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ARTS AND CULTURE

First impressions

  • 12 June 2006

Hillary Rodham Clinton is her own woman and a smart and successful lawyer, a former young Republican who became America’s First (Democrat) Lady not when her husband became its president, but when she lost her role as his appointed but independently powerful policy-maker. JFK’s appointment of his brother Robert as attorney-general could be borne, but not a later Democrat’s sharing real power with his wife. Most First Ladies are assumed to have at least some influence from their supposed intimate relationships with powerful men, and exercise it in their own ways—fashion icon (Jacqueline Kennedy), drugs campaigner (Nancy ‘Just Say No’ Reagan) or grandmother to the nation (Mrs Bush, no-nonsense wife to George the First). Eleanor Roosevelt exercised her real power after FDR succumbed humiliatingly, in the arms of his mistress, and she was appointed to chair the committee then drafting the declaration on human rights in the United Nations. But when first-term President Clinton appointed his wife to do the serious job, in his own administration, of reforming health policy, neither the power brokers in Congress, nor the public, nor the self-appointed guardians of public policy (the columnists, pundits, reporters and talk-show hosts) were willing to make the best—or any—use of what Clinton jokingly offered as ‘two for the price of one’. The joke was sour. By the end of 1994, Hillary Clinton was still her husband’s policy confidante and a power in Washington, but had been sidelined from direct power when what she called her ‘missteps’ or misjudgments sank her health care reform project that year. She writes, ‘I underestimated the resistance I would meet as a First Lady with a policy mission’. That’s putting it mildly. Even strong, self-confident women have a relatively tenuous hold on power. Hillary Rodham, feminist and partner in a prestigious law firm, felt obliged to add ‘Clinton’ to her name well after her marriage. Her husband was Governor of Arkansas at the time, and the Arkansas electors drew unsatisfactory conclusions from her keeping her ‘maiden’ (and professional) name. How much did she identify with her husband, then? ‘I’m not some little woman like Tammy Wynette, standing by her man’, she told a TV interviewer, doing exactly that when Gennifer Flowers revealed a long affair with Hillary’s husband. Following public reaction to that interview she  learned not to make jokes unless they were scripted.

An intelligent, educated and policy-driven woman, as Hillary Rodham Clinton has clearly always

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