Hillary Rodham Clinton’s role as a policymaker, and the substantive differences she may have with her husband–and her elusiveness in expressing her views–are what make this fair game, and irresistible. The fact is, we don’t know all that much about the First Lady’s politics–or about the ways she influences, or fails to influence, her husband. It seems clear that the early caricatures-feminazi, ultraliberal–were in sufficient and overwrought. Both Clintons are subtle, eclectic political thinkers. They are not easily boxed, which is part of the reason Mrs. Clinton’s views often seem so elusive: A religious feminazi? A liberal willing to “blame the victims” (welfare mothers who aren’t responsible)? The president is even harder to pin down. Their tiffs, noisy or not, must be great fun. And unpredictable–her idealism met by his pragmatism, his sentimentality by her discipline? What self-respecting policy wonk wouldn’t give all to be a fly on that wall?
To my knowledge, the Clintons have had one public disagreement on an issue, but it was telling–and it may shed some light on health care. The issue was day care. In the late ’80s, Democrats proposed a plan, pretty much spoon-fed by Marian Wright Edelman of the Children’s Defense Fund, Hillary’s longtime mentor. It was classic liberalism: a centralized federal bureaucracy supervising a nationwide network of standardized public day-care centers. What made this debate significant, though, was the Republican response: they didn’t just say no. They acknowledged the social problem-working mothers needed help-and proposed a tax-credit (or voucher) system, giving the parents an array of day-care choices. The National Governors’ Association, led by Bill Clinton, backed a compromise nearer the GOP plan than was comfortable for Marian Wright Edelman, who continued to fight passionately–indeed, intemperately–for her vision. Hillary Clinton supported her–and lost. An odd coalition of conservatives and New Democrats won a modest victory.
It was the first in a series of confrontations between traditional liberals and the new activists–let’s call them choicers–all of which revolve around the same essential questions: Government programs or tax credits (which can be “refunded” to the poor)? Regulations or incentives? Mandates or choices? The choicers have won the initial rounds, intellectually if not substantively. Their rhetoric has become public-policy boilerplate. Bill Clinton, a clever practitioner, used it to great effect in his splendid health-care speech last week.
This debate is, clearly, more complicated than day care. But the pure liberal position is still centralized, standardized–single-payer (like Canada). The pure Republican position, a progressive system of tax credits to individuals, would encourage more choice and individual responsibility. Both, though, are political nonstarters; the debate will take place in the mushy middle. The Clintons will try to work with a coalition of moderate Democrats and Republicans–whose plans are less ambitious than the president’s, but appear more reasonable.
The Clinton plan is a grand theoretical achievement, with “answers” for every contingency. But it is rife with mandates-benefits package, employer responsibilities, powerful new bureaucracies to supervise the whole shebang. It is neatly defended, as theory often is–but has two serious flaws. First, the health industry, one seventh the economy, is simply too large to be managed by government. There will be unintended consequences, especially if the president insists on price controls. Second, bureaucracy accretes. The Clintons intend slim, efficient agencies–but their National Health Board will have the power to issue guidelines to doctors that would make Al Gore’s ashtray specs seem simple. Their health alliances will control more money than most states, with less accountability. Their “employer mandates” will be much harder on small business than a plan that moves toward individual responsibility through tax credits.
“If there’s a better system out there, we’re open to it,” the First Lady said, regarding employer mandates, at a White House lunch last week. But maybe we shouldn’t be thinking about systems just yet; maybe there isn’t any unified field theory of health care, just lessons learned through trial and error. The Clintons, Hillary especially, will define themselves by the way they handle this. We’ll soon have a better idea how didactic she is, how patient she is–and if her obvious intelligence is accompanied by a measure of wisdom.
title: “Scenes From A Marriage” ShowToc: true date: “2022-12-28” author: “Jennifer Anthony”
In 1992, when she was a woman newly scorned, Mia Farrow sent Woody Allen a family portrait with turkey skewers stuck through everyone’s heart, along with a scalding message about his effect on her children. Though she doesn’t dwell on it in her memoir, What Falls Away (370 pages. Doubleday. $25), it was that unfunny valentine that started the glitterati backlash against her. Even liberals had seen red when Allen, after a dozen years of everything-but-marriage, began an affair with Farrow’s 20-year-old daughter. But after Valentine’s Day, the waiflike actress was no longer viewed with the kind of pity reserved for multiple-vehicle wrecks. There was almost a sigh of relief. Ah, she’s nuts then, people said. A West Side Medea. What Farrow’s simply elegant memoir does, however, is redeem her, in all her strengths and many frailties. It reveals her as a desperately naive, desperately lonely and intelligent woman caught in a common web: the inevitability of her own artfully dysfunctional family of origin played out in her adult life choices.
Leave out the legal rodeo over child custody. Leave out the allegations of sexual abuse, never proved, that she all but predictably flung at Allen during their vitriolic breakup. The distinguishing poison of the whole saga lies in the words Farrow hurled at him during their central confrontation. This was just after she found his pornographic Polaroids of Soon-Yi, the Korean daughter Farrow had adopted with her former husband, AndrE Previn. She screamed, ““You’re supposed to do the right thing! You’re not supposed to f–k the kids!''
Well, yes. And in my neighborhood, a man in his 50s who seduced his mate’s child would end up not a well man. And I don’t mean in the sense of not emotionally functioning. I mean in the sense of walking with functional kneecaps.
Farrow was show-business royalty from birth: the daughter of actress Maureen O’Sullivan and the tormented writer-director John Farrow. With no ghostwriter’s shadow over her shoulder, she writes with the grace and guilt of a convent-educated Irish Catholic girl. ““What Falls Away’’ is a grim fairy tale, and as in fairy tales, the most beastly details–childhood polio, her father’s dark but beguiling temperament and impressive womanizing–are retold in elegiac, almost ethereal prose.
After her father’s death, Farrow set out on what Sigmund Freud’s receptionist could have identified as a father quest. She aligned herself with Salvador Dali, sought peace with the Beatles and their aging guru in a Himalayan idyll, married the grand champion of sugar daddies, Frank Sinatra. She skates over the failure of her two marriages–blaming nothing much but time and distance. The narrative is most flawed when Farrow tries her hand at the big philosophical sweeps, in language more suited to Hiroshima than divorce: ““All that was nonessential … was singed to gray ash and blew away where I stood, a bare, scorched human stalk, bent into the wind.''
It’s when she encounters Woody Allen that she takes off the verbal velvet gloves. With mixed success, she recounts their long, doubt-ridden courtship, his indifference to her beloved children (nine of them then, 14 now), his bouts of leveling cruelty. Farrow writes that her biggest regret is having given 12 years of her children’s precious childhoods to the influence of a man whose feelings for them and her sometimes rose to ambivalence.
Except for the details, among them artistic genius, Farrow and Allen’s slow tumble to degradation could have happened in a trailer park: Single mothers are lonely and harried and tempted to cling. Perennial loners are selfish and strange. People will cling to a life raft and attempt to ignore the leaks.
One of the most stunning criticisms of Farrow’s decision to write this book is that it sprang from a desire to profit financially, to protect her children. Even if that is true, how is it wrong? And, yes, Farrow has an excessive desire to draw around her a tribe–what Carson McCullers, another lonely heart, called ““a we of me’’–and she seems overly lyrical about her own relationship with her children. But is that evidence of dishonesty? Maybe, in an age when motherhood is fashionably seen as a private hobby, it’s an offbeat courage.
In one skirmish between Allen and Farrow, he’s supposed to have said, ““By the time I’m finished with you, there will be nothing left.’’ In ““What Falls Away,’’ Mia Farrow quietly answers, ““No way.''
