Who's That First Lady?

By MARGARET CARLSON

Taking the platform in Los Angeles last week, Hillary Clinton showed she has mastered the ballet of politics. She extended her arms like Evita to take in the cheers of the crowd, sweeping back and forth across the stage, the mistress of all she surveyed, breaking stride only for the hackneyed wave and point--with astonished delight, as if she'd just spotted a bunkmate from sleep-away camp. But once the supportive circle of six women Senators left the podium and the applause subsided, Hillary simply couldn't make music. To her the Staples Center was the world's largest day-care center, and she the patient teacher, mouthing bromides in the singsongy style that Al Gore rose above for his own address. Along about the third reference to helping children, the audience began to drift. By the time she was saying thank you (for what she didn't say), many had lost the will to live. If the film introducing the President hadn't been mesmerizing, the walk dramatic and Elvis determined to leave the building quaking, the chill she cast might not have lifted.

Democrats I talked to in the hall just don't know who Hillary is on her own. Yes, she's smart and would have made something of herself had she not married Bill Clinton. But without his sins, we wouldn't know she's human. Had she not become the Wronged Wife, does anyone think Hillary's Senate candidacy would be the least bit plausible in a state she'd only visited as a tourist before deciding to run there? She hated the sympathy but without it she would never have recovered enough from grabbing health-care reform for herself and then bungling it.

The first First Lady to abdicate White House duties, establish a separate residence (even a separate skybox), Hillary, without the President, is all work but no warmth. Can't we just award her the Senate seat? She has followed the owner's manual on how to be a candidate. She kisses babies, wears funny hats, eats blintzes, visits diners (and doesn't forget to tip!) and has been to so many senior citizens' homes it's a wonder her hair isn't blue. She's not exaggerating when she boasts of visiting all 62 counties. She probably knows the precinct captains in Poughkeepsie. She got a pass when a long-ago aide charged that she had uttered an anti-Semitic slur against him. It helped that he was Baptist.

But she still can't catch a break with suburban women. It isn't only her hunger for the job; she just doesn't come across as genuine. It is hard for people to tell what's true when you can't talk about the things most important to you and have to put a smiley face on one of the toughest political marriages in history. When she says she felt like a newlywed unpacking boxes in Chappaqua, it rings hollow. Does she really relish the prospect of rattling around in the huge empty house on her own? When she says, "It takes a village," doesn't she really mean "It takes mandatory universal health care, if only you people had listened"? When she shook so many hands in the Puerto Rican Day parade that veins were bulging in her wrist, all the while earnestly asking "How are you?," it sounded tinny, like a hotel operator inquiring "How can I direct your call?" Gail Sheehy reported that after that somber walk across the White House lawn, the one after the President was forced to admit he'd had sex with "that woman," the Clintons actually laughed and joked on the plane all the way to Martha's Vineyard.

Many Democrats in the hall have given up trying to figure out what's real and what's Memorex. Several weeks ago, Hillary told Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times that she had, after all, been quite active behind the scenes of the Administration. I tend to believe that's true, but the truth is closed off to Hillary after six years of denying that she ever set foot in the West Wing, preferring to concern herself with preserving historic sites, fussing over state dinners and writing a book on entertaining. You can have only so many guises.

Politics comes off as a grim ordeal for her. Bob Dole joked that it will take a SWAT team to evict Clinton from the White House on Inauguration Day, he loves it so much, but Hillary gets more pleasure from one lecture to the women's conference in Beijing than in a year on the stump. He's such a campaign junkie that he pushed a speechwriter out of her chair to tap out Hillary's official announcement speech on Feb. 6 in Purchase, N.Y., then held a Nancy Reagan gaze as he listened to his handiwork. Too bad he was too busy with his own speech at the convention last week to improve hers.

How many people, after being broken in half in front of the whole country, would choose to run for office rather than seek psychotherapy or at least a calm visiting professorship somewhere? If she doesn't ask the people in the hall to believe her but asks them to believe she can accomplish what they believe in, she may yet pull it out. She's such a survivor, CBS should have cast her on the show.