Commentary by Margaret Carlson
Feb. 28 -- It's not right the way my editor expects me to go first week after week, to write a whole column before he has to lift a finger. I'll bet people in New York are ready with pillows in case he's not comfy in his Aeron chair.
Does the above paragraph seem a bit whiny, more than a bit puzzling and not the least bit funny? If so, you know how millions of viewers felt during the last debate when Senator Hillary Clinton said the rules of the game as they apply to her just aren't fair.
Clinton was using a complaint that she always gets the first question (she doesn't, and isn't that a good thing?) as a way to bring up a funny ``Saturday Night Live'' sketch that mocked the press for allegedly fawning over Barack Obama. The SNL show had high ratings, yet you could hardly count on people who were tuning in on Tuesday night to have watched that skit.
Wasn't there one person in the room during debate prep with enough sense to say, ``Don't try to milk this, you're no Tina Fey.'' The pillow line fell as flat as the accusation last week that Obama represented ``change you can Xerox.''
To do funny, you have to be funny, even when the line is scripted, or especially then. I feel Clinton's pain. I can occasionally make a relative laugh but leave a wider audience baffled when I try. But she has high-priced handlers to tell her to stick with her 10-point plans. She won every debate when she did.
But inside a bad night in Cleveland is a glimmer of hope. She's at about the same low point she reached in New Hampshire when women rallied to her side as they saw the smile fade and exasperation and sorrow take its place.
Cool Guy
I don't know a woman, whatever criticisms they have of Clinton, who hasn't been where she is. You've done everything right, graduated with honors, taken the sensible job believing that your time for the flashy one would come later, and stuck with your marriage only to get swept aside by the cool guy who borrowed your notes, never breaks a sweat, and gets away with murder right under the boss's nose.
There's one in every office. We hate him.
But not always. Look at President George W. Bush languishing at 30 percent in the opinion polls. Clinton has to make it personal again as she did during that teary moment in the Portsmouth diner, when she'd had it up to here with the new kid and threw herself at the mercy of the women of New Hampshire.
Who She Is
So what if she's not comfortable in her skin? Sometimes it signifies sound judgment and good instincts.
Al Gore was as awkward and stiff as they come. Yet had he been elected, we wouldn't have become the first Christians to invade a Muslim country since the Crusades, have oil over $100 a barrel or be waiting for more studies to see if greenhouse gases are melting the polar ice cap.
That's the point Clinton needs to make, consistently and as herself. Sure, she may be tedious with her Hillarycare, persisting with the wisdom of her plan even after NBC anchor Brian Williams begged her to stop. But that's who she is.
Clinton's been beaten up, not by the press as she claims but by her own aides, who keep putting different hats on her head.
With the bad advice of her multimillion-dollar consultants (Mark Penn earned $4.3 million in January alone), she's gone from being more hawkish than Bush to talk-show soft with Oprah- lite host Ellen DeGeneres; from the first lady in on every decision to being out of the loop on Nafta. She's tried warmth - - ``I'm honored to be here with Barack'' -- and ridicule.
Channeling Liza
She'd toned down her efforts to depict Obama as Elmer Gantry because he can lift 20,000 people to their feet at rallies when she failed to convince his supporters that they were fools, but it was back in full force last weekend.
The clip of her channeling Liza Minnelli in mocking Obama that was played at the debate would have been libelous if it weren't true. (``The sky will open, the light will come down, celestial choirs will be singing...'')
What makes Clinton so suggestible is that when she looks at the golden boy Obama she sees her husband, and it's déjà vu all over again. Bill always got all the attention. Bill was the smartest kid in the class, beloved of his teachers, without really trying. He was a star among his peers. For years, she worked in his shadow, sitting behind him nodding her head, bringing home the bacon.
It's finally her turn and, while Bill ranks as one of the most popular people in the world, she's having to answer for all the sins of his administration, from bad trade agreements to faulty personnel choices to how women who accused Clinton of harassing them were turned into prevaricating stalkers.
Haunting Her Now
She gets most of the blame for Whitewater and ruining the career (and life) of the longtime head of the White House travel office, claiming he embezzled money (he was exonerated after two years) so that distant cousins from Little Rock could take over the lucrative charters for presidential and White House press corps flights.
While her forbearance during impeachment helped make her a sympathetic figure, that's come back to haunt her. You'd think she stained the blue dress.
She was wrong about getting the first question being unfair and the pillow being funny. It's life that's often unfair and sometimes funny. She's had Bill using up all the oxygen in the room for most of her adult life and now comes Obama, if anything a smarter, better, scandal-free version of her husband. That's not fair. If women in Ohio and Texas see it that way, maybe she still has a chance.
(Margaret Carlson, author of ``Anyone Can Grow Up: How George Bush and I Made It to the White House'' and former White House correspondent for Time magazine, is a Bloomberg News columnist. The opinions expressed are her own.)
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