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Many Democrats in the hall have given up trying to figure out what's real and what's Memorex. Several weeks ago, Hillary told Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times that she had, after all, been quite active behind the scenes of the Administration. I tend to believe that's true, but the truth is closed off to Hillary after six years of denying that she ever set foot in the West Wing, preferring to concern herself with preserving historic sites, fussing over state dinners and writing a book on entertaining. You can have only so many guises.
Politics comes off as a grim ordeal for her. Bob Dole joked that it will take a SWAT team to evict Clinton from the White House on Inauguration Day, he loves it so much, but Hillary gets more pleasure from one lecture to the women's conference in Beijing than in a year on the stump. He's such a campaign junkie that he pushed a speechwriter out of her chair to tap out Hillary's official announcement speech on Feb. 6 in Purchase, N.Y., then held a Nancy Reagan gaze as he listened to his handiwork. Too bad he was too busy with his own speech at the convention last week to improve hers.
How many people, after being broken in half in front of the whole country, would choose to run for office rather than seek psychotherapy or at least a calm visiting professorship somewhere? If she doesn't ask the people in the hall to believe her but asks them to believe she can accomplish what they believe in, she may yet pull it out. She's such a survivor, CBS should have cast her on the show.