Savior or Saboteur?

[babylonsister]

Savior or Saboteur?

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 23, 2007



Once it was about Hillary, but now, of course, it’s about Bill.

Our ubiquitous ex-president is playing his favorite uxorious game, and it goes like this: Let’s create chaos and then get out of it together. You ride to my rescue or I ride to yours. We come within an inch of dying and then recapture the day by the skin of our teeth. While we’re killing ourselves, we blame everyone else. We’ll be heroes.

It worked for Bill and Hillary in ’92 and ’96. It didn’t work in the health care debacle. Will it work in Iowa and New Hampshire?

Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama.

Inside the Bill gang and the Hillary gang, there is panic and perplexity. Is Bill a loyal spouse or a subconscious saboteur?

Should Hillaryland muzzle him? Give him a minder? Is he rusty? Or is he freelancing because he relishes his role as head of the party his wife is trying to take over?

“For the first time since the Marc Rich pardon,” said a friend of the Clintons, “Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.”

Certainly Bill wants to repay Hill for those traumatic times when he had to hide behind her skirt. And certainly he feels that his legacy is tied to her. He suggests to Matt Bai in today’s Times Magazine that she can be F.D.R. to his Teddy Roosevelt, getting through the ideas that fell flat the first time.

Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help? Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/23/opinion/23dowd.html?em&ex=1198558800&en=fcd0991c51bdc727&ei=5087%0A

[acmavm]

1. I kind of wondered when Maureen would put in her two cents. And its

everybit as mean and nasty as I expected it would be.

Wow! Just Wow!

[Skip Intro]

2. Sheesh. "Panic" "Hillaryland" "Mark Rich" "traumatic times"

I love how some want to paint Hillary's campaign as unraveling and desperate.


How Dowd failed to work in Whitewater and Vince Foster is beyond me.

[Lucinda]

3. She left it out because she went all soft and fuzzy for the holidays

;)

[DesertFlower]

4. i've never like hillary,

but i liked bill. now he is beginning to get on my nerves. that being said, if she is the nominee i will vote for her.

[babylonsister]

6. We all like Bill, but he might be upset if this doesn't happen. nt

[desi]

5. God I hope Hillary does not Mo...

"What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?"

W's "correction" of Poppy's "mistakes" have been catastrophic. Mo's losing her touch...