f Michael Kelly can rise from the grave, this will be the week. He’s been summoned.
Kelly was the most relentlessly savage chronicler of the Clinton administration, and of the Clintons personally, but his opening shot was so subtle you had to squint to see what he was doing. In a long feature story that appeared in The New York Times Magazine in May of 1993 under the that’s-not-a-compliment title “Saint Hillary,” Kelly very quietly mocked Hillary as a preening know-it-all who didn’t know much of anything.
He wrote that she represented “the message of the preacher,” with a way of speaking that delivered a stream of moral lectures, as if she had the authority and the wisdom to direct others in the act of moral reconstruction. If you click on the link and read the whole story, you’ll want to watch for the transitional paragraph, the switch from mostly description to mostly derision. It begins with the words, “It is at this point that some awkward questions arise.” Next paragraph: “If it is necessary to remake society, why should Hillary Rodham Clinton get the job?”
It becomes less kind from there. Kelly described a meeting between Hillary Clinton and the left-wing Jewish editor and activist Michael Lerner, who (Kelly says) offered a vision of “unintentionally hilarious Big Brotherism.” And then: “The reason Lerner’s proposals for the application of the politics of meaning focus so heavily on bureaucratic irrelevancies is the same reason Mrs. Clinton is struggling still with words.” Self-delusion, unawareness of political realities, hard-headed self-importance, oblivious bumbling in an unearned sense of certainty. A moralizer, but not moral, unwise but committed to the appearance of wisdom.
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