Mind of an Outlaw (74 page)

But we have strayed, we have moralized! (We are moralizing among the moralizers.) And we have hardly declared where we are, nor why. Hillary was having a session at Chicago’s grandest new hotel, where she was staying and where Bill would join her. More than fifteen hundred people were present, 85 percent of whom were well-dressed women. When she came forward to speak, Senator Carol Moseley-Braun even waved her right arm in the air like a prizefighter. But then their subject was the empowerment of women.

Hillary’s speech soon followed. It was so easy for her. She had
only to touch a button and the women would cheer and rise to their feet. “Doesn’t it feel good to have a president who stood up against the National Rifle Association?” she asked. Cheers. Sound bites, one after the other. But then there were a great many TV people there. A sizable stand had been erected for them. Now, no matter how the TV would cut her remarks, there would always be a selling point. “I have listened to our women senators, and I say to myself, ‘Go, girl, go!’ ”

To the huge roar that came up on this last, she added, “We are applauding women who ran for office to help affect the lives of men, women and children.” If she had asked them to march all the way to the convention center, they might have sprouted a bouquet of blisters in their high heels, but they would have followed her. If she had asked them to bare their breasts, they would have shucked their blouses and their bras. They might be corporate ladies, but they were loyal troops. Command me—I am yours!

How the Republicans were enraged by Saint Hillary’s army, so militant, so sure of themselves. Republicans had often been left with dry, hard-edged specimens of women or obese cuties with beehive hairdos, but then the GOP had been giving it all to the men for a century—giving it to their tycoons, to their military heroes, their white athletes, their independent-minded riflemen who believed in freedom (while relinquishing more of it every day to the spiritual depredations of the corporation). What depredations? Why, to list a few—plastic, high-rises, fluorescent lighting, and sealed windows in expensive hotels.

That was Monday afternoon. On Tuesday night when Hillary spoke at the convention, she was wearing a knit dress somewhere in hue between baby blue and royal blue. A perfect color for television, it reached out for your eye but did not burn it. Her hair was coiffed for the kind of dinner party only doyennes give in New York. Immaculate yet subtle was her hair, and well colored. In two decades, Hillary had moved half the distance from bottle-lens Rodham—the angry formidable dark-haired no-nonsense Yale Law School grind and soon young wife of young Governor Clinton—all the way over to a modest copy of Sharon
Stone. Hillary had become a blond actress. She was not yet a very good one, but she was certainly better than the average ingenue.

At the convention on Tuesday night, the delegates were expecting a powerful speech to burn out the power of the impression Liddy Dole had left at the Republican Convention. But Hillary was not competitive, not, at least, on this night. She had a quiet, caring, interested-in-your-doings family chat prepared, and she was not going to stray. She did her best to fulfill the role. But she was not all that compassionate. Ice blondes can hide a variety of faults—they cannot convince you of their loving care, however, when they are not feeling it.

One could see why so many Americans disliked her. She was decompressing the presidency. She was pretending to be near to the people, but the nature of her position made that impossible. We laugh at the English royals when they pay their visits to factory workers, but at least they remain royal. Hillary was pretending that she was one of us, and it was hardly true. One wanted political leaders who were full of passion for the people but were also noble and a touch aloof: FDR and Eleanor set the standard. That was easier to trust than someone who pretended to know which laundry detergent to use, or, even worse, was not pretending. She did know. What a waste of the upper faculties.

During the half hour she spoke, there were more than seventy references to children, to mother and father, to family. It no longer had anything to do with politics. There she was, absolutely in place, ice-blond, a saint to her gender even as she proceeded to talk about PTA solutions to profound problems. None of the real questions came into her purview, nothing about the sleazy quality of so many American products advertised to the hilt, nothing trenchant about the waste of the ghettos, the paucity of good wages among working people, the fever of global capitalism to send the profits to the top rather than sharing some of the wealth with those who worked to make the stuff.

To her credit, Hillary had succeeded in weathering the 400 blows aimed at her over the last four years. A weaker woman would have been in a sanitarium by now. She became stronger. We all know: if it does not kill you, it will make you stronger. Yet she had not become a nicer woman. Her ice-blond presence now offered the unhappy suggestion that acts of transcendence do not always lead us to the light. Saint Hillary and her Knights Templar were a force to emblazon one another, but they might not be exactly what the country needed. They were too eager to show that they could be the equal of any man in the corporation or the government. Probably they could. And so what? Women are as ugly as men when personal power is their life cause, their only real life cause.

If black people are often seen by some fearful whites as the wildest people in America, it is not as easily recognized that they can also be the most disciplined men and women. If that helps to explain why a million black people can march on Washington without one act of violence, it can also account for the genial affect with which they came to Chicago and stayed there through the week, never breaking their own good mood, even if aspects of the Clinton overdrive—all that moderate Republicanism—had to be heartbreaking to the majority of them. Many of the welfare women and children, who would soon be having cruel and heartless dealings with the local authorities in their states,
might be friends of the delegates, or their neighbors, or even poor members of their own families. The word was out, however, among the brothers and sisters—we are here to celebrate how good our relations are with white Democrats.

And they were. One had to go back to the Fifties to recall a time when liberal whites and blacks had been so ready to have a good time together. Whatever Clinton’s faults, political omissions, and betrayals, there was this to his credit—relations between blacks and whites, in the Democratic Party at least, were on the mend. Blacks knew the figures. At the Dole convention, about 3 percent of the delegates were black. In Chicago, the figure was about 19 percent. Now, however, blacks also knew that they were the Democrats’ best chance for recapturing the House and the Senate. It could be done if they came out to vote in force.

So Clinton had gambled that blacks would accept his signing of the welfare bill. Many Democrats were unhappy that he signed, but they were certainly not mutinous. Where was there to go? They hoped, and some believed, that Clinton would fix the worst parts of the new welfare machine (not even yet designed) if he were reelected with a Democratic Congress. No voice, but for Jesse Jackson, rose in real wrath to declare: If welfare is to be cleansed at the bottom, why not have it fumigated at the top? Corpfare!

Silence prevailed. Since the fire was out of the Democratic Party, geniality took its place. Many of the black delegates liked Clinton. He was warm, he was good-hearted, he had tears in his eyes before the pain of others—he had been there to commiserate with black congregations after their churches were burned. If he was a sinner, he was also a churchgoer. (As you should be after you have sinned.) Of course, he was also sufficiently active as a sinner to salivate at the sight of a hotel room in a strange town, or, for that matter, in his own town. He was okay. He was alive, he was American, he had his good side, he had his bad side.

So the mood was genial. It was not a time to brood on the low state of the party. The Democratic Party, after all, had been in an
unhealthy condition for years. In 1968 it had been torn in half by Vietnam. The slash of the wound still ran across the face of the party. And of late, its soul had been bruised. Inanition bruises the soul.

The years from 1992 to 1994 were a terrible time for the Democrats. A wholly quixotic effort to get gays into the military was followed by a yearlong sludge-filled effort to arrive at a medical health plan. It failed altogether. Did one have to go back to the Civil War to find battles where so much had been committed and so little gained?

After two years in the White House, it was clear that Clinton’s past was a puddle and he was sitting in it. In consequence, the Democratic Party had been without a general. There was no one to lead them back to ground where they could fight the Republican Party. Instead, they all but joined it. The Democrats remained weak before the righteousness of the Republicans, whose blitzkrieg in 1994 had been underwritten by a fundamental public anger: there were too many indulgent poor people being supported on the taxes of the hardworking. Of course, the hardworking were often not too bright, especially the white men who had been brought up to succeed and believed, therefore, that to be hardworking was virtuous. It was, but it was not as virtuous as they thought. The top was taking more from the middle than the bottom was taking. The failure to recognize this (or the resolute cowardice not to recognize it) was also a failure of virtue.

On Thursday night, President William Jefferson Clinton came to the podium to present his acceptance speech. Rarely had he looked better or spoken with more vigor. His energy never waned. He had the charisma on that Thursday night to give a great speech and indeed he would have—if he had had a speech. But he didn’t. He had a list of items, political items, most of them modest. He had, in effect, the kind of speech that a man running for mayor in a small city might give to the locals.

The wonder of it all, however, was that it took something like
half the speech, a full thirty minutes, for the emptiness of the offering to become apparent. Clinton had risen in his person so completely above his text that he stood before the TV cameras of the world—tall, ruddy, handsome, vigorous, confident, even proud. His manner provided the assertion: he was going to do wonderful things for the country. But his text was offering less than any president had promised in a long time.

There is no need to quote at length from what he said. It is all pretty much the same, a demonstration of the inner life of political sin. Clinton’s punishment for his sins was that he had become intellectually dull:

He mentioned that bridge more than fifteen times in the hour. It was his metaphor.

How good he looked! It did not matter what he said. He never lost his vigor. Still! Excitement began to ooze out of the occasion. The delegates had heard too many other speakers go on this week about children and the family. One felt at last as if one were trapped in one of the old (by now classic) MGM films, one of those well-made dung heaps of sentimentality. We were receiving the worldview of the long-gone Hollywood studio lot with its L. B. Mayer star and starlet system.

In an interview Clinton had done for
USA Today
, he had listed the books that had been “sources of real inspiration.” He had shaped his values by those books. They were
The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius
and
The Imitation of Christ
by Thomas à Kempis. Christians should, Clinton said, “tend to their own soul’s health before all else.” There was
Moral Man & Immoral Society
by Reinhold Niebuhr, and that had influenced Clinton about “how you can deal with the question of personal integrity in public life.” There was “Politics as a Vocation” by Max Weber. “If you have power over other people,” suggested Clinton, “we risk our soul in the exercise of that power. It’s a great call for humility.”

Finally, there was his weekly reading of the Bible. He quoted Saint Paul: “It is the very thing I would not do that I do; the very thing that I would do that I do not” (Romans 7:15).

He was so bright. He was worthy of becoming a great character in a novel. It wasn’t what he had done but what he had failed to do. Gogol would have enshrined him. He was perfect for
Dead Souls
. He had failed to go to the root of any problem. He had a mind that wonked and wonked, and none of the vehicles of thought that his reading brought to him had been able to make a real stir in his political world, not Marcus Aurelius, Thomas à Kempis, Reinhold Niebuhr, Max Weber, Saint Paul, Jesus, or Jehovah. If only just once he would say, “Look, I’m no good and I can prove it, but for a bad guy working in a very bad town, maybe I am entitled to say, ‘I have accomplished one thing. I never gave up. I take a good punch. You can’t keep me down.’ ”