All Eyes on Hillary

By MARGARET CARLSON

You might think Hillary Clinton was running for President. Granted, she is a remarkable woman. The first student commencement speaker at Wellesley, part of the first large wave of women to go to law school, a prominent partner in a major law firm, rated one of the top 100 lawyers in the country -- there is no doubt that she is her husband's professional and intellectual equal. But is this reason to turn her into "Willary Horton" for the '92 campaign, making her an emblem of all that is wrong with family values, working mothers and modern women in general?

The Republicans clearly think so. Hillary has been such a constant target of G.O.P. campaign barbs that Bill Clinton recently wondered aloud whether "George Bush was running for First Lady." In making her a focus of their attack strategy, the Republicans seem to have calculated that they can shave votes off Governor Clinton's total by portraying his wife as a radical feminist who prefers the boardroom to the kitchen. And they may be right. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, 74% of the respondents said their votes would not be affected by their views of Hillary; but among the remainder, almost twice as many said they would vote against Clinton (14%) as for him (9%) based on their opinion of his wife. If the Hillary factor can mean the difference of a couple of percentage points, it could provide a critical margin in a close election.

The foundations of the anti-Hillary campaign were carefully poured and were part of a larger effort to solidify Bush's conservative base. Republicans dug up -- and seriously distorted -- some of her old academic articles on children's rights. Rich Bond, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, caricatured Hillary as a lawsuit-mongering feminist who likened marriage to slavery and encouraged children to sue their parents. (She did no such thing.) Richard Nixon warned that her forceful intelligence was likely to make her husband "look like a wimp." Patrick Buchanan blasted "Clinton & Clinton" for what he claimed was their agenda of abortion on demand, homosexual rights and putting women in combat.

Rarely has the spouse of a presidential candidate been so closely scrutinized and criticized by the political opposition. To a large extent, the controversy swirling around Hillary Clinton today reflects a profound ambivalence toward the changing role of women in American society over the past few decades. Hillary, who personifies many of the advances made by a cutting-edge generation of women, finds herself held up against what is probably the most tradition-bound and antiquated model of American womanhood: the institution of the First Lady.

The President's wife, as Eleanor Roosevelt once wrote, was to be seen and not heard, a discreet adornment to her husband's glory. Never mind that Mrs. Roosevelt broke most of her own rules with her high-profile tours and a vocal interest in civil rights. Most of those who followed in her footsteps remained true to the traditional backseat role, and those who ventured too close to the policymaking arena -- Rosalynn Carter sitting at the Cabinet table, for instance -- were harshly criticized. And there are some sound reasons for concern. The President's spouse is potentially the second most powerful person in government but is beyond accountability. Yet for reasons that are both social and generational, Barbara Bush will almost certainly be the last of the traditional First Ladies. Whoever follows her is likely to shatter the mold -- particularly if it is a woman with the professional achievements, the career ambitions and the activist bent of Hillary Clinton.

Still, Mrs. Clinton would have done well at the outset to have conformed more to the traditional campaign rules for aspiring First Ladies: gaze like Nancy Reagan, soothe like Barbara Bush and look like Jacqueline Kennedy. By not doing that, to some extent, Hillary played into the hands of her critics. At first she seemed insufficiently aware that she was not the candidate herself. Instead of standing by like a potted palm, she enjoyed talking at length about problems and policies. At one coffee in a living room in Manchester, New Hampshire, people were chatting amiably about the cost of groceries when she abruptly launched into a treatise on infant mortality. She sometimes took longer to introduce her husband than he did to deliver his speech. She, and he, should have known that quips like "People call us two- for-one" would arouse the traditionalists.

Her image as a tough career woman probably peaked in March, when Democratic gadfly Jerry Brown charged that her law firm benefited unfairly from her marriage to the Arkansas Governor. After she shot back, "I suppose I could have stayed home, baked cookies and had teas," many minds snapped shut on the Hillary question faster than you can say sound bite. (Almost no one reported the rest of what she said: "The work that I have done as a professional, a public advocate, has been aimed . . . to assure that women can make the choices . . . whether it's full-time career, full-time motherhood or some combination.")

Ironically, Hillary's natural desire to shield her daughter from the glare of publicity only fed suspicions that she valued the role of high-powered lawyer over that of wife and mother. Instead of using Chelsea in photo ops in New Hampshire, where a sweet family portrait might have helped counter the Gennifer Flowers story, Hillary kept her daughter back in Little Rock with her grandparents. To this day, Chelsea has never been interviewed and is still only rarely photographed.

All this made Hillary a perfect foil for Barbara Bush, the composed matron for whom hard-edged feminism is as foreign as an unmade bed. That she looks and acts as if she is above the political fray only makes her a more potent force within that very arena -- although her most conspicuous activities are politically neutral, like hugging sick babies, promoting literacy and ghostwriting best sellers for her dog. Twice as popular as her husband, she can have it both ways when she wants to. No one would think to label America's favorite grandmother cynical when she lets it be known that she is pro-choice, while her husband is doing everything possible to make abortion a crime. Mrs. Bush has also worked hard to conceal her role in the White House, which can be every bit as ferocious as was Nancy Reagan's, especially when she believes the President is not being well served. She can turn on a bulldog disposition when warranted. "You people are just not as important as you think you are," she once growled to a group of journalists she thought were tormenting her husband.

Although Mrs. Bush initially said Hillary bashing should be off limits, she reversed herself later on the grounds that Mrs. Clinton was playing such a prominent role and had spoken out on public policy. The President agreed and got in a few swipes of his own about Hillary's legal writings. Then Marilyn Quayle chimed in, insisting in an interview that as a representative of "the liberal, radical wing of the feminist movement," Mrs. Clinton was absolutely fair game.

Seated on the couch in the living room of the Arkansas Governor's mansion last week, with Bill and Chelsea waiting to have a rare family dinner, Hillary responded to the Republican onslaught more in sadness than in anger. "I really don't know what to make of it," she told TIME. "What recently has happened has been part of a very sad and cynical political strategy. It's not really about me. I find it hard to take a lot of that personally, since the portrait is a distorted, inaccurate one."

The unprecedented headlining of Barbara and Marilyn at the Republican National Convention last month was above all an attempt to score points on the family-values front by depicting them as paragons of stay-at-home motherhood. The First Lady's approach was typically gentle and low-key, invoking her years of driving carpools, den mothering and going to Little League games. Marilyn, however, took the white gloves off with a strident critique of the choices and values Hillary Clinton represents. "Not everyone ((in our generation)) believed that the family was so oppressive that women could only thrive apart from it," she said. "Most women do not wish to be liberated from their essential natures as women."

But there are signs that such tactics may backfire on the Republicans. The latest TIME/CNN poll shows, for example, that only 5% of likely voters consider family values the main campaign issue and that Marilyn Quayle is the least popular of the three women, with a 37% approval rating, compared with 40% for Hillary and 76% for Barbara. Only 14% felt Hillary does not pay enough attention to her family.

Bush campaign strategists, in fact, have sought to tone down the anti- Hillary rhetoric in recent weeks. In their own postconvention surveys, the Republicans found that a hard core of about 10% to 15% of voters strongly dislike the Arkansas Governor's wife. But the internal surveys also indicated this anti-Hillary sentiment is firm and needs no boosting, while the great majority of the public finds the assaults on her insulting, meanspirited and beside the point.

The Clinton camp, meanwhile, came to the same conclusion. A sampling taken by Democratic pollster Stan Greenberg showed that Hillary's favorability ratings shot up 8 or 9 points right after the Republican Convention. All the Hillary bashing in the Astrodome, says Clinton's top campaign strategist, James Carville, "played to a decent advantage for us. The Republican Party in Houston made a collective fool of itself in attacking Hillary. People want to hear other things in an election campaign than a distorted 1974 scholarly article."

The main reason for the backlash is obvious: by taking after Hillary the way they did, the Republicans unnecessarily angered moderates, who saw the attack as one on women in general. By going after women who work, they got at the elite Murphy Browns -- a small contingent -- but also snagged the middle- and working-class Roseannes, creating solidarity among both groups, who aren't confident enough in their new roles to take a presidential strike force with equanimity. Scratch the surface of any mother and she wonders if she is doing it right, whether she works full time, part time or not at all. A note from the teacher saying Junior is having trouble with long division can make a trial lawyer wonder if she should write briefs from the kitchen table. Ask a stay-at-home mother at a cocktail party what she does, and she looks at you as if you just asked if you could have one of her fingers as an hors d'oeuvre. She is wondering if she will ever be able to get back into the job market again, and is worried that if her children don't turn out a lot better than those of the woman doing arbitrage deals down the block, she will have wasted her life.

While the Republicans were busy painting Hillary as an overly ambitious careerist, she seemed to be consciously modifying her style. In the past few months, she has softened her image (much to the dismay of some feminists), grinning and gripping like a mayor's wife and baking cookies to show she is not a harridan. She has even learned to stand at the back of the stage and look at Bill with a convincing imitation of the Nancy Reagan gaze.

In person and off the podium, Hillary Clinton is neither a killer lawyer nor the adoring spouse of the bus tours. Riding in the back seat of a car during a New York campaign swing, she wolfs down popcorn while worrying about whether < Chelsea got her booster shots. She jokes about only making the teams for sports like volleyball and softball -- and laments that she didn't have the foresight to concentrate on profession-enhancing pastimes like tennis and golf. While Bill can go for long stretches of time on the road, she says she has to head back frequently to Little Rock to "make a cup of tea, hang out with Chelsea, take an afternoon nap. If I don't get back there, I don't feel grounded."

Running parallel to this homing instinct is what friends describe as a growing spirituality over the past few years. Though the fact is not trumpeted -- even in the face of Republican family-values attacks -- Hillary, a Methodist who claims to have been "religiously committed since childhood," carries her favorite Scriptures (Proverbs, Psalms, Corinthians, Beatitudes) wherever she goes. She and Bill regularly pray with Chelsea at bedtime. "As I have grown older," says Hillary, "I have tried to synthesize my personal beliefs with the way I act in the world and to try to keep growing. It's a very important part of who I am and what I think my life should mean."

Friends describe Hillary as someone who tends toward the earnest and serious but who nonetheless has a playful side. "She laughs harder than anyone at the jokes, but she is always a little surprised when she herself gets off a good line," says Mack McLarty, who has known the Governor since they attended Miss Mary's Kindergarten together in Hope, Arkansas, and is now chairman of the board of Arkla Inc., a huge natural-gas conglomerate. Prominent Washington lobbyist Liz Robbins, an old friend of both Clintons, marvels at the fact that Hillary manages to stay in touch while less busy people do not. "Hillary is a very inclusive person, which you don't usually find in successful women," says Robbins.

While not the life of a party, Hillary tends to get into the spirit of an evening. She's the one to "try the new meal -- hippopotamus stew -- or order the blue drink," says television producer Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. Most socializing is done at home, in the kitchen and breakfast room and around the piano. (All three Clintons play the instrument, says Hillary, "but none of us is what you'd call good.") They play Pictionary, Scrabble and a cutthroat card game called Hungarian Rummy.

Before the campaign switched into high gear, the Clintons would eat dinner at least once a week with Bill's mother and stepfather and Hillary's parents, who moved from Chicago to Little Rock a few years ago. On such occasions, says Dorothy Rodham, Hillary's mother, they all subscribe to the theory that it is more important who is around the table than what's on it -- which is fortunate for Hillary, who admits she served black beans, chili and leftovers from an official dinner as last year's Christmas meal.

There is no mistaking that Hillary is a strong and determined woman, used to dominating whatever situation she is in by force of mind. Although the campaign plays down her role, she is the talent that test-drives the Governor's ideas, punches holes in his theories, comments on his speeches and often identifies the weak spots in his campaign operation and helps get them corrected. She is one of the people who can convince him it's better to make three points in a speech than six, and the only one who can make sure he gets to bed on time rather than shooting the breeze with staff members into the wee hours, as he likes to do. Hillary herself ensures that Clinton's Arkansas supporters are properly used in his presidential quest. Says campaign aide Betsy Wright: "She has the analytic ability to make certain that the decisions he is leaning toward are ironclad." Mrs. Clinton is certain to be one of the key players in the room when her husband finally sits down to prepare for his crucial -- though still unscheduled -- debates with President Bush.

The gravest error the Republicans may have made was not resting their case with Barbara Bush. Instead they also spotlighted Marilyn Quayle as the symbol of their baby-boomer professional woman who gave it all up for the man she loves. Those worried about Hillary Clinton being a co-President (although in 11 years as First Lady in Arkansas, no one accused her of being co-Governor) should take a look at Mrs. Quayle's activities. She was her husband's campaign manager and has an office near his in the Old Executive Office Building, where she spends much of her time. In joint interviews, she doesn't hesitate to correct her husband.

An intelligent and capable manager who can rightly claim much of the credit for Dan's success, Marilyn Quayle has a vindictive streak that often undercuts her strengths. While aides go out of their way to point out what a nice guy her husband is, one Republican handler admits that "Marilyn doesn't have a lovable side."

Mrs. Quayle's personality and career choices should no more be a campaign issue than those of Mrs. Clinton. But the Vice President's wife has gone out of her way to criticize Hillary on points where she has labeled criticism of herself as unfair. When stories surfaced in 1988 about her parents' adherence to the teachings of Fundamentalist preacher "Colonel" Robert B. Thieme Jr., known for attacking homosexuals, liberals and the United Nations, she fumed that religion was a private matter. But recently she told a friend she considered it "very significant" that the Governor and his wife attended different churches.

While Mrs. Quayle is urging women who care about their children not to work, she is constantly buzzing around the world and the country helping her husband campaign to keep his job. Having adopted disaster relief as her personal crusade, she has visited numerous disaster sites in the U.S. and abroad during the past four years. Just last week she was off to Florida, as a highly visible member of the board of the Federal Emergency Management Agency. She has also traveled to all 50 states on behalf of the party, raising more than $1 million for the campaign. Almost any paying job, short of flight attendant, would give her more time at home with her kids.

And she has found time to co-author a potboiler novel called Embrace the Serpent and to take a nine-state book tour. Some critics point out, however, that she would never have landed a sweetheart book deal -- Crown Publishers churned out 75,000 copies instead of the usual 6,000 for a first novel -- if she had not been married to the Vice President. Marilyn Quayle's activities demonstrate nothing more than the fact that in the modern age, talented, ambitious women need not hide their skills nor divert their energies. Although politically unthinkable for a Republican at the moment, what would be wrong with a qualified lawyer like Marilyn Quayle -- or Hillary Clinton -- holding an important government job, if earned by merit? Robert Kennedy was his brother's Attorney General, and both the President and the country were well served.

Last week Hillary Clinton sought to reclaim a bit of her policy role by saying she intended to take a more "comprehensive" role in the White House, meaning she would be an active "voice for children" and an advocate of programs to promote their interests. "I have recollections of extraordinary policy roles taken by Eleanor Roosevelt and very strong positions on the environment by Lady Bird Johnson," she told TIME.

First Spouses have always had some influence on the President, no matter how much that influence was hidden or downplayed. Woodrow Wilson's wife Edith was the virtual President during her husband's long illness. And it is impossible to imagine Presidents from George Washington to George Bush not listening to the counsel of the one person in the world upon whom they can count to have their joint interests at heart. Bush is a better President for having Barbara Bush at his side. So why shouldn't Dan Quayle get the benefit of Marilyn Quayle's intellect and instincts? And why shouldn't Bill Clinton have the benefit of Hillary Clinton's? And why then shouldn't the country get the same benefit? Perhaps it is time to admit that "two for one" is a good deal.

CHART: NOT AVAILABLE

CREDIT: From a telephone poll of 836 American adults taken for TIME/CNN on Aug. 25-27 by Yankelovich Clancy Shulman. Sampling error is plus or minus 3%.

CAPTION: Do your opinions of Hillary Clinton make you more inclined to vote fro Bill Clinton?

Which of the following apply to Hillary Clinton?

With reporting by Priscilla Painton and Walter Shapiro/Little Rock