VALUES MATTER MOST by BEN J. WATTENBERG

Author:BEN J. WATTENBERG
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: The Free Press
Published: 1995-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

Inevitably we must consider the question of where Clinton’s political heart is located. In the Washington shorthand about Clinton the question is, “What does he really believe?”

I had pretty well sworn off political psychiatry when I read First in His Class, by David Maraniss. A first-class biography of Clinton from his birth to his 1991 announcement of candidacy, it offers a sense of an answer to the What does he really believe? question: Clinton is a tactical moderate and an ideological liberal. (His supporters say labels don’t mean anything anymore, which is what liberals say these days.)

The past is prologue. Drawing from Maraniss, what would Early Clinton and Early Hillary look like if made into a movie in the Forrest Gump style? Watch the screen: There go Bill Gump and Hillary Rodham Gump popping up at most every watering spot along the liberal wagon trail.

Thus, Bill gets his ticket punched: (1) working for the leading opponent to the Vietnam war (Senator William Fulbright, also a segregationist), (2) at the antiwar hothouse that was Oxford University (on a Rhodes scholarship), (3) as “a full-blown anti-war organizer,” (4) as an artful draft avoider, or evader, or dodger, considering selective conscientious objector status, (5) at the liberal Yale Law School, where students are encouraged to do their own thing, (6) which for Clinton was the 1970 Senate campaign of Joe Duffey in Connecticut, which drew young, liberal, antiwar activists from across the country, (7) as an early supporter, then organizer, in liberal George McGovern’s 1972 presidential bid (while most of his political friends went to work for the more moderate Senator Edmund Muskie).

Meanwhile, Hillary pays her dues (8) at the very liberal Children’s Defense Fund, (9) as a lawyer for the Watergate investigation that drew up the Nixon impeachment charges and later, (10) serving on the board of the Legal Services Corporation, an organization which was designed to help poor people use the law, and periodically, allegedly, used its personnel for quite liberal political purposes, which would be contrary to their charter and federal law.

Following Maraniss’s tale, we see the boy prodigy from Arkansas bloom in the fertile soil of the New Politics. There is passion everywhere: joy, rapture, despondency. Clinton is described as a young man who hardly sleeps, who consumes food, books, and women in prodigious quantities, who will talk to and listen to almost anyone, anywhere, anytime, who fits easily into any scene. (Maybe the right movie model is Woody Allen’s Zelig .) Amid the passion, Clinton builds an acquaintance card file to help him run for high office later in life. He marries. His wife is smart and ambitious. They shout at each other a lot.

This young man is an impressive piece of work. He returns to Arkansas and runs for Congress at age twenty-eight (loses), for attorney general at age thirty (wins), and for governor at age thirty-two (wins). Over the years Clinton is seen as a man who is tardy and indecisive; sometimes dissembling, fudging, and fibbing;

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