A new book tries to make sense of the gripping, grating psychodrama that is the Clintons' marriage.

Newsweek: Not Really Feeling It
A new book tries to make sense of the gripping, grating psychodrama that is the Clintons' marriage.
By Jonathan Darman
Oct 22, 2007 Issue

Never mind the man she's married to, Hillary Clinton isn't big on feelings. "Unthinking emotion," she wrote a friend in college, "has always been pitiful to me." In "For Love of Politics," Sally Bedell Smith's new book on Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage during their White House years, the First Lady is a woman determined not to surrender to emotion, even when her husband and the nation have. While President Clinton idles away an hour hugging his way through a rope line at a Democratic Leadership Council fund-raiser, his wife, backstage, waits patiently to depart. As the president admits on TV to an affair with Monica Lewinsky, the First Lady waits in the White House solarium and greets staffers with a smile. Chelsea, the dutiful daughter, tries hard to mimic mom: "Emotions aren't rational," she tells friends.

Now Senator Clinton is moving toward the Democratic presidential nomination, and emotions have little place in her campaign. Even discussions about her marriage, that gripping, grating psychodrama, come off as cerebral and qualified—when the candidate and her staff choose to have them at all. The Clintons' marriage is important, they say, because it gave her the unparalleled experience of seeing a presidency up close. Except not "up close" in the dynastic sense; Clinton, they say, is an accomplished senator and an independent woman. Except not "independent" in the separate-lives/marriage-of-convenience sense; theirs, they say, is in every way a real marriage. Either way, the Clintonites contend, all that is irrelevant now.

Smith does not agree. A biographer who's written on Pamela Harriman, Princess Diana and Jackie and Jack Kennedy, she has a keen instinct for history made inside of marriages. She knows the irrational is often most important. Her book is narrower than other recent Clinton biographies, which deal with the nuts and bolts of her career, but is perhaps more relevant. Certainly, it is more subversive. Homing in on "the push and pull" between them and their love of politics, Smith presents a story Clinton isn't eager to remember: how her marriage made and then nearly wrecked her career.

Smith's Hillary Clinton wants only to be a public woman, a wonk and a warrior for the Clintons' noble causes. Arriving in the White House, she and her husband make her status clear; staffers call her "the Supreme Court," mindful that the First Lady had the final say. She strives for cool detachment, but her husband's coterie sees the cracks. They are "wimps," she tells them in tirades, men who "don't have balls" and "don't know how to fight." (Neither Clinton talked to Smith.) Quickly, her real target emerges, the president himself. "She knew how to push his buttons," a senior official tells Smith.

The president seeks comfort, often in the wrong places....

http://www.newsweek.com/id/43362

"In that scenario, the Clinton campaign would work hard to move beyond the "unthinking emotion" that burnished Giuliani's 9/11 image, focusing instead on the mayor's real record. It will not be a simple task. Emotions aren't rational, but they do count."

Here we go:



http://www.rudy-urbanlegend.com/

version of that vicious, old swaggering WAR HORSE realized in HRC. :thumbsdown: :(

Who can forget? "Don't get wobbly on me Ronnie?" :puke: :nuke:



What Britain needs is an iron lady. Margaret Thatcher

:banghead:

I recall "Franklin and Eleanor" but that may have been a TV miniseries. I have it on video, great stuff, just wonderful!

are revolting.

They gave GWB. Supposedly he and Laura have
an ideal marriage.


What happened to the country under Clinton??
What happened to the country under Bush.

Unfortunately they are not all repukes. There are so-called dems

who enjoy riding the cesspool

why I would I want to try and unravel someone else's (unless I were a therapist)?

Thanks for posting it!

:sarcasm:

because I think it's important to know what's out there. And, for what it's worth, I'm not a participant in candidate wars here. I post articles, pro and con, about all the candidates.

This isn't con... this is BS.

But hey, if you think it merits discussion, have at it. I'm sure some here would agree.

and one I agree with.

I'm all for discussion of serious issues / actual criticism... but this kinda stuff... ugh! :P

:hi:

:)

And, it's not even Senator Clinton who was unfaithful...

and some "progressives" will eat it up

And if she shows any emotion, I'm sure the author will write a new book portraying her as a hysterical female

and some "progressives" will eat it up

bet they would publish so many crack pots bashing bush. I know damn well there are plenty who would write them. But then the republican owned publishing houses wouldn't publish.

:puke:

Sounds like the freeping National Enquirer

Sounds like me on a bad day.

:P

looking out, and impossible to know anything at all looking from the outside in. Where the hell's the indept examination of Mr. & Mrs. Chimp?

Do they?

Yikes, that is one fucked up family.

I swear if the idiot took a crap on the White House lawn, the press would report how nice it smelled.

Especially in politics. What's important is how they govern. Whether they're hot people or cold people, meh, who gives a shit. Who cares where they find comfort? I don't care if FDR found it in his wheelchair with Missy Lehand or JFK found it in the swimming pool with Fiddle and Faddle. It's none of my business. The New Deal and the Cuban Missile Crisis, that's my business.

perfect marriages and all their children are adorable.