DOWD: Already worn to exhaustion by Hillary’s campaign

Oy. By the time the Bushes and Clintons are finished, they are going to make the Tudors and the Plantagenets look like pikers. Barack Obama will turn out to be the interim guy who provided a tepid respite while Hillary and Jeb geared up to go at it.

But, as the Clinton library tardily disgorged 3,546 pages of official papers last month—dredging up memories of a presidency that was eight years of turbulence held steady by a roaring economy and an incompetent opposition, a reign roiled by Hillarycare, Vince Foster, Whitewater, Webb Hubbell, Travelgate, Monica, impeachment, Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey and Marc Rich—the looming prospect of another Clinton-Bush race makes us feel fatigued.

There was a Bush or a Clinton in the White House and cabinet for 32 years straight.

Just as Hillary clears the Democratic field if she is healthy and runs, a major Romney donor told The Washington Post that “if Jeb Bush is in the race, he clears the field.”

When the Clintons lost to Obama, they simply turned Obama’s presidency into their runway. Jim Messina, Obama’s 2012 campaign manager, and a passel of other former Obama aides are now helping Hillary. And Bill is out being the campaigner-in-chief.

The new cache of Clinton papers is benign, but just reading through them is draining. There are reams of advice on how to steer health care, which must have filled the briefing binders Hillary famously carried.

But did she absorb the lessons, given that health care failed because she refused to be flexible and make the sensible compromises suggested by her husband and allies? She’s always on listening tours, but is she hearing?

Just as in the reminiscences compiled by Hillary’s late friend, Diane Blair, a political science professor at the University of Arkansas, the new papers reflect how entangled the Clintons’ public and private lives were in the White House.

In a 1995 memo, Lisa Caputo, the first lady’s press secretary, sees an opportunity for the upcoming re-election campaign by “throwing a big party” for the Clintons’ 20th wedding anniversary.

“We could give a wonderful photo spread to People magazine of photos from the party coupled with old photos of their honeymoon and of special moments for them over the past 20 years,” Caputo wrote, adding that they could turn it into “a nice mail piece later on.”

The cascade of papers evoke Hillary’s stressful brawls—with her husband, the press, Congress and the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. And they evoke the issue about her that is so troubling and hard to fathom.

She is an immensely complex woman with two sides. She is the tireless and talented public servant. And she is the tired warrior who can be insecure and defensive, someone who has cleaved to a bunker mentality when she would have been better served getting out of her defensive crouch.

Talking to her pal Blair, Hillary had a lot of severe words for her “adversaries” in the press and the Republican Party. Blair also said Hillary was “furious” at Bill for “ruining himself and the presidency” by 1994.

Hillary has spent so much time searching for the right identity, listening to others tell her who to be, resisting and following advice on being “real,” that it leaves us with the same question we had when she first came on the stage in 1992.

Who is she?•

__________

Dowd is a New York Times columnist. Send comments to ibjedit@ibj.com.