The men who hate Hillary

No woman in American politics has been more vilified than Senator Clinton. A look at her recent biographers reveals why she's the object of such scrutiny, scorn and scandal

JL. Jk. illary drives men wild. Well, cer­tain men. You can recognize them by the flecks of foam in the corners of their mouth when the subject turns to the lat­est Clinton candidacy. Despise her they do, yet they're often strangely drawn to her, in some inexplicably intimate way. She occupies their attention. They spend a lot of time thinking about her—enumer­ating her character flaws, dissecting her motives, analyzing her physical shortcom­ings with a penetrating clinical eye: those thick ankles and dumpy hips, the ever-changing hairdos. You'd think they were talking about their first wives. There's the same overinvested quality, an edge of spite, some ancient wound not yet repaired. And how they love conjecturing on her sexual­ity—or lack of, heh heh. Is she frigid, is she gay? Heh heh. Yes, they have many theories about her, complete with detailed forensic analyses of her marriage, probably more detailed than of their own.

My point is you can tell a lot about a man by what he thinks about Hillary Clin­ton. Maybe even everything. She's not just

a presidential candidate; she's a sophisticated diagnostic instrument tor calibrating male anxiety, which seems to be running high at the moment, and understandably, given that the whole male-female who-runs-the-world question is pretty much up tor grabs. Face it, the possibility ot a woman in the White House creates a certain frisson—how could it not? The historic distribution ot power between the sexes is being entirely revamped, power is a vastly complicated subject, and the male psyche has to be feeling a bit embattled. Change hurts, loss rankles. So defenses are mounted, which—as any human with the usual repertoire ot human emotions knows— can take various and wily forms.

Let me pause here to confess I'm not much ot a Hillary tan myself. I don't like her poli­tics, and her speeches put me to sleep (unlike Obama, who is Kith enticingly vague on sub­stance and electrifying to watch). 1 wouldn't

sav I'm a full-fledged Hillaryphobe—and yes, lemale Hillaryphobia certainly exists, though 1 believe women hate her tor a different set ot reasons and thus deserve their own sepa­rate hut equal article (which maybe one day I'll get to). The problem is I Jnn't find her fascinating, which make.* me all the more fascinated by the passion ot the guvs who get so heated up about her. Now obviously the Hillarv haters will assure you they don't hate Hillarv because she's a woman—they're not Neanderthals!—they just hate her because she's Hillary. By attacking her, they're just refusing to kowtow to political correctness. They'd be tine with another woman presi­dential candidate, particularly one who's not going to run, like Condi.

Despite the reassurances, you have to sus­pect there's more to it than that. Hillary's ascendancy—to the ticket or ultimately the presidency—will be proportional to how much she agitates men (however much thev reas­sure you they're beyond all that). Meaning that the right's strategy, obviously, will be to ratchet up the apprehension levels, spinning anxiety into political capital and sending skit-ten male voters fleeing into the welcoming

amis of the GOP (the parry that understands a guy's needs and tears). Or, as it turns out, skittering toward Obama. Meaning that the upcoming months will also be a fascinating reality check because, despite all the platitudes about "gender progress" and "how tar women have come" and so on, a certain level ot inexo­rable anxiety between the sexes persists, which will be on tull display, and the spectacle should be quite riveting. The problem is that it's tar less permissible to discuss any of this openly, precisely because ot all the progress. We're too enlightened to debate whether a woman slunild be president—that would be antiquated and discriminatory. Instead, all such qualms will be displaced onto other matters entirely. Because that's how anxierv works.

I've enlisted as our tour guides into these subterranean thickets a selection ot Hillary's right-wing biographers to lead the way, more specifically a selection ot those obsessed

enough to write entire books about a woman they detest while still being lucid enough to rind a commercial publisher. UntortunateK1, this excludes selt-published works like Hil­lary Clinum Nude: Naked AinfimVui. Hillary Clinton and America's Demise by Sheldon Filger, but even the painfully repetitious title screamed tor the interventions ot a professional editor, and lite is short.

Any biography, even a bad one, is the record ot a relationship. That's the nature ot the biographical enterprise. It's a two-way street, meaning that a level ot interpersonal complication invariably comes with the ter­ritory, if not always fully consciously. It was frequently said about Carl Bernstein's recent WImum in C/uirge that one ot the strengths ot his portrait of'Hillary was that, having been a well-known philanderer during his marriage to Nora Ephron (hilariously and painfully detailed in her recipe-laden roman a clef, Ht'iin/'Kiu), he had an instinctive under­standing ot the terrain. Did he know this himself.' Not entirely clear. But biographers do occasionally admit to the intricacies that can arise between author and subject: It's like a love affair or sometimes a love-hate affair

or a domestic arrangement. As Leon Edel. Henry James's biographer, recounted. "The two ot us lived together tor manv years." For Thoreau biographer Richard Leheaux, not onlv was the book like a marriage, it wasn't always the smoothest ot marriages, either, "not without some stormy arguments, sepa­rations and passionate reconciliation.-."

Tine marriage comparison is especially apro­pos in Hillary's case. For one thing, the inescap­able tact about Hillary is that she herselt is a woman in an exceedingly complicated relation­ship with the most flamboyantly complicated man in America, and what American hasn't devoted at least a bit ot stray psychical energv to pondering the mystenes ot the Clinton mar­riage.' Thus tor any Hillary biographer, a certain amount ot triangulation, always an intensified tonn ot intimacy, comes with the territory (see under: Freud). As we'll see, the emotionality does run high in these hook.-—stormy ,irs.'u-

ments, passionate reconciliations. litanies ot accusations ot the type vou frequently hear in couples with unhealthy level.-, ot attachment. In other words, \\w learn as much alxuit the authors themselves as about Hillary, possihlv more. These are men with zestv imaginations, complicated inner lives and, vou inter, often rather mixed feelings about the female hodv itselt. It becomes clear that some tar more baroque torm ot anxiery is in play.

But.. .what, exactly.' Let's turn to R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr., author ot MiuLmk' Hi/Lirv: The Dark Rtkul Ui l/if \Y7me HuN.sc. since it Hillary's biog­rapher toes tend to sound like embittered ex-husbands, in Tyrrell we're lucky enough to have a biographer who has also occasionally mused in print akmt his real-lite ex-wife. And speaking ot mangulation, Tyrrell, founder and editor m chief ot the tar-right Amenam S/vc-Mior, also has a long history with both Clin­tons: The S/vcuilrir was home to the infamous Arkansas Project, funded by weird billionaire Richard Mellon Scaite to the tune ot a couple million dollars to dig up damaging into on Bill and Hillan's past, especially the murders and drug running. (Hillary's infamous ref­erence to "a vast (columned mi Jiiigc 126)

Hillary

Continued jrom page 102) right-wing conspiracy" was hardly wrong, just infelicitously phrased.)

So who gets it worse—Hillary or the ex? Coincidental!)', we find Madame Tyrrell and Madame Hillary share an uncanny number of similar traits—who could have predicted? Hillary's a self-righteous, sell-regarding nar­cissist, "a case study in what psychiatrists call 'the controlling personality,"' and assumes the world will share her conviction that she's always blameless. And here is Tyrrell on his soon-to-be ex, from bis political memoir, The C.onsm'ative Cmck-L'p: "She resorted to tennis, then religion and then psychother­apy. Finally she tried divorce—all common American coping mechanisms for navigat­ing middle age." When Tyrrell worries that suburban women will secretly identify with Hillary's independence and break from their husbands' politics in the privacy of the \oting booth, clearly suburban women's late-breaking independence is territory he has cause to know and lean (Feminists have long been one of Tyrrell's favorite punch­ing bags in the Spectator: "disagreeable misanthropes, horrible to behold, uncouth and unlovely...burdened by a splitting headache, halitosis, body odor and other

ailments too terrible and obscure to men­tion." I'm not sure what it says about me, but 1 conless this made me laugh.) Hillary's disposition is dark, sour and conspiratorial; she has a paranoid mind, a combative style, is thin-skinned and prone to angry out­bursts. Whereas the ex-Mrs. I., we learn, was afflicted with "random wrath" and. as divorce negotiations were in their final stages, threatened to make the proceedings as public and lurid as possible. Hillary has "a prehensile nature," which makes it sound as if she hangs from branches by her feet. And while Iyrrell nowhere actually says his ex-wife hung from branches by her feet, the reference to protracted divorce negotiations probably indicates that "grasping"—the definition ofprehemile—is a characterization he wouldn't argue with.

Threatening ex-wives, angry women, Hillary for President, property settle­ments—not exactly lighthearied stuff. Tyr­rell at least tries to be amusing about it, in the sense that love transformed into hatred can be amusing, in a bilious, horribly pain­ful sort ol way. In contrast, Edward Klein, author of The Truth About Hillary, is the humorless type, though he's so venomous about Hillary and suspicious of her sexual proclivities that unintentional humor abounds: He's like an angry Inspector

Clouseau with gaydar. The inconvenient lad that there's no particular evidence of Hillary bending thai way dissuades him not. Thus we learn Hillary went to a college with a long tradition of lesbianism (Welleslev) where she read a lot of lesbian literature, and two of her college friends would later become oul-of-lhe-closet lesbians, and laler some of her Welleslev classmates were invited for "sleepovers" al I he White House, ((let it? Slee/Mvers.) In 1972 a Methodist Church magazine she subscribed to pub­lished a special issue on radical lesbian and feminist themes, edited by two lesbians. In college her role models were lemiiiists w ho refused to wear preltv clothes and some­times appeared mannish; her White House chief of stall" was also mannish-looking. Though, according to Klein. Hillary never much liked sex to begin with and once had a fight with a college boyfriend about not wanting to go skiing—a light that, also according to Klein, "might have Ix'en a sub­stitute for an honest discussion about her sexual frigidity" and that ended with Hil­lary' retreating into "icy silence." (Get it? ley.) He also reports she'd had a torrid affair with Vince Foster, the deputy White House counsel (and her former law partner) who later committed suicide. This would make her a frigid, closeted, gay adulteress, for anyone keeping score.

If it's a handy truism that constant sex­ual innuendos mask a certain discomfort with sex, Klein is also a waffler, and nei­ther is exactly a testimonial to his level of self-acuity. Or a very attractive trait in a man, it must be said. In his preface to the paperback edition he attempts to weasel out of some of his more incendiary alle­gations, claiming mysteriously that the "exaggerated rumors about my book "— that Hillary's a lesbian and Bill raped his wife—"were blatantly untrue." Huh? This is indeed the book that has Bill Clinton, on a Bermuda vacation in 1979. telling some guys in the hotel bar that he was going back to his room to "rape my wife" and this was how Chelsea was conceived. Possibly Klein means he just quoted a lot of imagi­nary gossip rather than saying it himself. Still, his relation to Hillary brings to mind a self-loathing consumer of specialty porn: oscillating between fixation and contempt, projecting the derision outward onto the nasty object of his fascination and denying it has anything to do with him.

On the sexual creepiness meter Klein gets some still competition from Carl l.im-bacher. author of Hillary'* Sdirmr: Inside the Xexl Clinton's Ruthless Agenda In lake Ihe White House, another biographer deeply fas­cinated with nosing out the truth about Hil­lary's sexuality, l.imbacher comes up with an even darker picture, if that's possible: His premise is that Bill Clinton is a rapist, Hil­lary digs it. and this is (he key thai unlocks her character. Or if Hillary didn't literally hold down the victims while Bill did the deed, she was complicit nonetheless, "a vic­timize!" who actually enabled her husband's predations," since "a woman with half the

intellect of" Hillary Clinton would under­stand that she's married to a ravenous sex­ual predator at best—a brutal serial rapist at worst." At least he compliments her intel­lect! According to Limbacher, who writes for the far-right news outlet NewsMax, Hillary had to suppress evidence of Bill's sex life, especially any suspicion that he liked rough sex, as some of his accusers implied, because this might "raise questions about her own private peccadilloes." It's not entirely clear what peccadilloes Limbacher is referring to, though elsewhere he mentions Foster was Hillary's "'intimate friend." But "if you believed (uanita Broaddrick, then you either believed that Hillary's state of denial was so extreme as lo suggest some sort of psychological impairment—or you were forced to accept the possibility that she was an accomplice at some level to rape." I'd be curious to know what Lim­bacher imagines Hillary wearing when he fantasizes about her in the henchwoman-to-rape role—her lisa. She Wolf of the SS outfit or the navy-blue panlsuit.

As we see, the problem isn't that a woman is aspiring to be president—none of these books makes any argument against women as presidential candidates. No, the problem is that Hillary is a deformed woman; her fem­ininity itself is a pathology. She's a sadist, a victim, asexual, a dyke—maybe all at once. (Whereas Obama, by contrast—what -a fine specimen of a man.) On the femininity ques­tion Iyrrell is at least charitable enough to allow that she "flirts well" and has evolved into "a handsome woman," though he also spends many passages mocking her youth­ful appearance, down to the unplucked eye­brows that "would have collected coal dust in a Welsh mining village." She's an overly hairy woman, in addition to eveiything else. Her physicality does loom rather large for these men, though in Klein's case you get the sense outsize female personalities both attract and repel him (his previous subject was |acqueline Onassis, another woman with a charismatic straying husband, speak­ing of triangulation). He snidely notes the cubit poundage of any oversize woman who enters the story: Monica Lewinsky (who "had gained a lot of weight" and "was burst­ing the seams of her thin sleeveless summer dress"). Bill's deputy chief of staff Evelyn Lieberman ("overweight"), his Arkansas chief of staff Betsy Wright ("heavyset") and, of course. Hillary herself, whom Klein refers to throughout the book by the nickname the Big Girl, ((let it? The big girl.) But hold on—there's a gynecological explanation for those lumpy legs and ankles he harangues her about; Klein quotes an "anonymous medical authority" who speculates Hillary may have contracted an obstetric infection after giving birth to Chelsea that resulted in chronic lymphedema. a condition that causes "gross swelling in the legs and feet." Forgetting that the diagnosis is specula­tive (and as far as I can tell, nowhere else confirmed). Klein observes Hillary covers up lhis lumpiness with wide-legged pants. You have to give Klein credit—it's not every

biographer who approaches the task with calipers and a speculum. It's a dirty job, but someone had to do it.

Taking the measure of Hillary's feminin­ity also preoccupies John Podhoretz in Can She He Slopped?: Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless.... Podhoretz wants to like Hillary, though he finds her tough to warm up to—she never figured out what to do with her hair and clothes, isn't a raving beauty and has a man­ner that's almost pathologically unsexy. Interestingly, Podhoretz thinks this antifem-inine quality may actually work in her favor: Being "neither girlish nor womanly" with a "hard-to-describe style" could be the perfect blend for the first woman president, since a president has to be a little scary and not seem emotional—basically, she should be an unlikable bitch. "And Hillary is a bitch." (So firmly entrenched is this assessment among Hillary haters that when she momentarily teared up during the New Hampshire pri­mary, this too was taken as evidence of bitch-ery: She cried strategically.) Feigning worry that saying this kind of thing makes him sound sexist (while admiring himself for saying it), Podhoretz's point is that a woman presidential candidate needs to show she can be manly, and if any woman politician can pass for a tough guy, it's Hillary. Which

scares him, though in a fascinated sort of way. Call him Mr. Conflicted.

1 f I'odhoretz seems to be all over the map about Hillary, no doubt he has his reasons: When it comes to women and politics, his own life has been notoriously complicated too. For one thing he's a neocon currently married to a Northern liberal, as he reveals in the book, though those who follow such things may recall his previous marriage, to a more like-minded Beltway conser­vative, which unraveled rather publicly after three months, following a whirlwind 10-day courtship during which I'odhoretz declared his love lor his new amour in his Weekly SUindard column ("in her calm, there is the permanence 1 seek"). Mom is the ultraconservative doyenne and anufeminist Midge Decter, author of numerous books denouncing the women's movement and the dupes who fell for it. When I'odhoretz writes, incoherently, that Hillary had an "easy path due in part to feminism." he sounds like the dutiful son. channeling Midge. What mother could ask for more? But between the maternal powerhouse, the romantic impetuosities and flip-flops, and the strange-political-bedlellows cur­rent marriage (though I'm sure they're a lovely couple), the guy has more than his share of family baggage when it comes to

love and politics. As has Hillary herself, needless to say—in a better world the two of them could have a fascinating heart-to-heart on the subject.

But all these Hillary haters seem to be carting a lot of baggage around, even if the details haven't been as well publicized. When Klein rants, "As always with Hillary, it was all about her," note the unmistak­able flavor of marital overfamiliaritv—he's really just had it with her. Or with some­one. He even resents her successes, espe­cially the massive advance for her Hillary book. Living History. When Tyrrell writes that there was an emotional side to Bill and Hillary's arrangement, with each ful­filling the other's idiosyncratic needs, as we've heard, he's been there too. When Podhoret/. spends a good chunk of his book proffering advice to Hillary on how to position herself to win the election, not only is this weird, the advice itself is strange: For instance, to avoid being upstaged by Bill. Hillary should treat him "as though he were her father—there to provide her with emotional support and little else." Since Podhoretz is someone whose career has always been upstaged by his own more famous father. Norman (why the son's recent appointment to the editorship of Commentary, once Dad's

bastion, was much remarked upon), how can the reader even keep her tooting amid such a swirl of relatives, husbands, ambitions and projections?

By the way, Iyrrell has some free advice for Hillary too—namely that she should get herself a divorce and pronto. Since Bill is not only goatish bill also "ithyphallic." Hil­lary could present herself lo women voters as "a victim of the male penile imperative," then start dating again. Presumably, Iyrrell is so pro-divorce because life improved so dramatically following his own, especially on the penile-imperative front. His readers will no doubt recall his bubbly reports about life as a swinging bachelor, picking up "ter­rific coeds" al various right-wing ihink-tank shindigs and not returning home alone.

Yes, conservatives do score, Tyrrell makes sure to let us know, even as hecharges Hil­lary with having been too self-disclosing in Living History. His preference is for the "soignee" and "physiologically well-appointed," though unfortunately one of his soignee dates is mistaken for a hooker when he drops by a conservative gather­ing at the Lehrman Institute on his way to Au Club, a then-happening Manhat­tan nightspot.

Tyrrell can indeed be a hoot for those who find this kind of thing entertaining, though clearly we're at the precipice of male hysteria, where reason and intel­lect go to die. But il ever a man had an overladen relation to Hillary, it's Tyr-rell's protege, David Brock, author of The Seduction of Hil­lary Rodham. No, the

acorn doesn I tall lar Irom the lice. Kxcept that alter receiving a million-dollar book advance to do to Hillary what bed done to his previous victim, Anita Hill, in a best-selling smear job (Brock was famously the author of the "a bit nutty and a bit slutty" line about Mill), a strange thing happened when he tried to plunge the knile. Some­how he couldn't. Sure, there was the stuff" about the I'.KiOs radicalism Hillary never really abandoned, including a catty analy­sis of her college wardrobe, which featured the sort of "loose-fitting, flowing pants favored by the Viet Cong." (Just call her Ho Chi Rodham.) But for the most part it's an intermittently compassionate portrait of a gawky, brainy, well-intentioned Midwest-

em gal swept off her feet by a charismatic Southern charmer, who then migrated to the backwaters of Arkansas—or Dogpatch, as Brock likes to call it—to advance Bill's political fortunes, sacrificing herself and her principles for love, and Bill repaid her by having sex with everyone in sight.

Wait—is this the same David Brock who had spent his career to date as dirt-digger-in-residence at The American Specta­tor, employed by our pal Iyrrell to compile sleazy exposes on lyrrell's laundry list of political enemies? In fad. Block's most notable victim had been Bill Clinton. It was young David who first dug up the name Paula and used it in his infamous Trooper-gate article; consult your history books for what happened next. But to everyone's

shock (including his publisher's), the prom­ised Hillary takedown turned out to be a big squishy valentine instead, and his own camp was livid. Alas, as Brock scx>n learned, unconditional love is not the prevailing emotion on the conservative fringe when faced with public defection; instead, they stopped inviting him to their parties and said scurrilous things about him in print. Tyrrell stuck by him at the beginning, but soon he got canned from the Spectator too. < )ne interesting aspect oIBkx k's employ­ment situation was that he happens to be gay and the Spectator regularly fulminated against gay rights, as did his yappy boss whenever given the chance. When Brock speculates Hillary might have been "per-

versely drawn to the rejection implied by Bill's philandering' and willing to accept compromises and humiliation in the sexual arena because of the greater good she and Bill could together accomplish. Brock—who had once thrown a gala party to celebrate the 100th day of Newt Gingrich's antigay Contract With America—could be describ­ing his own career arc, too. After ail. Brock's was a political marriage with its own share of humiliations, though by writing this Hillary biography he finally got the divorce Hillary never could, after which he penned an engraved kiss-off to his former friends and boss in Esquire, titled "Confessions of a Right-Wing Hit Man."The accompany­ing pictorial has Brock as a modern-day Joan of Arc tied to a tree, perched atop a

pile- ol kindling and gazing heavenward, his billowy white shirt ripped open, one nipple exposed. Another noted apos­tate, David Horo­witz, picking up on the gender-bending implications, com­mented acerbically, "The editors didn't say whether he was waiting to be shot or to nurse."

Gender bending, indeed. The prob­lem was that Brock ended up identifying with Hillary when he was supposed to be vilifying her, and it turned his life upside down. The ques­tion he asks about Hillary—¦What made her vulner­able to those seduc­tive forces in the first place?"—was the same one soon to animate his own flamboyant break with the right. Some mysterious alchemy took place in the course of his writing

this hook: Instead of Brock exposing Hil­lary, she exposed Block to himself.

To any halfway attentive reader, the lev­els of psychodrama—and family drama and marital drama—played out in these books are impossible to ignore. You don't need to know the specifics of the backstory to recognize the signs. "All biography is ultimately fiction," Bernard Malamud wrote in Dubhi's Uxws, his novel about a biographer, though what would he have said if he'd read this particular collection ol authors: All biography is ultimately a Korschach test? The various Hillarics that emerge are fictive enough, but they have an inner reality for their creators. Kach invents his own personal Hillary, then has

to slay his creation, all the while paying tribute to her with these displays of antago­nism and ambivalence. They're caught in her grip, but they don't know why; they spin tales about her treachery and perver­sity, as if that explains it. But the harder they try to knock her oil her perch, the more shrill and unmanned they seem.

What female colossus is this they're Hailing at, what oversize mythic figure? A clue comes our way from Dorothy Din-nerstein, who wrote some years ago in The Mermaid and the Minotaur of the "human malaise" in our current sexual arrange­ments—namely, the one in which men rule the world and women rule over child­hood, with mothers the "first despots" in our lives. To her haters, Hillary is noth­ing if not a would-be despot making an illegitimate grab for power. Now, I would never say men who hate Hillary are treat­ing her like a bad mother, since it would sound like a huge cliche. But according to Dinnerstein, the psychological ori­gin of misogyny is simply the need for mother-raised humans to overthrow the residues of early female dominion. To put it another way: Men won't give up ruling the world until women stop ruling over childhood, meaning that if political power is ever really going to be reapportioned between the sexes, child rearing would probably have to be reapportioned too. For the most part this has yet to happen, meaning that it's not hard to see why the prospect of women ruling both spheres isn't exactly a neutral question.

Power is a subject that cuts deep, psy­chically speaking. Anxiety reigns in these vicinities, not in geopolitical terms alone but in the very experience of being ruled,

which is what being a citizen entails. We were all once children who got pushed around by big despots with their own agendas for us. Too often it can seem as if adulthood is just one long reprise, with a slightly larger cast of characters. As to how this plays out in terms of political psychology—who's allowed to lead, how leaders secure the consent of the ruled— well, that's what's being renegotiated al the moment, in a predictably bumpy sort of way. At the moment, the polls suggest there is significantly more anxiety in this country about a woman's rise to power than about a black man's. (Historical foot­note: Black men actually won suffrage long before women managed to; perhaps the same pattern will hold when it comes to presidential elections.) l course those wisning to dispute that conclusion can find plenty of reasons to blame the extremes of Hillary hatred on Hillary herself: Some­thing about the woman is just...[insert your own projection here].

But what is it about those Clintons? Years ago there was a wonderful book called Dreams of Bill; the authors ran clas­sified ads around the country soliciting accounts of dreams, erotic and otherwise, in which Bill Clinton appeared as a char­acter, and they compiled the results to hilarious effect. These days it's Hillary who seems to get the psychosexual juices flow­ing, along with haired, ambivalence and the occasional burst of admiration. Political charisma is as complicated a subject as any on the planet, and whether Hillary's ver­sion of it is one the country will be seduced by or rebutf is still anyone's guess.

Despite all the platitudes about "gender progress" and "how far women have come," a certain level of inexorable anxiety between the sexes persists.