Hilary'd Out
Dear Jodi,
As a proud resident of a Manhattan neighborhood that I pray will always be
called the Upper West Side and as a Times reader who has never deigned
to look at "Circuits," I'm afraid that I don't have much to add to your clever
insights from the F train.
The story in today's papers that caused me to mentally brake to a halt was a
front-page piece in the Washington Post by Alan Sipress about how the
Los Alamos National Laboratory is now busily researching traffic patterns.
Since we have all marveled (maybe grumbled might be a better word) at the way
bottlenecks appear and disappear with no apparent cause, I sped through the
story in hopes of discovering a telling insight. Alas, all that the scientists
at Los Alamos and in Germany seem to have come up with is a series of new
metaphors to describe traffic jams. Are they like "water molecules freezing
into ice"? Or is traffic movement akin to "the remarkable darting motion of a
school of fish"? The article, though, did have one memorable bit of deadpan
humor. A scientist, Chris Barrett, is described as the man "who convinced Los
Alamos that traffic was a matter of grave national security." Unmentioned in
the Post was that Dwight Eisenhower used the same flimsy
national-security excuse to build the interstate highway system.
I'm indebted to Republican political maven Rich Galen and his e-mail
newsletter "Mullings" for putting the Hillary interview in its proper context:
It's the media's "August story," an overhyped journalistic frenzy designed to
cover the fact that when the shrinks go on vacation, there is virtually no real
news. (Galen, who is a friend, makes his insights available to the world at
www.mullings.com.) A typical August story, which I remember from my early days
at Newsweek ," was the 1983 democracy-in-peril scandal called
"Debategate." There were breathless charges, never fully proved as I recall,
that someone from the 1980 Reagan campaign had swiped Jimmy Carter's debate
notebook.
I realize that yesterday in my haste to wrap up our correspondence in a
timely fashion, I never got a chance to explain why Hillary's Senate race makes
me so uncomfortable. Let me count the ways:
1). After an impeachment-tinged year in which the Clinton marriage drowned
out all other news (admittedly with a generous assist from Kenneth Starr and
Paula Jones), Hillary's decision to run for the Senate forces the country to
trek yet again through that tiresome swamp. Maybe the first lady wants
vindication, but as a New Yorker I simply crave relief from this entire
topic.
2). Yes, running for public office while serving as first lady does trouble
me in ways that go beyond legalistic questions of whether White House funds are
used for her travel and campaign expenses. The law, for example, does not
require reimbursement for the extensive costs of Secret Service protection when
she campaigns. Nor is there a way to wall her White House staff off from all
political concerns. Al Gore, of course, has the same problem. But, at least,
the vice president was elected to his current post.
3). Despite being the crucible of the feminist movement, New York ranks, I
believe, 49th in the nation in terms of women being elected to public office.
No woman in New York history has ever been elected to a statewide post more
august than lieutenant governor. So why don't I hail Hillary's candidacy as an
important feminist breakthrough? Because like Liddy Dole--and in sharp contrast
to, say, Dianne Feinstein and Barbara Boxer--Hillary owes her celebrity solely
to her husband's political career. New York will never develop its own cadre of
women political leaders if people like Congresswoman Nita Lowey are shut out of
the glamour races.
4). As a baseball fan, I was appalled by the cynicism with which Hillary
suddenly declared her secret yen for the Yankees. Back in 1993, I had a lengthy
discussion with the first lady about baseball. In all her rhapsodies about the
Chicago Cubs, Hillary never mentioned any American League allegiance to the
Yankees.
5). I do have some lingering problems with the carpetbagger issue. As a
teen-ager, I was in my jejune fashion totally opposed to Bobby Kennedy's 1964
Senate candidacy. And I certainly didn't cotton to Connecticut-transplant Jim
Buckley's 1970 Senate victory on the Conservative ballot line.
That said, I am now officially Hillary'd out.
Over to you, Jodi,
