Thinking Out Loud: On the Personal, the Political, the Public and the Private

by Anna Quindlen

  Enough Identikit scenarios. Bill Clinton is going to be the Democratic candidate for president.

  It’s been a hard primary season, filled with questions. Mr. Clinton wasn’t very good at some of the answers. He seemed to be doing a complicated minuet with his real self, the dance of the apologist for the person he once was. Over and over you hear about folks who are uncomfortable with him, who think he’s too slick or too polished or just not quite quite. And then they meet him. And their opinion changes. Bill Clinton is obviously a guy who does better up close and personal. Still pictures and print quotes do him no service. They lack twang.

  For months he’d been telling newspaper reporters that the American people have more important concerns than whom he’s bedded, and it read like excuses, excuses, excuses. But when he threw it back at Phil Donahue, told him that they were going to be sitting in silence for a long time if this line of questioning continued, he won the audience in no time flat.

  Donahue is just what Mr. Clinton needs, even if the political snobs think it’s déclassé. That, and any other venue that lets him behave in a way local politicians do on a swing down Main Street. Mr. Clinton needs to shake the voters’ hands and look into their eyes, at least metaphorically. He is good on many of the issues, although I’m still troubled by the fact that he took time out from campaigning to execute a brain-damaged murderer. And at least he knows what the issues are.

  His empathy for the poor and the disfranchised seems genuine, the outgrowth of his own hardscrabble childhood and poor-boy-makes-good idealism. Racial polarization and crushing unemployment are much on his mind. He needs to communicate that concern to the people and, in the process, bring them Bill his own self. Ronald Reagan needed TV to abet a fantasy. Mr. Clinton needs it to communicate a reality.

  It’s time for a reality fix. It’s time to get pragmatic. I hate pragmatism in politics, which perhaps should exempt me from this kind of job. Every four years I hope for an overweening idealism, perhaps the character flaw of someone whose first seminal political act was kneeling on a linoleum floor, saying the rosary with the sixth grade the day John F. Kennedy died.

  But what I hate more than pragmatism is the idea of the Democrats expending their political capital on bickering and what-ifs, the idea of four years of disaffection with a White House that, now more than ever, seems to hover on some astroplane above the workaday world. It’s funny; George Bush will have exactly the opposite problem that Bill Clinton does. Still pictures shelter him; behind a camera, his tangled syntax often makes him seem goofy or unconnected. He finds himself in an election in which it does not serve to seem too presidential, too privileged, too estranged from privation. Mr. Bush has to communicate that he is just plain folks.

  And he can’t even go on Donahue.

  Bill Clinton is going to be the Democratic nominee for president. He’s not perfect, but if you heed your history you discover that no candidate, not FDR, not JFK, ever has been. (You have to imagine poor Lincoln on the cover of Time—“I’m sorry, Agnes, but I could never vote for a man that ugly! And his wife is so unpleasant!”) It no longer serves to compare him with Jerry Brown, or Paul Tsongas, or some fantasy man we yearned to embrace in the face of our natural disasters. This has been a season of hard questions, but at its end comes an easy one. Do you prefer George Bush?

  GENDER CONTENDER

  July 8, 1992

  To: Governor Clinton

  Re: Half the Voters

  Dear Governor, How’s your sore throat? What’s happening in the Pennsylvania primary? Is it my imagination or has Hillary been muzzled since the cookies vs. career controversy? Will Bob Kerrey be your running mate? There aren’t any more bombshells, are there?

  How come you haven’t noticed us?

  There are millions of agitated female voters out here and you have a golden opportunity to persuade us to support you. We’re the people who upset Senator Alan J. Dixon in Illinois and could make Carol Moseley Braun the first woman of color to serve in the Senate. We’re the people who have taken Lynn Yeakel from o to 60 in a couple of months in Pennsylvania, relishing the spectacle of a smart woman taking on Arlen Specter in a Senate race.

  They say this is our year. The issues once called women’s issues have become cutting-edge. Since this last momentous fall, when the Judiciary Committee sent Anita Hill back to Oklahoma like a doctoral candidate who had failed her orals, our anger has become a recognized national phenomenon. One of our fund-raising organizations, Emily’s List, has doubled the number of its contributors since then.

  Hasn’t anyone told you?

  We have no reason to support George Bush. Even some Republican women will say so. During the New Hampshire primary the reporters who cover the president got some yuks out of one commercial. In it, Mr. Bush was sitting at his desk when a woman assistant came in and handed him some papers. The joke was that it was the first woman assistant seen in the Oval Office since the administration began.

  But it’s not simply that Barbara Bush is the best-known woman in this administration. After all, your wife is the most prominent woman in your inner circle, too, although she has the experience to be part of a policy partnership as well as a domestic one. Your closest campaign advisers are the standard-issue white guys.

  And this is not just about abortion. By the way, Governor, what was going through your mind last Wednesday? There was only one story in this country that day, and it was the future of legal abortion, writ large in Supreme Court arguments and in arrests in Buffalo. And you gave a speech about the environment. Great issue, bad timing, even if it was Earth Day.

  Back in 1988 George Bush evoked significantly less enthusiasm from women than he did from men. And that was before he vetoed family leave, gagged the doctors at family-planning clinics, said Clarence Thomas was the best man for the job, and spent a year pretending that the economy was A-O.K. Opinion polls showed that we women were much less enamored of his antiseptic war in the Persian Gulf than our male counterparts.

  You could fashion a victory out of this gender gap. If you are going to stand for a new generation, you can begin by standing for a generation that has come of age during the fight for equality at work and at home, a generation that has been irrevocably shaped by the changing roles, concerns, and problems of women. You could show that you get it, as the post-Hill shorthand goes. But first you have to convincingly recognize our existence.

  You cannot assume that the gender gap automatically benefits you. You have a gender gap of your own, a personal one. Some women look at you and see every charming and evasive rover they ever had the bad fortune to tangle with.

  You could defuse that if you spoke out in a constant and unremitting way about your commitment to family-planing clinics and prenatal care programs, family-leave policies and early-childhood-education initiatives, legal abortion and a polyglot inner circle. You’ve been out there romancing black voters, Jewish communities, labor unions. But you haven’t romanced women enough. (Look, you’re going to have this problem with double entendres. Just grin and bear it and everyone will think you’re a sport.) We’re raising hell in state races; we could raise hell in this one, too. But we’re too ticked off to be taken for granted for long, and lots of us are still looking at you as the lesser of two evils, which doesn’t inspire anybody to hire a sitter and trudge to the polls come November. The gool ol’ boys keep saying you need to bring Joe Six-Pack back to the Democratic party in November. But for every Joe, there’s another voter out there searching for a candidate. Name’s Jane. We’re waiting.

  ALL OF THESE YOU ARE

  June 28, 1992

  Let us begin today with the fact that being called a honky is not in the same league as being called a nigger.

  And therein lies one explanation of why Bill Clinton generated considerable heat, but no light, when he publicly decried the anti-white comments of a woman by the name of Sister Souljah who thinks with her mouth.

  This is not a meditation on the sister, who has already gotte
n more attention than her talents as a rap artist or a social commentator merit.

  Nor is this a disquisition on the board game known as national politics and whether Governor Clinton wants to dis the Reverend Jesse Jackson, or to distance himself from him (although either, it seems to me, could have been covered adequately by a simple No when asked to speak).

  This is about race, the thing today that dare not speak its name.

  We not only lack the words. We lack the knowledge.

  The Chicago bureau chief of The New York Times, Isabel Wilkerson, last week made this vivid by drawing word pictures of two neighboring communities. The dreams and aspirations of the people are much the same. But Roseland is black, Mount Greenwood white, as though Jim Crow had never died. One white woman said her family had to eat hamburger while the blacks bought steaks with their food stamps. She’d never actually seen anyone do this, you understand, but she knew that it was so.

  The story observed: “The paradox, interviews show, is that black people were fearful because much of their contact with white people was negative; whites were fearful because they had little or no contact.”

  Into the fray in a nation so divided steps Mr. Clinton, sounding the white-guy clarion call, that hatred is as bad when it goes black to white as when it goes white to black. All things being equal, this is true.

  Only all things aren’t equal. Hatred by the powerful, the majority, has a different weight—and often very different effects—than hatred by the powerless, the minority. Reverse racism is like reverse discrimination: how much power does it really have in our overwhelmingly white world?

  Mr. Clinton brought the Uzi of power and position to bear on someone with a dart gun full of poison. Those little suckers sure sting. But it’s clear who’s better armed. It’s especially clear when the man should be carrying a lamp instead, looking to illuminate.

  All of us rushed right in to say that Bill Clinton was right, right, right, no doubt about it. And there was no doubt that Sister Souljah’s words have been unconscionable. But as any debater can tell you, right may give you a lovely puffed-up feeling, but sometimes it does not advance the argument.

  Senator Bill Bradley took on this most difficult of issues in a speech in March. And he didn’t do it with bromides, and he didn’t do it because he was running for something, much as people wish he were. He talked about white fear of black criminality, he talked about the disintegration of the black family, he talked about misunderstanding and ill will on all sides, Republican and Democrat, white and black alike.

  He told us we were all dependent on one another, and that if we do not stand united we will surely fall. Senator Bradley even said some of the things that Mr. Clinton was trying to say, talking about the “threats and bombast” of some black leaders. But he didn’t single them out for blame. He asked us all to examine our consciences. He cast light.

  This other has been pure heat. Sister Souljah got her fifteen minutes of fame. Jesse Jackson got to play his habitual game of Super Mario Brothers with the Democratic powers-that-be. And Mr. Clinton got to shout across from the white side of the racial divide that black folks can be racist, too. There are those who say he was pandering. If he prospers with the support of voters who believe that the key to racial problems in this country is blacks killing whites, or talking about killing whites, he will be little better than the current occupant of the job.

  Our problem is not the venomous words of a rap singer—it is silences so huge we are drowning in them. Senator Bradley quoted Stephen Vincent Benét on the conundrum of America:

  All of these you are

  And each is partly you

  And none of them is false

  And none is wholly true.

  Alas, it doesn’t make for sound bites.

  THE TWO FACES OF EVE

  July 15, 1992

  It is no longer the fashion to lie about the everyday lives of women. Gone are the days when we pretended that caring for children and cooking meals were an always rewarding enterprise. Gone are the days when we insisted that a real woman found it more satisfying to provide comfort for those who did great things in the world than to do great things in the world herself.

  Now we only insist on lying about the lives of women whose husbands are running for president.

  It’s particularly noticeable this year, at this convention, as the Democrats parade their female congressional candidates, smart and outspoken and nobody’s fools. It’s particularly noticeable as Ann Richards runs the proceedings, a gavel, a grandmother, a governor. It’s particularly noticeable as Barbara Jordan talks about the role of women in the party, and the party faithful, half of them female, roar back the joy of inclusion.

  It’s particularly noticeable that Hillary Clinton, who has already changed her name, her hair, her clothes, and her comments, is reduced to hawking her chocolate-chip-cookie entry in the First Lady bake-off.

  What next? Eleanor Roosevelt fudge?

  The irony is that if Ms. Clinton were up on that podium as a candidate, she would be golden, with her Yale Law degree, her board positions, her smarts, and her looks. But Hillary Rodham Clinton is running for First Lady, an anachronistic title for an amorphous position. The job description is a stereotype that no real woman has ever fit except perhaps June Cleaver on her good days.

  The remarkable thing about how long the fantasy of the adoring and apolitical First Lady has endured is how few occupants of the job have conformed to it. In the last twenty-five years, only Pat Nixon has truly seemed separate from the work her husband made his life.

  Margaret Truman Daniel, whose mother, Bess, was the prototype of First Lady as average American housewife, says she does not recall her parents talking politics much. But her husband, Clifton Daniel, demurs. “I heard her do it often,” he said. “She was actively interested in politics and she did not hesitate to give her opinions.”

  Barbara Bush, she of the ubiquitous adjective “grandmotherly,” has stoked the fiction afresh. In a fine profile in Vanity Fair, we learn how: she tends it relentlessly. “I could get in so much trouble if I said something she didn’t agree with,” her own stepmother worries. “Because you know how she is: she knows how she wants to appear to the world.” And she knows how the world wants her to appear, canny Bar—not as the Machiavellian woman who can whip Bush subordinates into shape with a word, but as the happy shadow.

  Mrs. Bush came of age when the best hope for advancement many women had was to hitch their wagon to their husband’s star, although, like both Nancy Reagan and Rosalynn Carter, her lack of interest in influence is pure pulp fiction. Ms. Clinton is part of a different age, an age when we girls were taught we could be anything we chose—and were foolish enough to believe it. She is a lightning rod for the mixed emotions we have about work and motherhood, dreams and accommodation, smart women and men’s worlds.

  She was the kind of girl they said might wind up in the Oval Office. Now if she’s lucky she’ll get the East Wing, a not uncommon kind of pact in two-career marriages. Well, we say, she made her choices. She blonded and blended and sometimes she was outspoken and looked ambitious and that will never, ever do.

  Here in New York and for the rest of this campaign we have the two faces of Eve. We have the women candidates, who are permitted—and I chose that word deliberately—to be ambitious, outspoken, strong, and sure.

  And then we have Hillary Clinton, who must hawk those cookies and show off her daughter to prove her bona fide. Bill Clinton married someone smart and opinionated, who could challenge him and apparently frequently does. That’s not an easy thing for a man, but apparently it’s even tougher for this nation. Talk to people who don’t like her and they often say they have never heard her speak or seen her interviewed. It is the idea of her they dislike.

  Abigail Adams, a pistol if there ever was one, wrote in the famous “Remember the ladies” letter to her husband, John, the second president, “While you are proclaiming peace and good will to men, emancipating all nations
, you insist upon retaining an absolute power over wives.” It was a young country then. In some ways it still hasn’t grown up.

  THE FOURTH WALL

  July 19, 1992

  Late at night, bleached by the streetlights, the satellite dishes pale moons at its perimeter, Madison Square Garden looked like the starship Enterprise. The doors were barred to all but those with special passes by a phalanx of police officers, who stood between the arena and the uninvited—the protesters, the leafleteers, and the man who paced the corner repeating, “The answer is Jesus. Jesus is the answer.”

  The third night of the Democratic convention a man walked by with his hands in his pockets and muttered bitterly, “Blah blah blah blah.” And though it is possible that he was not all there, this being New York City, the Democrats should keep in mind, during this anniversary celebration of the Michael Dukakis Memorial Euphoria, that he may have been an ordinary working Joe, giving vent to the still-considerable chasm between working Joes and politicos this country over.

  Bill Clinton gave a speech Thursday night in which he introduced himself anew to the American people, making the personal political. The most important thing about that speech was that he could not simply give it to the people in the Garden, the people with the open-sesame passes slung around their necks. Accepting the nomination of your party for the presidency is the most egregious sort of exercise in preaching to the converted if you talk to the folks in the hall.