Hillary’s Become Mrs. Bill Clinton, Once and for All

While the fashionable world has been consumed in past weeks by the evolution of last season’s glamour puss to next season’s restrained siren, the real fashion news took place halfway across the globe.

I would never suggest that the sartorial choices of a lone woman could for a moment surpass in importance the multimillion-dollar extravaganzas of fashion that were taking place in New York and Paris. But I would say that image for image, a photo of Hillary Clinton standing in stockings and dowdy dress outside a temple in Colombo, Sri Lanka, packs a far bigger wallop on the American subconscious than pictures of leggy young things strutting down catwalks in threads few of us will ever see in stores, let alone try on or buy.

Yes, the real fashion story of the day is the transformation of Hillary Clinton from presidential partner to helpmate and goodwill ambassador.

Is this news? You bet.

On the front page of the New York Times, a place reserved for the major news events of the day, the headline on the story about Mrs. Clinton’s South Asia tour was this: “Hillary Clinton a Traditional First Lady Now.”

Somewhere, even as feminists wept, Democratic political consultants must have been smiling. Hillary Rodham Clinton has become Mrs. Bill Clinton, for once and for all.

Hillary Clinton’s new look was probably the only bad news in an otherwise fabulous moment for the people who brought you the contract on America. (Purveyors of the contract, celebrating the end of their first 100 days in power last week, were photographed with elephants too. Weird world, ain’t it?)

As fashion models traded in their rubber suits for the pared-down, elegant clothes that Jacqueline Kennedy might once have worn, Hillary Clinton evoked her memory too. In 1962, Jackie took Asia by storm on a tour of her own. And as one State Department official told a reporter last month, “It was a long time ago, but believe me, people still remember that with fondness and emotion.”

So gone now is the Hillary Clinton of health-care reform, of policy statements, of unabashed pride in her partnership with Bill. In her place is the new, though I cannot say improved, Hillary Clinton. She is more restrained, less certain, less likely to hold forth on policy issues. Can pillbox hats be far behind?

Before setting out with her daughter for Pakistan, India, Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka, Clinton told an interviewer on CNN: “I will be speaking out about women and children in the countries that I visit. But I cannot speak about specific (problems). I just don’t have any information and I don’t have any expertise on which to base an answer.”

This from a woman who can speak without notes for as long as you’ve got about any public policy issue you can think of.

Should you require proof that the dumbing down of Hillary Clinton is afoot, let me just repeat the gobbledygook uttered by the State Department official who had spoken so fondly of Jackie’s trip of yore:

“Her whole agenda,” said the official, “is people in the most fundamental sense.”

Yeah, and I’d like to teach the world to sing in perfect harmony.

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I’m trying not to be too cynical here, but it seems the whole South Asia tour, while important diplomatically to a part of the world that feels ignored by the United States, was mostly an exercise in image rehabilitation.

With an election looming, our beleaguered president will have trouble enough fending off the forces of the far right without giving them a powerful and threatening symbol (Hillary) to exploit the fears and confusion of a nation that has not fully decided whether it wants women to work (definitely, in the case of welfare moms) or to be at home (definitely, in the case of more affluent women who abandon their children to . . . horrors! . . . day care)

So our First Lady--the brilliant lawyer whose Wellesley classmates assumed would be the first female president of the United States--has been muzzled. Politically speaking (if I may paraphrase Jerry Brown), someone has decided that less Hillary is more.

After last year’s health-care reform debacle, she dropped from sight, wounded by the vitriol and defeat. And now she has emerged from her cocoon, dedicated to women and children and her own daughter (as witnessed by the unveiling of the 15-year-old Chelsea on this trip). She is remaking herself into a First Lady of the sort the electorate appears to prefer. Talk about standing by your man.

Personally, I’d give all the pillbox hats in America to have the old Hillary back.