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Jewish World Review July 24, 2000 / 21 Tamuz, 5760

Chris Matthews

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Consumer Reports


Will being 'better' sink Hillary?


http://www.jewishworldreview.com -- SHE THINKS she's better than we are.

That's the decisive issue in this year's New York Senate race. It's not policy or politics or personality. It's how voters react to how Hillary Rodham Clinton views herself.

The first lady does not offer herself — both ally and critic agree — as one of the people, another kid-made-good from the neighborhoods.

"One of the top hundred lawyers in the country!" declared her earliest notices. A graduate of Wellesley and Yale law, she entered the White House as the most educated first lady in history. We were getting, the new first lady herself let us know, two leaders of presidential stature for the price of one.

We're talking about more than diplomas and IQ here.

As a Senate candidate, Clinton has brandished an image of unquestioned moral superiority. Who can forget her first sighting as a New York politician — that smart, gutsy barnstorming for '98 Senate candidate Chuck Schumer? Far from being a player in the Clinton coverup, here was its prime casualty, a woman carrying on the fight amid the mortification wrought by her husband's outlandish misconduct.

Many people, including some close to me, see Hillary Clinton entirely in this light. They look up to her as their champion, smart enough to be a future president, strong and downright good enough to put up with the current president's weaknesses. What other woman have they known who has such spunk, such panache, such nerve, such pristine, state-of-the-art political goodness?

This is the stellar premise that will decide the contest for those not bound by unblinking party loyalty. It explains as much as anything the uproar this week over what Hillary Clinton said or didn't say on election night in Little Rock a full 26 years ago.

I'm sorry, but most Americans, and that includes most politicians, do, on occasion, get angry.

Whether it's on the highway after having someone cut you off or in the heat of a hard-fought political campaign, real people do let loose with every verbal arrow in their quiver.

Only a politician claiming an extraordinary moral and cultural stature would claim to be above such explosions of expletives, not excluding the ethnic variety.

Yet this is the message that President Clinton delivered the other day by phone to the editors at the New York Daily News. He told them that Hillary is innocent, not just in this pathetic claim of 26 years ago, but that she is totally innocent: She has never, at any time, ever voiced a negative thought about any ethnic, religious or racial group.

If we believe her claim, no such thought has even entered her head. Ever!

This is the enduring, dominating question of this campaign. If Hillary is truly a superior American figure, she may well deserve to be the United States senator from New York. If she isn't, but thinks she is, that may be a presumption even this liberal, welcoming state may be unwilling to ratify.



JWR contributor Chris Matthews is the author of Hardball. and hosts a CNBC show of the same name. Send your comments to him by clicking here.

Up

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