Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: Personal and political

Back in the day in Arkansas, Hillary Clinton never much liked for anyone--bimbo or otherwise--to hang around her husband.

Hillary's view was that star-struck backwater inferiors, both male and female, wanted to cozy up to her magnetic spouse and make themselves feel important by way of Bill's frustratingly undisciplined eagerness to please everybody.

She thought Bill was always at risk that those star-struck backwater inferiors would steer him into political trouble, perhaps merely by the self-aggrandizing overstatement of their association and activity with him.

She knew that women presented special personal and political peril, although the phrase, "personal and political," perhaps is redundant in the Clintons' case.

Was Hillary worried as a wife that some of these women might land a quickie with her weak-of-the-flesh husband? Or was she worried as a political partner that some of these women might try to exploit or misrepresent their interactions and make themselves famous, and thus harm Bill--harm them--politically?

Yes.


Once, decades ago, I mentioned to Bill a certain woman whom I found ... let us say odd ... who had shown up at a couple of his campaign events.

Bill said Hillary had told him never to be alone with that woman.

Was that because she feared Bill's pants might fall off were he alone with her? Or was it because she feared the woman might allege as much even if the pants stayed on?

Again, I'm leaning toward "yes."

All of what I describe was exacerbated by the fact that Arkansas was Bill's natural habitat and Hillary an alien hostage in this good-ol'-boy land.

You had a star-quality male politician given to incurable Labrador retriever behavior--big, happy, lick-your-face behavior--and a much more reserved and disciplined wife who loved the big lug, but could never keep him under the porch no matter how short the leash she tried to apply.

Did Hillary choose to emphasize the politically protective angle as a denial mechanism against marital betrayal?

I seem to have asked a better question than I can answer. We'll need a team of professionals and an array of couches for that one.

But I fully understand that Hillary could love her husband and, at the same time, view him as a partner in a political corporation. Marriages vary. They're hard. Whatever works, seems to me.

Now Donald Trump, lacking any policy command, and vengeful because Hillary destroyed him in a debate, has taken to blaming Hillary for Bill's tomcat behavior.

His charge seems to be that she enabled the behavior by knowing it was happening and not divorcing or assailing her husband, but instead disparaging the "victims," meaning the women either claiming or reported to have engaged in physically intimate interactions with him.

Much of this goes back to the late 1980s in Arkansas when the Clintons were fretting that political rival Sheffield Nelson was intending to make public accusations naming women, and when--at Hillary's direction--agents for the Clintons got some of those women to sign affidavits that nothing had happened.

Then when Gennifer Flowers made her charge of a 12-year affair, Hillary said she could destroy the nightclub singer on cross-examination, as surely was true. Flowers' story of a 12-year love affair didn't come close to holding up. The best guess is that Gennifer and Bill had an isolated moment or two and that any 12-year context would apply only if the second moment happened to take place 12 years after the first.

Juanita Broaddrick claimed Bill forced himself on her--years after she had denied it, even in an affidavit--and says Hillary came up to her at a function and made a statement of implied intimidation.

To know what to make of all that, one would need to have been in the hotel room with Bill and Juanita, and then standing by during the subsequent conversation between Juanita and Hillary.

I wasn't. You weren't. The rest is forever guesswork.

Then, of Monica Lewinsky, Hillary is said by a late friend's diary to have declared in private conservation that the young woman was a "narcissistic loony tune." That is an unsubstantiated statement and an opinion to which Hillary would seem fully entitled. And possibly a truth.

None of that presents a pretty or admirable picture. The Clinton marriage is plainly more Gatsby-esque than Cleaver-esque.

Bill can be a scamp and Hillary can be cold and calculating. Can we agree on that much?

But whether anything described herein remotely qualifies the shallow and megalomaniacal Trump for president, or disqualifies the cold and suspicious and disciplined Hillary ... on this one I must say the answer is "no."

If JFK could behave as he behaved and stare down the Soviets when it counted, Hillary ought to be able to defend a defenseless and aging scamp and competently lead the country.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 10/04/2016

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