When the Rose documents turned up, Senator Alfonse D’Amato’s Whitewater inquiry, largely stalled at the time, got a fresh lease on life—and would go on to become, Mr. Bernstein reminds us, “the longest-running congressional investigation of a sitting president in history.” Whitewater special prosecutor Kenneth Starr—who not long before had tried to ditch his thankless D.C. assignment for a law-school deanship—seized on the billing-records mix-up to subpoena Hillary to testify in person before his grand jury. And that additional blow to her vanity, in turn, triggered a fresh round of troop-rallying within the White House bunker—“an all-out offensive” against the Starr inquiry, including a bizarre mobilization of the White House legal team to compile a dossier on The Washington Post’s skewed Whitewater coverage, evidently to try to intimidate Post executive editor Len Downie. It’s remarkable that Mr. Bernstein—justly celebrated as a hero for his Watergate reporting in The Post—manages to admire the spiritual depth of a First Lady who pursued, in the bowels of the White House, a Nixonian crusade against journalists.
Meanwhile, Mr. Starr—who, Mr. Bernstein notes, “seemed constitutionally unable not to exude sanctimony and piety”—whipped his legal team into new frenzies of prurient interest in Paula Jones’ sexual harassment suit. And thus, thanks to the cunning paths of overlapping hubris from the offices of the First Lady and the special prosecutor, was a very tawdry kind of history made: Enter Monica.
And after that saga of dueling sanctimonies comes the episode that Mr. Bernstein treats as a redemptive epilogue: Hillary’s 2000 Senate campaign. But it hardly seems like a new chapter begun. Consider the campaign innovation that Mr. Bernstein singles out as a “brilliant” Hillary conceit, her “listening tour” of the state. By his own strained logic, it yielded completely unexciting results: “[S]he made sure not to offend, and she told voters largely what they wanted to hear … there was hardly a single noteworthy position she embraced that put her at odds with the core constituencies she sought.” And yet, Mr. Bernstein insists, the cautious ordinariness of the campaign was what made it exceptional—at least for her. “What was particularly striking in Hillary’s campaign was how it contrasted with the view of leadership she had long embraced and demanded of others.”
Yes, that’s change—but is it evolution, spiritual or otherwise? It seems more like a reversion to the sort of gnat-straining “triangulation” strategy perfected by Clinton pollster-strategist Dick Morris (something that Mr. Bernstein, yet again, is forced to concede). That poll-cautious approach to campaigning—and to government as campaigning by other means—produced the most Republican policy record of any modern Democratic administration. It also, far from coincidently, clearly informed Hillary’s vote in the Senate in support of the 2002 resolution authorizing President Bush’s invasion of Iraq. And the hair-splitting semantics of calculated, centrist-style “listening” continues to inform Hillary’s anemic defense of that historic error: for example, her entirely disingenuous claim that it wasn’t really a vote to authorize a pre-emptive war—even though on the Senate floor she called it “the hardest decision I have ever had to make.” If it wasn’t a vote for war, why was it so hard? (She also called her decision to stay married to her husband the hardest of her life; ditto her decision to run for the Senate. So maybe, thanks to Jean Houston, she’s on her third life.)
If Hillary Clinton accedes, per her latest ambition, to the Oval Office, she will surely continue to “evolve” in the same direction, refining her very special, very insulated vision of moral leadership.
Let us pray.
Chris Lehmann is an editor at CQ Weekly and a frequent contributor to The Observer.
