Hillary Ascendant: The Freshman Senator as Queen
To wit: On a crisp November afternoon, a stream of Washington's lunchtime stargazers curled out of Borders bookstore, at the power-alley intersection of F St. and 14th St., and stretched for more than a block, the end still forming and barely in sight.
It was?are you ready for this??her nibs, Hillary Rodham Clinton, first-lady-cum-junior-senator-elect from New York, autographing copies of her coffee-table epic, An Invitation to the White House, a glossy handbook about entertaining at the executive mansion.
It was an event demonstrating your tax dollars at work, a sighting that commanded the full might of the U.S. Secret Service?those dress-alike, lookalike Jacks and Jills with wires protruding from their ears, who talk into their shirt cuffs?hovering over its precious charge like an offensive line snuggling a quarterback in a protective pocket.
And just last week, HRC attended a dinner at the Supreme Court for new members of the Senate, accompanied by her date/husband, President Bill Clinton, and the ubiquitous squad of S.S. agents.
No big deal, you say?just an everyday happenstance in this city of self-importance, a company town whose only business is the company, to paraphrase former Labor Secretary Robert Reich.
But the vision of Sen. Hillary surrounded by a human shield of Secret Service agents is a very big deal indeed to those who'll be chronicling her every move and trailing her through the caverns of the Senate complex like tin cans tied to a dog's tail. Hillary's just not some pantsuited Zelig who's ready to blend into any crowd.
For the Washington press corps?or, more specifically, that branch that's assigned to report the doings on Capitol Hill?is concerned about its sacrosanct access to the 100 members of the Senate. And their concern is that the Secret Service, whose protection Mrs. Clinton is entitled to, will exercise its right to protect her from even so much as a common cold, as God and the Treasury Dept. intended.
As a former First Lady, Hillary can accept or reject the single round-the-clock bodyguard to which she is entitled for the rest of her life. Protection would end if she and her husband divorce, or if he dies. She's getting schizophrenic advice both ways?accept and reject.
All of which could mean that the easy access (just wait outside the right door) that reporters enjoy could become sharply restricted under the Secret Service's protective grip, as well as under the restraints of the Capitol police force and its bomb-sniffing dogs. And it comes at a time when the leafy boulevards around the White House have just been reopened to vehicular traffic after a shutdown of five years, at the insistence of the Secret Service and the National Park Service.
However, Robert Petersen, director of the Senate press gallery, was given assurances that the Secret Service will not impede reporters' access to Senate territory.
"I've met with the sergeant at arms, and I was assured that the Secret Service will not interfere with reporters' access to the people they cover," Peterson said. "However, Mrs. Clinton did request that reporters not follow her around during orientation. But that will change in January when she's sworn in."
The Secret Service, backed up by the Capitol police, honored HRC's request by roping off reporters and cameramen and the attendant crush of oglers during Hillary's right-of-passage debut on Senate orientation day.
Lacking the bread at this moment to do anything else, Hillary at least has the wit to put on a good circus. So there's no question that even Hillary knows she'll be a major media draw in the Senate, no doubt to the chagrin of the 99 other members, especially the 12 other women in the Senate, nine of whom outrank her in seniority.
She's already been put on notice by the Senate's Republican rapmaster, Majority Leader Trent Lott of Mississippi, that she should be aware that "she'll be one of 100"?although Lott did soften his edgy tone on orientation day. "And she, I'm sure, is going to be a very diligent senator, work hard...and will be a very important part of this body," he said then.
Hillary herself attempted to deflect attention by declaiming that she wants to be a "workhorse," not a "showhorse."
The Senate is no longer on testosterone overload, no longer a bourbon-and-branch clubby sanctum of male bonding. Its distaff contingent is now 13 strong, and includes Clinton's own in-law, Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, whose daughter is married to HRC's brother.
And that hydrant-sized Maryland Democrat, Barbara Mikulski, is, in her brass-band voice, reminding anyone within earshot?reporters and senators alike?that she's the senior woman in the Senate and dean of the ever-expanding women's caucus, according to reporters who have been within earshot, but who wear the protective cloak of anonymity, if not of silence. So take that, former First Lady.
In fact, Her Deanship, Mikulski, caffeinated Hillary and three other new female members of the Senate in her office on the day after the formal orientation.
But HRC's prominence may be even more nettlesome to senators and to Democratic Party hierarchs than it is inconvenient to the press. News stories are self-fulfilling prophesies. Bet the townhouse that virtually every puff piece about Hillary in the opening weeks and months of Congress will cast her as an eventual candidate for president, thereby devaluing other Democrats who are on the way up (or down).
Feeling sorry for Al Gore? Believe he'll pull an Andrew Jackson four years from now? Think again. Hillary's presence in the Senate, where Gore presided for eight years as ceremonial president and occasional tiebreaker, will surely diminish the former Vice President's comeback chances as he's banished offstage into a sulky private life of what-ifs and might-have-beens.
In the land of the bland, the zippy one-liner is king. Hillary could become the Newt Gingrich of the Senate. Reporters despised him personally and politically, but they were intrigued by his easy accessibility and his eagerness to talk on the record about anything and everything. In politics, those who live by the press die by the press. And it was the media, with its excessive reportage, that eventually helped to decapitate Gingrich as House speaker.
The Senate itself has its own stiletto-in-the-back methods of dealing with showboats, methods that would be envied in a Medici palace. It's an ironfisted rule of legislative demeanor and homage: Newcomers should stay in their seats and keep their lips zipped. Rule two: Pick a single issue and become an expert, don't be a jabbering dilettante who's all over the Congressional Record. Parvenus are expected to listen and learn, to go along and get along, and to pay homage not only to the system, but to its crusty mandarins as well.
Are you listening, Charles Schumer? Already HRC has New York's senior senator (by two years) behaving as if he's the lowliest backbencher groping for even a modicum of attention, let alone respect. And did you witness the way Hillary elbowed her husband, the Big Tuna himself, out of the picture on election night?
So in an evenly divided, haunch-to-paunch Senate of 50 Republicans and 50 Democrats (canny old Joe Lieberman knew what he was doing by running simultaneously for vice president and Senate), keep a whimsical eye trained on the Senate's organizational chart.
As she's one of 10 newcomers, where Hillary ends up sitting will be determined largely by where she stands. And nothing outs more than committee assignments. An attorney by training, and a former Watergate staffer to boot, she's a natural for the prestigious Judiciary Committee, although her preference might be the Commitee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions, which ranking Democrats might object to her sitting on.
Yet her brilliance could be hidden under a bushel basket in some forsaken outpost such as a subcommittee on hatcheries or a committee on one piece of national tomfoolery or another.
Hillary has already been taken down a peg or two. From her executive suite in the White House, and her sprawling house in Chappaqua, she's been assigned to windowless basement digs in the Dirksen Senate catacombs and is considering a rental house in the District. And in place of the haute cuisine of the White House kitchen, Hillary's now slurping bean soup in the Senate dining room. Her salary as senator is $141,300, plus the usual generous travel and staff allowances.
But a Senate sliced down the middle numerically could work to her advantage if Democrats, as they are demanding, win coequal control of the chamber and its perks and privileges. Control, coequal or otherwise, translates into power, and power into position, and onward and upward in the political food chain.
One of the toothsome twists of Hillary's position today is that she's a sitting member of the very same Senate that attempted to impeach her priapic husband, and where bitterness and frustration with the Clinton presidency still linger like a bad hangover.
In politics, pillow talk is a powerful weapon. HRC has announced that she intends to write a book about her feelings and anguish during the Monica Lewinsky imbroglio and the impeachment encounter?no doubt another gesture that will endear her to her 99 colleagues, especially those who led the charge to banish her husband.
Whoever said bedfellows make strange politics had the Clintons in mind.
Frank A. DeFilippo, as a Washington correspondent in the late 1960s, covered the White House and Capitol Hill for the Hearst News Service. He writes from Baltimore.