Okay, let me be up front about this. There are days — about 365 of them, in the average calendar year, with allowances for leap years — when the reporting in the New York Times pisses me off. (The nadir, perhaps, being when our self-styled “newspaper of record” sat on the domestic warrantless NSA spying story for 14 months, a decision that may well have given George W. Bush his second term.) But rarely does the Times strike me as classless, an exercise in poor taste that leaves me with an icky feeling just reading it.
But that’s exactly how I felt today reading the Times’ exhaustive story on the state of the marriage between Bill and Hillary Clinton.
Now, make no mistake: I find the politics of Sen. Hillary Clinton, a triangulator for non-triangulating times, to be not only despicable but profoundly out of touch with mainstream America. Her efforts to recast herself as a “centrist” by embracing some of the most disastrous aspects of the Bush presidency, and some of the most repugnant personalities the Republicans have on offer, are doing very little to convince ordinary Americans that she stands for anything other than the desire to become President. Combine that with her effect on progressives, who mostly despise her, and the far right, which mostly despises her even more, and you have a candidacy with tons of money but no votes. Those campaigns tend not to do well.
But even Hillary Clinton doesn’t deserve this. Neither does Bill, whose many shortcomings as President (of which lying about Monica Lewinsky, the grounds for his farce of an impeachment, was one of the least), doesn’t change the fact that next to Dubya he looks like a statesman. And even that is immaterial. No couple, public or private, deserves this.
What breaking news does the Times see fit to print about the Clintons’ marriage? That they spend, on average, “only” 14 days together each month. Out of the last 73 weekends, they’ve spent 51 together. (Where I live, with D.C. over 3,000 miles away from the constituents, both figures are probably above average for a lot of Congresspeople — and that’s without factoring in a globe-trotting ex-President for a spouse.) The Times drolly notes that “The dynamics of a couple’s marriage are hard to gauge from the outside…,” before going on to attempt to do just that — by interviewing “some 50 people” for its article. That didn’t include Bill, Hillary, or most of their respective staffs, who “declined to cooperate for this article.” And why should they cooperate? The National Enquirer pays good money for interviews like that.
So what does this article teach us about the Clintons after 30 years of marriage? Well, virtually nothing, actually. Leon Panetta, a former chief of staff for Bill, notes that “there’s something there that basically bonds them.” (After 30 years? Really?) There’s a lot of idle speculation by friends and political allies, some of it admiring of the relationship, some of it concerned about the baggage Bill might present for a Hillary presidential bid. Yet the overall tone is somehow negative and lurid, as when author Patrick Healy (think Judith Miller, without the reporting chops) notes in the third paragraph that “Mr. Clinton is rarely without company in public, yet the company he keeps rarely includes his wife. Nights out find him zipping around Los Angeles with his bachelor buddy, Ronald W. Burkle, or hitting parties and fund-raisers in Manhattan; she is yoked to work in Washington or New York — her Senate career and political ambitions consuming her time.” The implication, of course, is that “Mr. Clinton” and his bachelor buddy are out having a wild and crazy (wink, wink) time – and why, exactly, was the phrase “bachelor buddy” included at all?
This is, of course, a dream article for the Republican National Committee. Without quoting a single Republican, it manages to insert a particularly tasteless incident of marital infidelity into the dialogue surrounding a probable 2008 presidential candidate, a full decade after the incident occurred. And as unsavory as that incident was, it pales compared to the repeated lies, law-breaking, Constitution-bashing behavior of the current White House occupant. The RNC could use that kind of distraction right now.
What’s more of a mystery is why any Democrat would choose to dignify such an article by being quoted in it, anonymously or by name. Beyond the fact that the article’s mere existence is unfair to Hillary — anyone seen an article lately on the state of Joe Biden’s marriage? –- Democrats as a party have been working overtime since Al Gore’s electoral failure (which is to say, his allowing the 2000 race to be close enough that it could be stolen) to prove that they, too, are a party of morals and values. (Hence John Kerry, wasting months after he’d wrapped up the 2004 Democratic nomination trumpeting himself as a “war hero” rather than saying how he’d actually govern, or criticizing more forcibly the execrable first-term performance of Dubya.) Why would any Democrat with a lick of sense want to see such issues dredged back up?
Get used to it. If Hillary becomes a frontrunner in 2008, which her money and fundraising connections virtually guarantee, this is exactly the sort of thing smear-happy Republicans will pound. (They certainly can’t criticize much in her senatorial record, which has often lined up nicely with the Republican agenda.) Conservative talk radio spent nearly a decade hammering away at the themes of Hillary as liberal queen bitch and Bill as amoral “Slick Willie,” and they’re not about to let go of a proven ratings winner.
Why the first frontal assault should come from the New York Times, though, is, as they say, “hard to gauge from the outside.” Damn that liberal media, anyway.
