B-b-b-b-bad to the bone

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February 25, 2001 New York Times

Weird, Psychic Lock

By MAUREEN DOWD

ASHINGTON — First there was that woman.

Now there is that person.

As in Hillary telling a group of us huddled around her in the Russell Senate Office Building on Thursday that we should go hunt down "the person" or "people" who issued those sulfurous pardons, because she was plum shocked about the whole thing.

"With respect to any of these decisions, you'll have to talk with people who were involved in making them," she said. "And that leaves me out."

Again and again, she alluded to her husband without using his name.

No matter what bad, bad thing her bad, bad boy did in the past, Hillary never before shoved him into traffic, saying: "You'll have to ask him."

It was the first shot in the War of the Roses. The dame has decided to ice the dude.

Bill has been chained in Chappaqua, while Hillary reigns on Embassy Row. But they know they're bad for each other, so they won't be able to stay apart. Soon they'll be hanging from that pricey Walter Kaye chandelier and screaming about who owes what to whom. We have reached ground zero of America's most byzantine marriage. The Clintons have run out of aides to blame, friends to ruin, Republicans to decry, conspiracies to denounce and hearts to break.

Now they are turning on each other.

Hillary can't put her political career back on track unless she makes Bill take the fall. And Bill can't put his post-presidential career back on track unless he stops Hillary from forcing him to take the fall.

It's reminiscent of "Prizzi's Honor" when Kathleen Turner and Jack Nicholson, married hit men for the Mob, suddenly turn on each other.

She takes a pistol out of her make- up drawer. He removes a dagger taped to his shin. She shoots. He throws. She gets it in the throat.

So place your bets, mesdames et messieurs.

The cagey senator known as "the Warrior"? Or the cunning ex-president known as "the Survivor"?

Despite the bitter betrayals involved, they never turned on each other during earlier cataclysms because they shared a political goal: to make Bill president, to keep Bill president, to do Great Things.

But now their ambitions are on different tracks.

"This is the first time their political self-interest has diverged," says Dee Dee Myers, Mr. Clinton's former press secretary who is now a "West Wing" consultant. "Before, they were all wound up together on the national stage. Now she has hung out her own shingle and Senator Clinton is not dependent for success or failure on the ex-president."

Ms. Myers is often asked: Will they stay married? She always said yes, "because they have this weird, magnetic, psychic lock between them. And I think she's hot for him. But this is the first time in their married life when she is not the caboose or sidecar connected to his career. Maybe she will want to split off."

When Hillary tried to send the hounds chasing off after her husband, she was feeling the heat from revelations about her brother Hugh taking "a success fee" of $400,000 for helping secure a pardon for a Miami vitamin charlatan and a commutation for an L.A. drug kingpin. And for the cat's cradle of her intimates — old friend Harry Thomason, campaign guru Harold Ickes and her former campaign treasurer, William Cunningham — involved in the pardons of two Little Rock restaurateurs convicted of tax evasion.

But the pack was not so easily diverted. By Friday we learned that Mary Jo White, nicknamed Sid Vicious by tennis partners familiar with her ferocity, was not only investigating the pardon of Marc Rich, but also the decision to commute the sentences of four Hasidic New Yorkers whose clemency was championed at a White House meeting that Mrs. Clinton attended. In her Senate race, Hillary got an outlandishly large margin of the vote in the Hasidic community where the four men resided.

There's always the chance, with this pair, that Bill is strategically instructing Hillary to distance herself from him, as some Democrats said he did during her Senate campaign. Sid Vicious needs to get these two into separate interrogation rooms.

If this really is marital mutually assured destruction, which half will prevail? Will Bill talk to Brokaw, and "accidentally" drop something devastating about Hill?

On the one hand, Senator Hillary now has the power. On the other hand, he is Bill Clinton.



-- (Paracelsus@Pb.Au), March 25, 2001

Answers

off, off, damn tags

-- (-@-.-), March 25, 2001.

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