 100 miles away," she said...

...Her husband's sex addiction would heighten the martyrdom that had won her so much adulation from traditional wives...

...Is the president a "sex addict...

...If Hillary couldn't see that, it is because she is anchored in ideology, not pragmatism...

...There was a terrible conflict between his mother and grandmother...

...Within 48 hours, Joe Lock-hart was insisting the abuse of young Bill Clinton was "psychological, not physical...

...She's just bad at them...

...After some hedging, Hillary replied, "Well, if all that were proven true, i think that would be a very serious offense...

...You thought O.J...

...No: They were sins of highhanded tyranny...

...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...

...But it also links his behavior to two very different vices that, if taken to excess, routinely get classed as addictions...

...that they killed Kathleen Willey's cat) do not chalk these sins up to diffidence, low self-esteem, or other milquetoastian flaws...

...Whoa, Dobbin...

...Not only was the link between the president's psychological development and his Oval Office satyriasis received with snickering scorn...

...What accounts for Hillary's clumsy deployment of the abuse excuse...

...In other words, it was not so much abuse as what earlier generations of American parents called discipline...

...There is always the desire to please each one...

...Hillary was talking about child abuse...

...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 HILLARY HAD A CHOICE: LOOK LIKE A TYPICAL MARTYR-WIFE OR LOOK LIKE A MACHIAVELLIAN SCHEMER RIDING BILL’S COATTAILS...

...That is not going to be proven true...

...NBC's Matt Lauer asked, "If an American president had an adulterous liaison in the White House and lied to cover it up, should the American people ask for his resignation...

...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...

...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...

...When Paula Jones came forward with her sexual-harassment lawsuit, Hillary had another bright idea: Don't settle out of court under any circumstances...

...So the first lady, in mid-listening tour in upstate New York, quickly backtracked, spinning her own sob story...

...If Hillary's theology was flawed, her sense of psycho-dynamics was incoherent...

...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...

...Soon the White House was backing off the abuse claim altogether...

...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...

...shrinking violet...

...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 Cas-sidy was impressive in many ways...

...Clinton, planning a run for office, must have felt trapped between two constituencies...

...You now have a political catastrophe on your hands...

...they don't have things "causing their behavior...

...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...

...It also undermined the Clintons' claim—repeated in policy contexts from welfare reform to job-retraining—to stand for "personal responsibility...

...that he raped Juanita Broaddrick) and against the less savory members of his enforcement team (e.g...

...This outburst of pop psychology provoked outright laughter...

...But that wasn't helpful to Hillary, either...

...She taught herself nursing through a correspondence course—and taught young Bill Clinton, for whom she was responsible much of the time, to read...

...And those who believe the worst unproved allegations against Clinton (e.g...

...The week the story broke, she was visiting Elmi-ra, 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...

...i think we're going to find some other things...

...Who knew that Hillary was referring to her husband's grandmother...

...That's exactly what she was doing, of course...

...It's a way of treating something that's wrong...

...I think she was basically stating some feelings about his childhood, but that they do not excuse his behavior...

...had the lamest alibi in history...

...But that's not what Hillary was saying...

...Neither was satisfactory, of course, so she tried to use abuse and addiction to find a middle way...

...Perhaps she should, but Hillary doesn't hate Washington and its ways...

...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...

...how likely is it, after all, that my husband would make an "unwanted sexual advance...

...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...

...When Franks asked Hillary about her feelings towards Bill, she replied, "We have love...

...Either the president needs therapy or he doesn't...

...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...

...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...

...You have the confrontation with the person, and then it is their responsibility, whether it's gambling, drinking, or whatever...

...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...

...That's wrong...

...What else could she have meant when she said the president "has become more aware of his past and what was causing this behavior...

...On the other hand, if her story was correct, she had been covering up a secret history of child abuse in her own family...

...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...

...Franks tells us early in the article that Hillary has "always regarded Washington with suspicion...

...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...

...Because once you adopt that standard, many of the lace-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...

...Healthy Families is a government surveillance program for "at risk"—i.e., poor—families, and Hillary's visit left her in an awkward position...

...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...

...HILLARY CLINTON, PSYCHOANALYST by Christopher Caldwell During the January 1998 interview in which Hillary Clinton became the first American politician since Joe McCarthy to link the words "vast" and "conspiracy" in a single sentence, there occurred a little-remembered exchange on the Monica Lewinsky affair...

...Carville, as usual, was insisting on a standard of nit-picking literalism...

...On the one hand, child abuse is the polestar, the ne plus ultra, of the evils her vision of government means to correct...

...Non-addicted people just behave (or misbehave...

...Christopher Caldwell is a senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...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...

...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...

...Abuse of power"—for which the president was nearly impeached in the House of Representatives—is not legalese for "To Err Is Human...

...In Christian theology," Hillary explained, "there are sins of weakness and sins of malice...

...Whether they're in love, or whether she loves him is all a matter of what the definition of the word "have" is...

...Lockhart, like Carville, missed the point...

...I am," she said, "a very strong proponent and believer in personal responsibility...

...This is a description of what's called in the addiction industry an intervention ("You have the confrontation with the person...

...If so, she misjudged...

...What she didn't anticipate was that the idea of an addict in the Oval Office would scare the country out of its wits...

...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...

...It's optional only if you don't care whether your problem is fixed or not...

...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...

...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...

...2) What is the nature of the "scarring" that has resulted...

...Now, on the eve of her first political campaign, she has done it again...