The Politics of What?

By PRISCILLA PAINTON

It was not enough to insist on having a real job as First Lady. Nor was it enough to begin reinventing America's health-care system. This time Hillary Rodham Clinton has done something really radical: she has made it almost impossible for people to peg her with a permanent caricature. First came the Republican version of a sharp-elbowed, pointy-headed wife determined to play out her ambition through her husband's campaign for the White House; then came Hillary as a cross between Betty Crocker and Joan of Arc, a cathartic role model for women who need to believe that someone can effortlessly combine marriage, children and career.

Now comes St. Hillary, as the New York Times Magazine calls her this week, and parts of Washington are having trouble handling this latest incarnation. Here is a First Lady with a complex moral and political philosophy who not only tries to articulate it, but also believes it could be useful to the nation. "If she wants to talk about the discontents of her own climb, and the spiritual emptiness she feels, congratulations to her for rare candor," wrote Jacob Weisberg in the New Republic. "But her yuppie awakening doesn't mean everyone else is a moral failure."

Much of the puzzling that has greeted Clinton's public soul-searching surrounds her language, most notably the phrase "the politics of meaning," borrowed from Michael Lerner, editor of the Jewish liberal bimonthly Tikkun. But her fascination with the terrain is all her own. She has been groping for an understanding of "what it means to be a human being in the 20th century" ever since she was 14 and began attending the youth sessions of the Rev. Donald G. Jones in Park Ridge, Illinois. He cemented her sense as a Methodist of an obligation to help the less fortunate and introduced her to the writings of theologians Paul Tillich and Reinhold Niebuhr. The former sought to redefine the Christian role in the modern world as one of overcoming alienation through a sense of community; the latter made the case for using power to achieve good.

Lately, much of Hillary's thinking has bubbled out of her in the reflective grief that followed the death of her father in April. America, she said, suffers from a "sleeping sickness of the soul," a "sense that somehow economic growth and prosperity, political democracy and freedom are not enough -- that we lack, at some core level, meaning in our individual lives and meaning collectively, that sense that our lives are part of some greater effort."

The First Lady is not the first resident of the White House to deplore American society's spiritual poverty. Carter did so in his famous "malaise speech," and George Bush skated near it during the 1988 campaign. But in the past 12 years, the subject has generally been monopolized by conservative Republicans who have made "religious" and "right" synonymous. Clinton not only ventures onto their turf, but unashamedly makes their argument that society has extended too many rights without responsibilities, leading to a decline in the standard of behavior. All this may be too much to take for the snarky secularists who make up Washington's pundit class. But for Clinton it has the political virtue of stealing some of the energy that, as she says, has been "animating the responsible fundamentalist right." And it keeps Clinton ahead of her explicators in the caricature game.