Tuesday, November 13, 2007

Mitt Romney has recently taken to referring to the idea of a Hillary Clinton presidency as electing an “intern.” He recently said, to Fox News host Sean Hannity: “The government of the United States is not a place for a president to be an intern. You need to have experience actually leading and running things.”

He’s said it more than once, so there’s no mistaking. He did not mean to say the presidency is no slot for on-the-job training. He meant intern.

It’s a smart line of attack.

In fact, while he’s at it, he ought to encourage Americans to read the new Sally Bedell Smith book, For Love of Politics: Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years, wherein you’ll find passages like: “Finally, on Friday, February 28, Bill invited Lewinsky to an evening taping of his weekly radio address. Afterward he instructed Betty Currie to escort Lewinsky into his private study . . . For the first time in eleven months, they were sexually intimate, first in the hallway and then in the bathroom. When he pushed her away during oral . . . “

Why read this stuff? Voyeurism? Nope. There’s a substantive reason. As I started to read the book, I, political junkie, got bored; then frustrated. I’ve been there, done that.

I’ve lived through the blue dress and all the other details. We all lived through that. And while the impeachment was about important public issues — perjury and abuse of power — it all stemmed from, and fed into, that drama that is the Clintons.

For all the Clintons’ talk about getting-back-to-the-people’s-business, it was, in the end, about the Clintons. All the time “wasted” on impeachment was the result of the refusal of a president to resign, after being caught red-handed in perjury and obstruction of justice. Hillary Clinton, who stakes her claim of executive experience on her two-for-the-price-of-one days in the White House, hasn’t apologized; to the contrary, she continues to rant about a vast right-wing conspiracy.