Do Bill's second term hopes depend on a softer, quieter Hillary?

by Peter Coyote

From: coyote@motherjones.com
To: mojowire@motherjones.com

I enter the convention center where ever-passionate Mario Cuomo is pleading the cause in front of a curious big-screen TV image which magnifies his own right hand behind him in a second image, waving like a disembodied limb punctuating his speech. He's good, he's articulate, he's dedicated. "We need jobs," he declaims, "not in Thailand, not in Bangladesh, not in Mexico [all good speech writers learn to love specificity], but in Chicago, rural Mississippi." He goes on to remind us that public education produced Colin Powell and President Clinton, urges us not to abandon it. Someone next to me comments to their neighbor, "He's good, but he has no guts." I question that, and a woman with owlish eyeglasses informs me definitively that "you don't flirt with the Presidency. If you get that close, throw your hat in the ring and take the heat."

I wander out into the hall, forgetting for the moment that I have exited from the floor, several levels lower than where I entered, and soon, I am completely lost in the corridors surrounding the convention center. There are no landmarks. The halls are full of plastic bags holding signs for the Hillary demonstration later. People enter and exit the corridors aimlessly, others sit around and noone seems to know where the food is. I'm rescued by a maintenance man who seems to have nothing better to do than keep me company right to the lobby. I buy him a Coke and a near-lethal Italian sausage sandwich for myself, and wander back into the hall, following a middle-aged man with a Bob Dylan hairdo who turns out to be Phil Angelides, "the scariest trial lawyer in America." He is a securities litigator, the kind of guy who goes after computer company executives who don't live up to their promises to investors, and the sponsor of Initiative 211, which makes them personally liable.

Martha Whetstone is laughing to someone about Clinton's loyalty to Arkansans which borders on the naive. "I mean, he'll come up to me" she laughs, "and say, `Hey did you see that guy over there? He's from Minah!', as if he'd just spotted the ghost of John Lennon."

I'm sitting next to a plump, motherly black woman with doe eyes named Helina Parks who works in the DNC office in Washington. We discuss the coronation of Ron Brown's spirit the night before and she confirms my impression that the reception was "genuine," and like myself she was moved. She speaks softly and tenderly and tells me that she worked under Ron Brown, and like the crowd, considered him a "special man."

As she talks, brave Joe Biden who was so tough on Anita Hill is on the TV screen with his Republican hairdo and gravelly voice, a tough, polished, bull-dog, warns the crowd that he is ready to get tough on young criminals. The subtext of his speech is that he will personally kick their asses.

John Kerry follows him, trim and handsome as an ideal submarine commander, but it is all pearls before grime...no one listens to a word, and finally I am embarrassed and then angry when a woman takes the podium and begins recounting the story of her husband's murder and son's paralysis in the famous Long Island commuter train incident. Someone passing in the corridor asks me what she's talking about and I snap, "Her husband's murder. If you'd shut up and listen you'd know."

The whole thing is a dumb show for television. It's as if the flesh and blood people in the convention hall are reduced to the role of extras waving their props. The real audience is out there in Televisionland, and everything: civility, order, integrity and authenticity is sacrificed to the insatiable hunger of the media.

For a brief moment, everything harmonizes when Aretha Franklin emerges to sing "The Star-Spangled Banner." ALL chatter stops; ALL vagaries and distractions stop as Aretha grabs that tattered, impossible-to-sing old chestnut and tears the heart out of it, raising it aloft like a burning torch. The camera zeros in on a WWII vet, snapped to perfect attention, eyes rivetted on her and all the passion of her voice is expressing the weltering complex of feeling that is evident on his face. He is transfixed by memory and respect, and my respect for him forbids the slightest cynicism.

Dick Gephardt, whipped back in line by his failed Presidential explorations, is a faithful party Doberman now (probably nursing a feral urge to run against Al Gore next time around), but tonight he introduces Tipper Gore, who still remains my favorite speaker. She speaks about civility, and it seems to me that her address (I've admitted my bias, folks) cuts to the heart of the real problem assailing the nation; the fundamental loss of civility in discourse and strategy which is sundering the political process and victimizing all the players in it. She urges us "to disagree with decency and dignity and keep our sense of humor," and I just have to admit that I like this woman, no matter how stupid or ill-conceived some of her earlier ideas may have been.

Hillary's moment arrives and it is stunning. John Lennon's "Imagine" plays and the crowd leaps to its feet, waving a blizzard of white signs which read WELCOME HOME HILLARY. They are fused into one throat, and the intensity of the reception provokes goose-bumps all over my body. They are thanking her; loving her; supporting her; nursing her wounds; making up for the vicious barbs and slices of the opposition; saying they don't care, they love her. She tries, I admit that she tries to stop them and begin her speech, but can't. The applause holds her in place until they are spent and she can begin.

There is no question that she is good, beginning with a few anecdotes and jokes -- including the idea of dying her hair red and changing her name to Hillary "Rodman" Clinton -- which the crowd loves. There are fine phrases, particularly when she speaks of the children and decries the values which decree that "the logos on their clothes are more valuable than the generosity in their hearts," but I am uncomfortable. I saw and was mesmerized by her yesterday, but this is a different woman, and I am uneasy with my disbelief in what she is saying, and determine to analyze why.

I begin picking apart not her text, but her subtext, and focus on the voice. It is comforting, slow and calm, addressing me as if English were not my native language and I am struck with the thought that she has been coached to soften her abrasive edges and diminish liabilities to her husband. I cannot shake this feeling, and for the rest of the speech feel detached and disappointed, that on this important night, someone might feel that the way to help President Clinton demanded softening and diminishing a brilliant and autonomous woman. Her speech gets slower and slower as if we might be having difficulty understanding.

Video cameras ride on the shoulders of operators like humps, passing through the aisles, obscuring my vision, trailing sound people and passing through the crowd like ice-breaking ships. Hillary is going on about children and family and family and children and I can't help remembering that her husband has just signed a bill consigning 40 percent of the nations poorest children to limbo, and that all she can counter that with is the HOPE that her husband will be able to soften the legislation. [And if he can't? It's a gamble isn't it, played on the backs of the poor.] Where, I am wondering was the President and his bully pulpit in challenging the Republicans when they framed the debate on Welfare and the poor? Now, it is too late, and it is obvious that the President, having abandoned the advantage of his office, was forced to sign the bill.

Indiana Governor Evan Bayh begins to speak, and after three sentences, I am convinced I am listening to the phoniest white man I have ever met. He is pimping his mother's death from cancer to this crowd to demonstrate his sensitivity and family values and I am revolted by him and troubled by my own reaction to Hillary's speech.

I admire this woman and identify with her. I respect her intelligence, the grace she has shown under disgraceful assaults, the universality of her concern for community and the old and the poor; and I wanted to feel that she had redeemed herself with this speech and I don't. My imagination is running away with me, and I imagine her being coached by people trying to help; trying to change her "effect" instead of translating her essence. I am disturbed that she would abandon herself when the stakes got high; pander to someone else's impression than her own true instincts, but of course I know none of this, am inventing scenarios. What makes me feel even worse is that no one around me seems to have noticed what I have. They are all focused on the content (fine, nothing controversial) and seem to have totally missed the persona presenting it, the emotional text. It makes me feel estranged, unrepresentative; makes me question why I am even there at all.

I stop by at John Kennedy's George party, the hottest ticket in town. It is jammed with what appear to be sons and daughters of famous people, and has all the neck-craning vigilance of a high-voltage event. I sit for awhile with crusty old Liz Carpenter (LBJ's Press Secretary) and mine her for gossip, and then, still troubled, leave to visit old Chicago friends, Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, ex-Weathermen who were underground for fifteen plus years.

They are having a party and I have promised to stop by. People there are discussing the speech, and most feel exactly as I do. It is a relief. They all respect and identify with Hillary, and yet all feel that the speech was a strategy and not a communication. I am looking around for a better way to think and feel about it; to resist cynicism.

But this is after all, the world of politics, of signals and messages and while I am personally disappointed, actually at home here among my friends and not in the center of the convention floor, I have to admit that it is a world like any other, a world with its own premises and rules; a world I have chosen, on some level, to observe and influence from the outside. And so, like many others, I imagine, I take a deep breath, and shrug to lighten my mood. One-hundred percent true or not, Hillary's is a mind that I want in the center of public policy debate; and if I have to swallow some personal discomfort with my own standards to help with that, it is not such a difficult chore. I take a breath, and grab a beer. Time to wind down.