Posted on 06/10/2003 10:38:48 AM PDT by knighthawk
Walters sycophantic and uninquisitive in exclusive interview
A Barbara Walters interview is usually an awful marriage of sycophantic queries and dubious spin. With Hillary Rodham Clinton as guest, there were subtle changes. The sycophantic queries and dubious spin were about an awful marriage.
The hour-long program, which aired last night on ABC, was entitled Hillary Clinton's Journey: Public. Private. Personal. Or, to put that subtitle in the context of a typical viewer's degree of interest: Couldn't Care Less, Whatever and Dish It, Baby! A more accurate title might have been Her New Book's Coming Out Monday So, You Know, Somebody's Got to Interview Her.
The tone was acutely sympathetic: puffball queries outside the Capitol in Washington; a nostalgic stroll through the streets of her hometown; frisky reminiscences about Hillary's first encounters with a bushy-bearded Bill Clinton. Barbara asked about something in the book, Living History -- a comment about Hillary's affection for Bill's hands. "He has these beautiful hands," Hillary told her. "Very long fingers. And I've watched those hands age with us." Barbara, exhibiting better taste than most of us could have mustered, refrained from reminding her of the many women those "beautiful" hands have groped.
"It was an immediate attraction," Hillary recalled. "It was a life-changing experience to have met him ... He looked like a viking!" Time would prove he had the sexual manners to match.
Hillary Clinton splits public opinion like a Dairy Queen staffer on a banana. There are those who see her as the devil and there are those who see her more favourably: as the devil's efficient she-bride, for instance.
A subject on which there is much less debate: the fact that, like many politicians and celebrities, Hillary Clinton long ago learned to speak strategically, to tidily parcel the information she wants to reveal. She is talking now about her husband's serial infidelity because it suits her to put it behind her, and any interviewer bent on getting something other than the predictable sound bites is going to have to work very hard.
Walters didn't work very hard. When the subject finally turned to Monica Lewinsky, it became clear that this "ABC News special" was less an interview than a forum for a soliloquy. Barbara piped in every now and then to prod Hillary along, but never to ask anything so impolite as a follow-up question that challenged or even remarked upon an answer. Nothing when Hillary said of herself and her husband: "We really try to be together as much as possible." Nothing when she insisted she instantly believed her husband's denial about having been sexually intimate with Lewinsky. Barbara didn't even clue to the irony of Hillary claiming that her relationship with Bill is subject to "a zone of privacy." You know, except for all the stuff I'm telling you now about how hot he was in college and how we've been to marriage counselling a bunch of times and how I didn't talk to him for months after the Lewinsky thing and ...
Instead, Barbara offered only her Nod of Empathy, with the occasional display of a look that declared: Take That, Katie Couric: I Landed This Fish.
"He just kept saying he was very sorry," Hillary said of the morning that Bill finally copped to having, well, copped Monica Lewinsky. "Over and over again. And I could tell that he was [sorry]."
"Terrible time," Barbara consoled.
"Terrible time," Hillary agreed.
More useful than "Terrible time" might have been an actual question, like, "Sorry for having been serviced by a White House intern in the Oval Office, or sorry for having gotten caught again?" But Hillary Clinton knows how to pick her inquisitors. And Barbara Walters knows how to secure the A-list guests, and how to keep them coming back.
sfeschuk@nationalpost.com
Nope, Baba wears it as the brown badge of complicity...
He looked like the jusband on "Grounded for Life."
Has the man ever been in a fist fight in his life? A popular past time in my HS youth, very popular pastime in the South as I am told.
Bubba; "I feel your homophobic pain, future oppressor of the working class, put some ice on it.
Well, he had horns on his head.
"Senatuh Cwinton, if you could be a twee, what would you be?"
"Well, I've been called a birch."
"That's cwose, that's vewy cwose."
"What are you talking about?"
"Hiwwawee, would you say the Pwesident was a phiwandewuh?"
"A what?"
"Would you say he was a wady-kiwwuh?"
"What?"
"Did Biww skwoo awound with pawamouhs?"
"I surrender. What are you talking about?"
"Thank you and we'w be wight back!"
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