HILLARY'S BIG MOUTH by Dick Morris
December 30, 2002 -- AMERICAN attitudes toward Hillary Clinton are a bit like how parents see their small but unruly child: They like him best when he is asleep. Throughout her career, when Hillary is silent, she gains in popularity - but when she starts talking, she loses support. Her recent decision to become a spokesperson for the Democratic Party in the wake of its fall mishap is misguided and will only lead to an increase in her negative ratings.
Hillary's history tells the story:
As America first met Hillary Clinton, it came to dislike her more and more. Her outspoken refusal to "stay at home and bake cookies" almost cost her husband the presidency. Then her health-care proposals did cost Democrats control of Congress.
With her negative ratings piling up, it became clear that she and Bill were locked in a zero-sum game. The more she was seen as powerful, the weaker voters felt Bill was. It was only by withdrawing from public - or even White House staff view - that she could repair the damage she had done to the president's image and to her own. She wrote a non-controversial book about raising and educating children and watched it become a best seller as she mouthed platitudes in its support.
Ever since, silence has been Hillary's ally. When Monica burst on our consciousness, Hillary made a particular virtue of saying nothing. After an initial faux pas, in which she denounced the "vast right-wing conspiracy" against Bill, she clammed up for the rest of the impeachment process and earned points for her dignity, even evoking comparisons with Jackie Kennedy's class in the aftermath of her husband's death.
During her campaign for Senate, Hillary spoke a lot and said nothing. Avoiding controversy, she stayed carefully within the four walls of Democratic orthodoxy and made a virtue of silence by saying she was "listening" to the concerns of her new fellow New Yorkers.
When scandal hit, as over her husband's pardons and her parting theft from the White House, she hid under a rock until the smoke cleared.
Her Senate career, thus far, has also shown the rewards of saying nothing. Reluctant to challenge Bush, she has won points for being a good girl. Stories stressed how well she fit in with the Senate club.
Anxious to please, she avoided controversy. She couldn't help the occasional slip as when she attacked Bush from the Senate floor for ignoring warnings of 9/11, but, in the main, she kept her mouth shut.
Of Hillary's public life since 1994, it could be said (as Gilbert and Sullivan wrote of the British House of Lords), "She did nothing in particular, but did it very well."
Now the "old" Hillary seems to be re-emerging, slashing and burning against the Republican agenda, dancing on Trent Lott's grave and attacking Bush for leaving American unsafe in the face of terrorism.
She is pursuing the totally misguided and ludicrously flawed Democratic strategy of engaging Bush by trying to get to the right of him on the terrorism issue, attacking him for leaving us exposed to the threat of a new 9/11.
Like the "old" Nixons that periodically reared their head just after we had been introduced to a "new" Nixon, Hillary is baaaack, attacking and berating her adversaries.
But the old axiom still applies: the less she says, the better she does. In her own interest, Hillary Rodham Clinton should sit down and shut up.
