Posted on 06/03/2003 3:55:51 PM PDT by Pokey78
When she was a young woman, Hillary Rodham stood before her collegiate graduating class and gave voice to the sentiments of her generation (or at least that upper-middle-class portion that had the money and brains to go to expensive and competitive universities). The prevailing acquisitive and competitive corporate life is not for us, the young Hillary declared. “We’re searching for more immediate, ecstatic and penetrating modes of living.”
Now may be a good time to see how that whole ecstatic and penetrating modes of living business is going. For Hillary Rodham, now Clinton, is about to release her mid-life memoir. Her husband’s memoir will be published soon after, or whenever he can get round to writing it. And the world’s third most famous baby boomer, Tony Blair, has emerged as a global leader having championed a daring and controversial war.
And as we survey the trajectory of these boomer lives (and as you know, it is our mission in life to pay infinite attention to that generation and its concerns), we see that their lives have followed three separate paths, each of which was incipient even in the 1960s and 1970s. To put it baldly, Hillary has become the sell-out, the one who has rejected all that Aquarius nonsense for the sake of ambition and success. Bill has become the narcissist. Now in his post-presidential phase, he travels the world singing his own praises and announcing the greatness of his presidency. And Blair has become the moralist, the person who has embraced the earnest tone of uplift that was also endemic to the mood of that period.
Hillary’s decision to sell out was at least a conscious one. While she was First Lady, she still fooled around with concepts such as the Politics of Meaning. But when she ran for the Senate in her own right, she had to make a fundamental decision.
Hillary and her staff had long debates about whether she should be interesting. Should they let that inner Hillary out for a romp? Should they let her bare her soul and make that human-to-human connection with voters? They decided against it. Presumably after a fair share of market research, they decided that her personality would only stir up animosity. The better route, they concluded, would be to play down all hint of personality. She would become a disciplined issue machine.
So Hillary proceeded to run what was perhaps the most robotic and dull campaign in all history. Wherever she was, she remained firmly on message: education, healthcare, the children. She evaded any question that did not play to her mantra. She ignored everything she had done in her life up to that point. She was almost never personal or emotional. She simply had her mantra. It was vacuous. It was often blatantly deceptive. But it was disciplined. She was a machine and it worked.
In the Senate she has become the Organisation Woman. She fits in. She plays by the rules. She is serious and substantive. She works hard, is effective and occasionally ruthless. As a result, she is respected and even a little feared by the Establishment.
I suspect that she will be the Democratic Party’s nominee for president in 2008. Of course, she won’t win, because her husband will do something during the campaign to draw attention to himself and screw it all up. Bill Clinton these days is a lesson for all those who are about to achieve their life’s goal. Once it is done, there is no ambition left to restrain one’s worst impulses.
So Clinton is now unbound. On the one hand he is smart and savvy. He has been delivering a series of speeches to Democratic policy groups that illustrate why he overshadows the men who hope to succeed him as party leader. Just after the Democrats’ congressional defeat last year, Clinton delivered a brilliant analysis of how the party could toughen its image and establish its anti-terror cojones. The entire party is following that advice.
On the other hand, there is his longing for universal love. In retrospect, Clinton’s presidency seems small, but his hunger for affection immense. It became an eight-year referendum on whether each of us loved or hated Bill Clinton. And that hunger for love hasn’t ended with his presidency.
And so Clinton’s speeches, which are basically terrific, are littered with statistics that celebrate his glories. Sometimes Clinton will tell whoppers so immense as to be juvenile. In April, he told a tale of an unnamed business executive who allegedly called to remind him that he had perfectly foreseen September 11, he had done everything he could to prevent September 11, that he warned us but we wouldn’t listen. This was a story so manifestly made up, and so selfaggrandising, it was like hearing a lonely eight-year-old boy bragging about scoring six goals in a game in his old school.
It wouldn’t have been obvious five years ago that Tony Blair would emerge as the greatest of the boomers, that he turned out to be the leader Bill Clinton dreamt of being. But facing opposition of the sort he faced over Iraq, and still going through with it, is the sort of task Clinton never would have had the guts to undertake. The hunger for popularity would have prevented it.
Blair seems both of his generation but also aloof from it. Like Hillary, he has that Methodist do-gooder impulse, but unlike her, he didn’t suppress it for the sake of expediency. He shares Bill Clinton’s gift for strategic flexibility, but apparently he is also rooted to something beyond self.
The difference between the three is that it is possible to imagine Blair going on with life after politics. With the Clintons that is impossible.
They will be there for decades, offering new revelations for scientists of boomer selfhood.
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Yup. Works for me.
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