Hillary's Antiwar Movement

By MARGARET CARLSON

Do they have kids? That's what we always wanted to know when a moving van pulled up in my old neighborhood. Back then, the arrival of the Clintons would have prompted other questions. Is she married? Then where's her husband? And who are all those tall men in the dark glasses?

As always, nothing is simple with the Clintons, who have given almost as many answers about their living arrangements as they did about the billing records. Originally, the President wasn't going to show up in Chappaqua until next week. But with news cameras trained on the five-bedroom, four-bath residence, the President hastily bailed out of the Middle East peace talks to forestall video of Hillary spending her first night alone. The next morning, in their end-of-driveway press conference, the First Lady made like a young bride, ecstatic to be unpacking gewgaws from Arkansas circa 1983. This helped fend off thoughts about her as a carpetbagger in need of a new zip code, or worse, as the first First Lady to abdicate. For the moment, the Clintons diverted attention from the fact that they are the first presidential couple to officially take up separate residences and that this most reckless of Presidents will now be Home Alone.

By turning compliance with New York's residency requirements into a Lifetime movie, the Clintons have given new meaning to keeping up appearances. Why force us to watch their melodrama? We're being asked to believe that "they" are staying married, that "they" are moving to New York, when by many people's definitions, "they" are doing neither. The headline in one New York paper was HERE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW, as the President returned to Shepherdstown, W.Va., for the Israeli-Syrian talks. Among their possessions, you could see a couple of rugs, a kitchen table and a large bed. Don Imus wondered whether the plastic would ever come off the mattress. I wondered whether there would ever be enough living in the living room to fill up such a huge space.

But the media pictures on the front porch may at least remind people of Hillary's bright and winning side, apparent in her early listening tour but obscured by a series of errors: the bungling of the Puerto Rican clemency issue, a messy mortgage that had to be scrapped after it raised ethical questions, her unfortunate embrace of an Arafat. Most recently, her campaign spokesman loudly denounced presumed rival Rudy Giuliani as "shameless" for starring in I Love New York-type ads, sponsored by the tourist bureau. Problem is, they aren't taxpayer financed, and it drew attention to her soft-money donations (more than $300,000 from corporate donors and wealthy private citizens) and her own blurring of the lines between official and campaign business. Most candidates have to take the shuttle between Washington and New York. She flies on Air Force jets.

Now that she has quit her day job, Charlie Cook, editor of the authoritative Cook Report, says she has time "to bring home the voters she should already have locked up but has fallen behind with"--women, Jews, union households--"and motivate those who've stuck with her, primarily African Americans." If she doesn't cause gridlock at the Grand Union, she might get back the soccer moms. Fortunately for Hillary, Giuliani's domestic life is no Norman Rockwell painting, either. As the Clintons were playing out their own soap opera, Rudy's wife Donna Hanover was announcing that she had signed on to play a recurring character on ABC's One Life to Live, a curious example of bad art imitating life. Hanover long ago dropped her married name and stopped attending political events, and the details of the curious Giuliani marriage were laid out in a notorious 1997 Vanity Fair article. Having garnered all the credit there is to get from saving the city, the mayor has some controversies of his own to overcome: police-brutality cases, his crackdown on the homeless, his feud with the just departed school chancellor. Cook notes that Hillary can turn the race around if she "makes the race about Rudy and not about her." In other words, pray for snow and another tasteless museum exhibit.

The photo-ops of the First Couple on Old House Lane may serve to bring down the curtain on the past two years in the White House. Once again, Hillary is nodding her head at everything the President says. Monica has found a job hawking a diet program. Linda Tripp is a "new man," as David Letterman observed, after her massive plastic surgery. Ken Starr is back at his law firm. Clinton is busily working on his legacy.

The amazing thing is not that we don't know whether the Clintons are a couple but that they themselves don't seem to. The President hemmed and hawed his way through a question about how they would manage to find time together. What even the adults in my old neighborhood wouldn't have been able to fathom is how the new woman down the block has passed through life's most traumatic events--marital meltdown, the death of her father and best friend, Whitewater and more than a year at the center of a crisis that laid bare her intimate life--and craves no down time to catch her breath. Picking through the charred embers of the conflagration of the past two years requires more attention than your average candidate can spare. But that may be just the way she wants it.