“Just when I thought I was out, the Clintons pull me back into their conjugal psychodrama,” writes N.Y. Times columnist Maureen Dowd in a truly fascinating column. The thrust of her 12.23 entry is that Bill Clinton, for the strangest and most tangled-up of reasons, may be subconsciously sabotaging Hillary Clinton‘s presidential campaign.
The seed of this suspicion is a friend of the Clintons having told Dowd that “for the first time since the Marc Rich pardon, Bill is seriously diminishing his personal standing with the people closest to him.”
“Is Bill torn between resentment of being second fiddle and gratification that Hillary can be first banana only with his help?,” Dowd wonders. “Their relationship has always been a co-dependence between his charm and her discipline. But what if, as some of her advisers suggest, she turned out to be a tougher leader, quicker to grasp foreign policy, less skittish about using military power and more inspirational abroad? What if she were to use his mistakes as a reverse blueprint, like W. did with his dad?
“When Bill gets slit-eyed, red-faced and finger-wagging in defense of her, is he really defending himself, ego in full bloom, against aspersions that Obama and Edwards cast on Clintonian politics?
“Maybe the Boy Who Can’t Help Himself is simply engaging in his usual patterns of humiliating Hillary and lighting an exploding cigar when things are going well. ‘They’re not Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, who had jealousy as the lifeblood of their marriage,’ said one writer who has studied the pair. ‘The lifeblood of their marriage is crisis, coming to each other’s rescue.'”
Exploding cigars! Reverse blueprints! Sturm und drang! Terrific stuff.