How many professional political operatives can you name? I don’t
mean politicians or party bigwigs; I mean the people on their
staffs. I’m not thinking of the Secretary of State or the
Undersecretary for Lima Bean Inspection, but of the bureaucrats who
control access to them, swimming like pilot fish near their
big-mouthed masters.
If, like me, you’re at or approaching the age when friends make
jokes about being a “pillar of the community,” then the names
Erlichman and Haldeman probably ring a distant bell. G. Gordon
Liddy has another familiar moniker. After that, it’s a dry well
until you get to Karl Rove, unless you’re obsessed with the
minutiae of government.
Political operatives tend not to seek the limelight, either
because they regard any grand jury with the same loathing that
vampires reportedly reserve for cloves of garlic, or because public
exposure puts them off their game, as Lewis “Scooter” Libby could
testify.
Why, then, did the Washington Post run a June 21
feature story by Lois Romano on the “Gatekeepers
of Hillaryland? This was a fawning profile of the mostly-female
people in a “closely-knit Praetorian Guard around Clinton that
plots strategy, develops message, and clamps down on leaks.”
If you suppose that the Watergate “plumbers” were never as
zealous in their approach to leaks, you’re right. Oddly, the
“Hillaryland” label didn’t come from WaPo editors, but
from the group itself. The story is vague about how many
inner-circle advisers Hillary actually has, but admits that it’s
more than a dozen. Moreover, they like that label, which
tells some of us all we need to know about their boss’s desire to
remake America into her own personal theme park.
Having decided to green light a story that wandered away from
its natural home among horoscopes and swimsuit-slimming tips in
women’s magazines, WaPo editors weren’t shy about mixing
their metaphors. Before settling on allusions to imperial Rome,
they flirted with 17th-century France, in a subhead suggesting that
the inhabitants of Hillaryland were, like the Three Musketeers,
“all for one and one for all.”
Near the end of the piece, past Tamera, Patti, Ann, Capricia,
Neera, Huma, Evelyn, Maggie, Solis, and Mandy, three men are
singled out as “naturalized citizens in Hillaryland.” The tone of
the story is so breathlessly self-parodying (communications
director Howard Wolfson has been “a Hillaryland member since 1999”)
that one wonders whether these men have helium-infused voices and
letters of introduction from the Lollipop Guild. Wrong land? My
mistake. But an easy one to make.
Which brings us back to the question of why these staffers ever
made it to page A01 in the first place. With some newspapers and
some campaigns, this profile is the kind of thing that would fill
the news hole on a slow day. But Hillary Clinton’s campaign is
invariably described as a well-oiled and impressively disciplined
machine, which means several people in it had to sign off on
talking to the Washington Post before anyone would return
a reporter’s phone call. Hillary and her crew wanted this story out
there, and I suspect it’s because they wanted to scare Democratic
rivals with the size and experience of their organization.
Another thing the story does, however, is prove that Bay
Buchanan was right. In her recent book, The Extreme Makeover of Hillary
(Rodham) Clinton, Ms. Buchanan describes the junior senator
from New York as a bright and ruthlessly ambitious student
handicapped by a lifelong lack of political vision, for which she
compensates by seeking advice from as many trusted people as she
can find. Buchanan backs that assertion by pointing to Hillary’s
commencement address to the Wellesley College graduating
class of 1969, and to the doomed health care reform campaign she
spearheaded in 1993 and 1994. Both efforts foundered in part
because Hillary indulged in her mania for consultation, missing
(again) the distinction between management and leadership.
Assuming the sketch of Hillaryland that the Washington
Post gave us last week is accurate, it confirms Buchanan’s
hypothesis. Moreover, any politician with as many handlers as
Hillary has puts a new and disquieting spin on “it takes a
village.”
Village, hell. Cronyism is an art form in Washington, but Bill
Clinton’s wife collects gurus the way some other women collect
shoes. There are more people on the payroll in Hillaryland than
there were in the Bolivian army detachment that went after Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. If the size of a celebrity’s
entourage is inversely proportional to his or her sense of
self-worth, then you can be sure that Hillary Clinton has no
business even aspiring to a position where she controls missile
launch codes and can nominate the next Justice of the Supreme
Court.
