Autumn in Chappaqua With Hillary
Sitting in the Starbucks coffee shop at North Greeley and King streets in Chappaqua in the last hours of the 2006 campaign, I am at the center of the happy-go-lucky town that within moments launches Hillary Clinton for the presidency.
If she is successful over the next 24 months, it will be these Starbucks consumers who nominate her, these suburban moms and dads who choose her over the maverick John McCain, and these generous, well-educated, demanding, well-traveled, contrarian Democrats and independents of Westchester who throw the dice and make history by putting a mom in the White House. Her campaign for commander in chief begins here with her overwhelming victory for the Senate and, more completely, in her public endeavor to remake herself into the American icon of Mrs. Suburban New York.
Yes, Mrs. Clinton is not much of a mom from Chappaqua, is not truly a New Yorker, and is not genuinely a resident of anywhere but America, but then again, the vast number of voters whom she will court are not from where they live today, are not what they were born to be, and are not anything less than their own dreams. In these last decades since the end of the Cold War, Americans have remade their lives as she has done.
Fifty years ago, Chappaqua was a hardscrabble farming village with a sprinkling of clapboard estates on the outskirts of commuter lines into Grand Central. Today, it is a manicured Manhattan neighborhood that is fully integrated into New York City's culture, commerce, and politics. The very busy Harlem-line train station is a museum-quality showplace. The World War II and Vietnam monument anchors the train station parking lot of $70,000 drive-to-station-only cars. The main drag of King Street offers small stores and small-banking convenience between the Dunkin' Donuts across from Horace Greeley High School and the Starbucks across from Sotheby's Realty Agency of Westchester.
The Sotheby's post is the key to the town. In the surrounding hills and dells is a display of plush housing that 100 years from now will be artwork. Chappaqua is a totally constructed Google Earth document of our times, and Mrs. Clinton is a totally constructed politician appropriate to represent what America wants to be in the 21st century.
Yes, too, Mrs. Clinton is not much of a traditional big city Democrat, and she certainly is not a recognizable Eastern Republican, even of the sleepy Rockefeller cell. Mrs. Clinton's health-care policy while first lady is now forgettable spreadsheet wonkism that was shoved aside by what the pre-Internet newspapers made of the Clinton scandals. Mrs. Clinton's policies in the Senate during the last six years reflect a cautious, acute, center/left-of the-road Ivy Leaguer. In truth, the only way to describe her 2006 politics is as colorless intellectualism: bookish not bombastic, obedient not rebellious, slow, over-patient, tepid.
And yes, Mrs. Clinton is not much of a campaigner. Her voice is uninteresting. Her demeanor in person is that of a compelling rock star, but on TV, she appears tense, obtuse, and on autopilot, what "Star Trek" would call "shields up." Then again, Mrs. Clinton does possess the one political weapon that only foolish Republicans would underestimate — her blindingly colorful husband. President Clinton is a man on a mission to install his wife in the Oval Office and to vindicate his marred presidency with a remake. There is no easy equivalent in American history to his potency, aggression, and theatrics, with the possible exception of William Jennings Bryan, who was three times denied the White House and never quit to the day he collapsed in the heat of the Scopes trial. Mrs. Clinton will proceed down the road, side by side with Bill Clinton, and the next two years will be everything one could ask for in noise, melodrama, revenge, and suspense, a comic opera to enjoy.
Finally, yes, Mrs. Clinton in the White House is not much of an advance over the battered, manipulative, self-important politicians who dominated the White House when she and her husband and my own lot were young and rudely posed against the men who vouchsafed intolerance, Saigon, and mutually assured destruction. It is a hard irony that takes a lifetime of talk to learn that we are President Kennedy's and Nixon's offspring, and that perhaps we have moved the argument for a better republic about one small step. Two years from now, we will all know if Mrs. Clinton of Chappaqua is our last best hope to get one more foothold in the autumn of our lives.
Mr. Batchelor is host of "The John Batchelor Show," now on hiatus.
