In Pursuit of Traditional Power

When New York Democrats began urging Hillary Rodham Clinton to run for the U.S. Senate, most people didn’t take it seriously. Not that she wouldn’t be a good candidate. But after all she has been through, it seemed a safe bet she’d rather invite independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr to a state dinner than spend a year doing battle with the New York press corps for the honor of being one of 100.

But the truth is, Clinton would love to be a senator. Ending months of speculation, she announced Friday that she would set up her exploratory committee. The fact that she really, really wants to enter the race says a lot about who she is and how she sees the world.

In a phrase: She’s old-fashioned. That may seem ironic, since Clinton has become the far right’s poster child for the assault on “traditional values.” But in truth, she is uncomfortable with many modern ideas and prefers the security of an orderly world in which public service is the highest calling and power derives from respected institutions.

Of course, it’s no longer that simple. In the information age, big corporations, the federal government and wealthy individuals no longer hold a monopoly on power. It’s portable; it attaches to individuals and ideas, not just institutions. No one denies that Colin L. Powell and Oprah Winfrey have power. They make things happen just by weighing in. Powell hosts a summit and creates enthusiasm for volunteering. Winfrey urges people to read, and her suggested titles become bestsellers. They pick their topics, make their rules--and get results.

Think what Clinton could accomplish if she leveraged her celebrity, experience and passion on behalf of a few favorite causes. But that’s not what she wants, at least not now. For her, the bully pulpit isn’t enough; she wants the imprimatur of institutional power. Like the U.S. Senate.

Perhaps her view was shaped, at least in part, by her bruising experience in the 1994 battle to reform health care. Though she doesn’t say so publicly, she seems to have concluded that her role as head of the health-care task force was part of the problem. The public was anxious about her unelected status. Her opponents used that to attack her credibility. When push came to shove in Congress, she was part of the problem, but she couldn’t be part of the solution. She needed a seat at the table.

The failure of health care, and the ups and downs of her years in the White House, have done nothing to shake Clinton’s faith in government. If anything, they’ve strengthened it. Only government can make the kind of sweeping changes that improve people’s lives. But for her husband, she probably would have run for elective office years ago.

As an advocate and the wife of a governor and president, she’s always had juice. But without being sanctified by the voters, that influence has always seemed suspect, even to Hillary Clinton. So as she contemplates the next chapter of her life, she doesn’t want to be a personality; she wants to be an inside player. So much so that she’s on the verge of jumping into a brutal campaign that she might not win. As she told Dan Rather recently, the U.S. Senate is “probably the most important legislative body, I would argue, in the history of the world.” If that’s true, given all she believes, then it’s worth the risk.

Clinton’s old-fashioned sensibilities have roots in Park Ridge, Ill., the orderly Chicago suburb where she grew up, her conservative father’s daughter, a Goldwater girl. She excelled in high school and attended Wellesley, one of the “Seven Sister” colleges considered the pinnacle of Eastern establishment education for women in the mid-1960s, a far cry from counterculture campuses like Berkeley. Even as her politics began to change--her support for the civil-rights movement and opposition to the Vietnam War led her to reregister as a Democrat--her methods didn’t. While many kids her age were trying to tear down the establishment, Clinton was trying to get inside it, to use its power to achieve her goals.

After Yale Law School and a stint on Capitol Hill, she left a promising career in Washington to follow her boyfriend to Arkansas. Two years later, she married him and never looked back. As a friend of Clinton’s recently told me, “When she said ‘for better or for worse,’ she meant it--and she got it.” Even after everything she’s been through, she’s still there.

People have speculated that Clinton is running for the Senate so she can leave her husband without really leaving him. But it may be more her effort to stay. She has endured a lot of criticism and not just from feminists, for becoming something she said she would never be: a stand-by-her-man woman. But if she has her own career, and a power base independent of her husband, then she is less wife and more partner. Staying, one could argue, is an act of strength, not weakness.

Clinton’s old-fashioned ideas about public service, power and the role of institutions seem out of place in Los Angeles--like a Model T rolling down the 405. After all, people came west to escape the bounds of traditional society, in which people were expected to accept the established order, embrace rules rigged against them and wait their turn. They also seem out of place for a progressive, even liberal, Democrat, a feminist, a path-breaker in her own right. But there they are. For better or worse, they are drawing her into a campaign for the Senate.*