CAVEAT: i am not making fun of anyone but myself and my political journey of ignorance.
i read hillary's autobiography "living history" last month and i really enjoyed it. i admit, my main motivation was to read about bill's affair, and i was not disappointed. hillary did not withhold her emotions although she certainly didn't tell all. i finished the book with respect for their marriage and their politics (!).
i was in 2nd grade when bill clinton was elected. a lot of my parents' friends were at our house in norfolk, ne, watching the election, and i remember going to bed feeling like the world was over and where was god and terrible events would begin tomorrow. of course i forgot all about the election by morning (just another epoch in my young life, learning that nothing matters, nothing will ever change and all my emotions are impotent).
then when the monica lewinski scandal happened, i did not take the time to form my own opinion (yeah i was like 12). the unanimous message from my community was that an unfaithful husband shouldn't be in office.
my point is that i thought he was a terrible person and a terrible president without knowing anything. and i'm sure his wife is not an impartial source but i did learn that they balanced the budget promptly upon entering office (my formerly beloved GW spent like crazy) (also parenthetically, i say "they" instead of "he" b/c that's how hillary describes bill's presidency, haha) AND the number of abortions went down during their administration.
(interesting tangent: hillary is pro-choice because of how struck she was by government interference in family planning in china (forced abortions) and romania (no birth control, forced pregnancy tests for women at work, government monitoring of all pregnancies). she does feel that pro-life advocates should have every right to counsel and attempt to persuade women in the private sector. interesting to consider pro-choice as a small-government stance.)
when i finished the book i picked up bill's heftier autobio and skimmed it (to get to the monica lewinski part, i confess) and again came away with respect for the marriage they have built. they didn't just gloss over the affair for publicity's sake. they went to therapy once a week for years and bill says he talked about his feelings for the first time in his whole life (YIKES).
my final takeaway was WTF was going on with ken starr? my research led me to the 700pp. couldn't-put-it-down (i'm serious) THE DEATH OF AMERICAN VIRTUE, CLINTON V STARR, by respected watergate scholar ken gormley, and that whole investigation seems to be pretty freaking farcical.
what did any of the issues he was investigating have to do with the government?! he was supposed to be investigating a decades old real estate investment so why exactly did he subpoena monica lewinsky and hold her without a lawyer for a day? what did that have to do with real estate and what did the real estate have to do with the presidency?
whoa. ken starr seems to have been a nice man way over his head. a lot of his people were "politically motivated" and they would dig up something questionable outside the scope of their investigation based on their assumptions that the clintons were totally guilty of everything imaginable and covering it up, and ken's reaction would be "oh dear, well, we had to behave unethically to discover this, but now that we know, i guess we have to investigate..."
just 2 brief and insane examples of the tangled web.
1. vince foster committed suicide early in the administration. he was bill's friend since preschool and hillary's colleague at her law firm. the impartial independent counsel that was first appointed did a quick investigation (since he was peripherally involved in whitewater etc) and found that his death was obviously a suicide. that first independent counsel was too impartial for his fellow republicans, so when they took control of congress, they ran him out appointed ken starr. ken starr took a few more years and re-did the same investigation and found that his death was obviously a suicide.
2. the reason they ever approached monica lewinsky in the first place is... let me see if i can get this right:
the clinton's whitewater real estate deal in the 80's was with a man named james mcdougal. towards the end of their association he became a crazy embezzler. he hired hillary's law firm and she was in charge of the case but tried to stay out of it as much as possible to avoid any conflict of interest. one of her colleagues there, webb hubbell, came with them to washington and was also under investigation by ken starr because he succumbed to financial corruption, resigned, and another friend of the clintons gave him some work (no foul play on the clinton's part ever proved). this same friend (i can't find his name, i returned the death of american virtue to the library, so sorry!) gave monica lewinsky a job after she left the pentagon where bill sent her to try to end the affair.
got that? the independent counsel was already investigating clinton's extramarital affairs (... because?) when linda tripp that crazy lady appeared with her illegal tapes of conversations with monica. they used the friend who gave jobs to both webb hubbell and monica lewinsky as the justification for approaching her at the mall and taking her to a hotel room where they kept her for over 8 hrs, displaying their guns, making her feel like she couldn't leave or call a lawyer (even though they didn't explicitly say you may not call your lawyer), and ultimately including her in a list of women that they then asked bill if he had sex with so that they could catch him in perjury.
(3. what happened to jim and susan mcdougal based on their respective participation and refusal to participate with ken starr is maybe the most insane thing about it all. i ended my obsession before reading susan's memoir though.)
?????
bill clinton did not have personal integrity, but pretty much none of this investigation should ever have happened.
what i learned from my reading about the clintons provoked a lot of thought about SMALL GOVERNMENT, the motto of conservatives. i begin to think that the clintons lived out this motto more than the conservatives during their extremely partisan-ridden terms. balanced budget, pro-choice from convictions that government should be limited v. corrupt and off-topic MULTI-YEAR, MULTI-MILLION $ INVESTIGATIONS...
i hope you are now interested in small government b/c my next "on the nightstand" will feature my new favorite book of all time, LIBERTY DEFINED BY RON PAUL.
and i leave you with this special treat: http://textsfromhillaryclinton.tumblr.com/
1 comment:
I, like you, have had my view of Hillary transformed by this book. I realize the whole point of a political memoir is to make me feel inspired and filled with respect and the kind of awe that makes me go vote. But I read Sarah Palin's book and I...did not feel that. I read Hillary's book and thought, "Wow, she is so very much smarter and more driven than I will ever be." She bragged on herself like Sarah Palin did, but I found myself thinking, "Yes, that is worth writing into a book. Nice work, Hillary. You go legislate on behalf of those foster kids!" The only part that have made me roll my eyes is the way she so clearly treats Chelsea as an only child, who is fully VALUED and APPRECIATED and SUPPORTED in her ideas and interests. Even so, I think the Clintons really did do a good job shielding her from the press, and she seems like a decent, well adjusted person.
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