Rodham of the Barrel; Beth Dozoretz, Martyr; Dale Earnhardt Crashes on Deadline

BOSTON ? Right around the time Hillary's brother "Huge" Rodham began waddling across America's television screens, Andrea Mitchell took to worrying that former President Clinton was "blowing his legacy." Huge's spectacular cupidity offered several new story lines. He spoke volumes, for instance, about Rodham family values, the kind it takes a village to make. Hillary has always tried to weave a bit of ethnic mythology around her parents, to portray them as the kind of WASPs she admired in college?i.e., as noblesse-oblige liberals (like Archibald Cox and William Sloane Coffin or whomever their equivalents were at Wellesley and Yale) manques. There was, unfortunately, the historical fact that Papa Rodham had been a Goldwater supporter so virulent that his offspring volunteered for him, too. No matter. One got the impression that Hillary's parents, while Republican, were also sherry-sipping, church-fair-sponsoring pillars of the community?not the resentment-driven kind of Goldwaterite but the slow-maturing-bond-portfolio kind.

A look at the startling physical and moral resemblances between Huge and his sister tells a different story. This is a family of Midwestern swamp-Yankee grifters, one of whom happened to get high enough SAT scores to claw her way into Wellesley. It shouldn't surprise us. Hillary's assumption that any white heterosexual male is a study in rapacity, appetite, mental dullness and unearned superiority had to come from somewhere.

We're learning a bit about the Rodham/Clinton marriage, too. When the Senate recessed last week, Hillary decided to spend it with her favorite person?herself?in what the New York Post described as "her posh $2.8 million second home." Any woman who's just 45 minutes by shuttle from a husband she hasn't seen in a month, then gets a few days off and spends it in a house he's never occupied, is not living in a second home. She's living in her home?as opposed to his home.

With Huge's triumphal entry, it was clear that the pardon scandals weren't going to follow one of the usual Clinton scandal trajectories, either (a) fizzling out for lack of evidence or (b) accumulating so much evidence that the conscienceless chipperness of the Clintons in the face of it would strain voters' sense of human character, to the point at which they beg investigators to "move on." Not this time. Each day has brought a new iteration of the Marc Rich scandal, until the Clintons' pardon performance looks like a suitable template on which to lay their entire public career. A Newsweek poll shows 39 percent of Americans, post-pardons, have a less favorable opinion of Clinton, versus 3 percent who now view him more favorably. (Who, by the way, are they?) Forty-two percent say Clinton should be "targeted criminally" for his granting of the Rich pardon. Which is why Andrea Mitchell's worries about Clinton's "blowing his legacy" are misplaced. The legacy has never been more secure. Unfortunately for both the Clintons, this is it.

And it gets reinforced every day by those Clintonites who have themselves been unable to "move on." They're like the writer in Fitzgerald's "Babylon Revisited," who holds out hope that an American literary scene is still lurking in some hidden corner of Paris, even years after the city has "gone back into France." They seem to believe that the magic of Clinton's Washington is something other than a state of mind that has disappeared, that it is still thriving in some restaurant or federal agency or television studio somewhere.

Look at what DNC head Terry McAuliffe did on CNN last week. Judy Woodruff asked him this question about the pardon scandals: "Given the high profile of former President Clinton, can your party move on in its own way while Bill Clinton is still out there front and center with stories like this one?" McAuliffe replied: "I think it's a problem for President Bush, because Bill Clinton is in the newspapers every day. And it's not a problem for us. The problem is really on the other side. It's not on our side. We want to talk about the issues, we want to talk about what the Democratic agenda is." (You raise a good point, Terry. What is the Democratic agenda?)

Or take Paul Begala, in whom hope springs eternal. "Republicans," Begala said when asked about the pardons, "can always be counted on to overplay their hand and to take an honest criticism of public policy, where I think he made a mistake, and to turn it into a political attack, to try to make the guy look like he was somehow crooked in doing something, just because they disagree with it." Thereby hangs a puzzle: On the one hand, Begala himself says he disagrees with the pardons. On the other, the president's authority to pardon is plenary. If Clinton's behavior wasn't crooked, there would be no reason for him to disagree with it.

The Dozer

It would be a shame if the only lesson we took out of the Clinton White House was that the Clintons were personally corrupt. Politicians of real stature ought to be capable of wrecking the ideologies they "serve," and the Clintons seem to have inflicted a great deal of damage on liberalism through the snobby simulacrum of it they've practiced for the last decade.

Christopher Hitchens appears more and more correct in his insistence that American politics is one long saga of hacks using the language of populism to both conceal and promote the reality of elitism. That's the lesson one takes from Mary McGrory's museum-quality column on pardon go-between Beth Dozoretz. The two met at that battleground of poverty and despair, the Kennedy estate in suburban Virginia: "I met Beth Dozoretz at Robert Kennedy's swimming pool at Hickory Hill," McGrory writes, "where Ethel Kennedy invited us volunteers to bring children from St. Ann's Infant and Maternity Home to swim every Thursday." (Note the shrine-like reference to the pool; it's still Bobby's, 33 years after his assassination.)

These children were so "bright and verbal and responsive"?and why wouldn't they be? is it because they were poor??that it just tore Beth to pieces. She "wanted to help." Here's what she did: "She visited their home. She gave money to their grandmother. She bought them clothes for school, she bought them books and toys. She sent her car and driver to pick them up and took them to puppet shows and the circus." Huh? Pretty much all of this falls under the rubric of arm's-length almsgiving. The point of having a car and driver, for instance, is that one doesn't have to do any driving at all. And the point of "sending" one's car and driver is that one does not have to ride along with the people he's picking up.

Now, a lot of people make an enthusiastic resolution to "put something back in the pot," to help the worst-off people in the inner cities. But then, after having told most of their friends (and maybe a few discreet confidants with the "Reliable Sources" at The Washington Post), they grow bored with?or scared of?these people, who never wind up being quite as "bright and verbal and responsive" as they had hoped. So, hell, just have the driver take them to the zoo. He'll have more to talk about with them, anyway.

But that's not what happened with Beth Dozoretz! Really! Not at all! Let her friend Mary explain: "She offered every encouragement. In the end, as can be the way with the poorest and most unfortunate of families, where every effort is too much, things fell apart. Whatever she was doing was not enough. But she had been memorably whole-hearted and open-handed in her kindness. It was a thankless activity that brought her no attention or praise." Nope, none at all. All that hard work sitting at the Kennedy poolside and sending her chauffeur off to fight poverty, and poor Beth Dozoretz had nothing to show for it except access to the Kennedys, a position as DNC finance chair, a president of the United States willing to stand as godfather to her daughter, and a role as Oval Office gatekeeper and satrap over a court of megabucks donors. The martyr!

Crashing On Deadline

The death of Dale Earnhardt on the last lap of the Daytona 500 a week ago was one of those Two Nations moments, when you realize how huge is the gulf that separates this country's urbanites from its rustics. You could tell which parts of the country fit in where by looking at the newspaper headlines.

At the "rube" end of the continuum, the Richmond Times-Dispatch, just two hours south of where I live, published a special section two days after the event. USA Today showed itself to be the newspaper of the Sun Belt with its huge banner headline (more appropriate to "Los Angeles Pounded by Nuclear Assault") "NASCAR Legend Dies on Daytona's Last Lap," along with a reverent picture captioned (Diana-style) "Dale Earnhardt, 1951-2001."

I vacillate between thinking Washington has been absorbed into the cosmopolitan Northeast and thinking it's the same Southern backwater it always was. The Daytona crash shows DC to be a bit of both, firmly in the center of the backwater/megalopolis spectrum. Earnhardt's death was the top headline in both The Washington Post ("Dale Earnhardt Killed at Daytona") and The Washington Times ("Dale Earnhardt Killed in Last-Lap Crash"). While the keening reverence on display just two hours south was absent from both the papers, neither of them assumed, either, that anyone would ask Who the Hell's Dale Earnhardt? or What's Daytona? or Last Lap of What?

At the Northern end of the continuum you have The New York Times, which ran the story in its very bottom corner, beneath "Pakistani Tale of a Drug Addict's Blasphemy." The headline was "Stock Car Star Killed on Last Lap of Daytona 500." I love that "stock car star"?as if to say, "Well, you wouldn't recognize his name, but take my word for it, a lot of people will." God knows who writes the Times' headlines, but it's probable the one they had in mind was more along the lines of: "Inexplicably Treasured Cracker with Mustache Immolated in Bizarre Folk Ritual."