Au dessus de sa gare - the social philosophy of Hillary Rodham Clinton - Editorial

National Review, June 7, 1993 by John O'Sullivan

There is a wonderful silly joke in Terence Rattigan's farce, French without Tears, in which an idle young man learning French is asked to translate "she has ideas above her station," and making a brave stab at it, replies "elle a des idees au dessus de sa gare," which I will translate back as "she has ideas upon her railway terminus."

Every time I see Hillary Clinton, I think of that joke.

Just lately she has been dazzling the press with her grasp of philosophy, with a speech in Texas on "the politics of meaning," and an interview in the Washington Post in which she ranged broadly over life, death, God, and spirituality. Presumably taxes are too sensitive a topic.

She was fortunate in finding the ideal interlocutor in the Post's Martha Sherrill who brought a breathless admiration to her task: "She is both impersonal and poignant - with much more depth, intellect, and spirituality than we are used to in a politician."

Lest you should think that last clause a sneaky qualification, Miss Sherrill points out they're all deeply intellectual and poignantly spiritual in this White House: "They are surrounded by a rather metaphysical staff too ... Al Gore made mention of his |inner life' during the campaign."

Yes; and he almost persuaded me he had one. Mrs. Clinton leaves no doubt on that score. Her inner life, like her outer, is a hive of purposeful activity, a Long March through Epistemology, a "search for meaning."

Indeed, she wants the rest of us to sign up for this quest. Her "politics of meaning" is a sort of philosophical package tour, with coach loads of whole communities singing "Merrily We Roll Along" as they rumble through the undulating lowlands of Positivism, careen down the Hedonistic Precipice, and clamber up the bracing vertiginous heights of Stoicism.

Terrific, put me down for two weeks in August. Oh, by the way, where do we end up?

"The search for meaning," says Mrs. Clinton severely, "should cut across all kinds of religious and ideological boundaries. That's what we should be struggling with - not whether you have a comer on God."

So we are to search for religion in general while avoiding any religion in particular. I think I see. How about political philosophies?

Mrs. Clinton thinks that such queries show an ignorance of the "new sense of politics that Bill and a lot of us are trying to create ... (in which) labels are irrelevant." Labels, that is, like "liberal" and "conservative."

But if we renounce this useful shorthand, then we must laboriously list all the general ideas that it conveys. And indeed Miss Sherrill does list Mrs. Clinton's conclusions: "Life has transcendental meaning ... you have to be involved in something bigger than yourself, linked to a higher purpose ... people need to think of others, instead of themselves ... the Me Decade must give way to the We Decade."

And there it is. A top dressing of references to certified Big Thinkers like Reinhold Niebuhr and Vaclav Havel is added but, curiously, not Albert Camus who always used to be brought in when Tone was needed). Otherwise, these pokerwork mottos are the railway terminus where Mrs. Clinton's search for meaning winds up.

Nothing wrong with them, of course; we all believe them. But they are somewhat thin gruel to offer at the end of such an exacting journey which has anyway left us exactly where we started. Was it really necessary?

One looks desperately around for bigger, deeper, more poignant ideas. Are they under the train? Are they above the station? But there is nothing there. One is tempted to wonder if Mrs. Clinton is really the right person to run the Department of Ontology.

But she has one overriding qualification: no one was elected to do the job, and she wasn't elected.