You might think Hillary Clinton was running for President. Granted, she is a remarkable woman. The first student commencement speaker at Wellesley, part of the first large wave of women to go to law school, a prominent partner in a major law firm, rated one of the top 100 lawyers in the country -- there is no doubt that she is her husband's professional and intellectual equal. But is this reason to turn her into "Willary Horton" for the '92 campaign, making her an emblem of all that is wrong with family values, working mothers and modern women in general?
The Republicans clearly think so. Hillary has been such a constant target of G.O.P. campaign barbs that Bill Clinton recently wondered aloud whether "George Bush was running for First Lady." In making her a focus of their attack strategy, the Republicans seem to have calculated that they can shave votes off Governor Clinton's total by portraying his wife as a radical feminist who prefers the boardroom to the kitchen. And they may be right. In the latest TIME/CNN poll, 74% of the respondents said their votes would not be affected by their views of Hillary; but among the remainder, almost twice as many said they would vote against Clinton (14%) as for him (9%) based on their opinion of his wife. If the Hillary factor can mean the difference of a couple of percentage points, it could provide a critical margin in a close election.
The foundations of the anti-Hillary campaign were carefully poured and were part of a larger effort to solidify Bush's conservative base. Republicans dug up -- and seriously distorted -- some of her old academic articles on children's rights. Rich Bond, the chairman of the Republican National Committee, caricatured Hillary as a lawsuit-mongering feminist who likened marriage to slavery and encouraged children to sue their parents. (She did no such thing.) Richard Nixon warned that her forceful intelligence was likely to make her husband "look like a wimp." Patrick Buchanan blasted "Clinton & Clinton" for what he claimed was their agenda of abortion on demand, homosexual rights and putting women in combat.
Rarely has the spouse of a presidential candidate been so closely scrutinized and criticized by the political opposition. To a large extent, the controversy swirling around Hillary Clinton today reflects a profound ambivalence toward the changing role of women in American society over the past few decades. Hillary, who personifies many of the advances made by a cutting-edge generation of women, finds herself held up against what is probably the most tradition-bound and antiquated model of American womanhood: the institution of the First Lady.