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Jewish World Review July 24, 2000 / 21 Tamuz, 5760
Chris Matthews
That's the decisive issue in this year's New York Senate
race. It's not policy or politics or personality. It's how
voters react to how Hillary Rodham Clinton views herself.
The first lady does not offer herself — both ally and critic
agree — as one of the people, another kid-made-good
from the neighborhoods.
"One of the top hundred lawyers in the country!" declared
her earliest notices. A graduate of Wellesley and Yale
law, she entered the White House as the most educated
first lady in history. We were getting, the new first lady
herself let us know, two leaders of presidential stature for
the price of one.
We're talking about more than diplomas and IQ here.
As a Senate candidate, Clinton has brandished an image
of unquestioned moral superiority. Who can forget her
first sighting as a New York politician — that smart, gutsy
barnstorming for '98 Senate candidate Chuck Schumer?
Far from being a player in the Clinton coverup, here was
its prime casualty, a woman carrying on the fight amid the
mortification wrought by her husband's outlandish
misconduct.
Many people, including some close to me, see Hillary
Clinton entirely in this light. They look up to her as their champion, smart
enough to be a future president, strong and downright good enough to put up
with the current president's weaknesses. What other woman have they known
who has such spunk, such panache, such nerve, such pristine, state-of-the-art
political goodness?
This is the stellar premise that will decide the contest for those not bound by
unblinking party loyalty. It explains as much as anything the uproar this week
over what Hillary Clinton said or didn't say on election night in Little Rock a full
26 years ago.
I'm sorry, but most Americans, and that includes most politicians, do, on
occasion, get angry.
Whether it's on the highway after having someone cut you off or in the heat of a
hard-fought political campaign, real people do let loose with every verbal arrow
in their quiver.
Only a politician claiming an extraordinary moral and cultural stature would
claim to be above such explosions of expletives, not excluding the ethnic
variety.
Yet this is the message that President Clinton delivered the other day by phone
to the editors at the New York Daily News. He told them that Hillary is
innocent, not just in this pathetic claim of 26 years ago, but that she is totally
innocent: She has never, at any time, ever voiced a negative thought about any
ethnic, religious or racial group.
If we believe her claim, no such thought has even entered her head. Ever!
This is the enduring, dominating question of this campaign. If Hillary is truly a
superior American figure, she may well deserve to be the United States senator
from New York. If she isn't, but thinks she is, that may be a presumption even
this liberal, welcoming state may be unwilling to
07/19/00: Pre-convention calm?
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