Hillary Clinton: A Different Kind of First Lady

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Such careful hedging will be less necessary now that Bill Clinton has won. It is telling that Hillary seems to have mastered the lessons of accommodation just as meticulously as any law school text. As the campaign unfolded, she was able to lower her public profile even as her private influence grew. She did not wield power for its own sake, but rather intervened as needed, fixing speeches, poking holes in arguments, warning the Governor of his foes and rewarding his friends. She was the candidate's most pointed critic, arguing that he was too passive in the first debate in New Hampshire (he has never been so laid back again), and his most trusted ally. She was much more likely to end a meeting than hold one, the one person who could cut off debate and force a decision. Without diminishing other First Ladies' intelligence, Hillary Clinton's is that of a trained killer lawyer, and the Governor says proudly that he wants her mind brought to bear on whatever he is doing, including being President. In any event, her influence is so pervasive that he has it with him whether or not she is in the room.

The presidential race was not Hillary's first experience with expedient self-censorship. Bill Clinton lost his first re-election bid as Governor in part because voters did not like the way this attorney out of Yale and Wellesley kept her maiden name. After she began answering to Clinton instead of Rodham and acting more like an archetypal wife and mother, she gradually expanded her role. Over the years she headed up an education task force that instituted a competency test for teachers, brought a neonatal-care unit and two fully equipped hospital helicopters to the state and introduced a home- instruction program for parents of preschoolers, all the while attending teas in Batesville and Pea Ridge. Conservative columnist John Robert Starr of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, a rabid opponent of Bill Clinton's, says that "the best thing that could happen would be to let Hillary run the country. I know that sounds ridiculous, but she has just never failed."

Having successfully refurbished her image in Arkansas, Hillary Clinton had to start all over again once she stepped onto the national stage. "The Hillary problem," as some aides called it, reflected the perception of some voters that she combined the aura of the teacher's pet with the grimness of the first generation of women lawyers, afraid to crack a joke about a client for fear of being sent back to the typing pool. To some, her marriage looked like a merger. Former candidate Michael Dukakis only read about Swedish land- use planning in his spare time; the Clintons talk about similarly dense topics with friends over dinner in the huge kitchen in the statehouse.