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Hillary, Naomi, Susan and Rush. Sheesh!
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Nov. 17, 1999 |
While I support Palestinian statehood, as Hillary has in the past, I was appalled that Arafat would compromise the stature and autonomy of an American first lady by forcing her, in effect, to sit captive on a speaker's platform while an anti-Israel litany was being recited. But Hillary demonstrated what an embarrassing neophyte she is at seat-of-the-pants improvisation, the rat-a-tat style of banking, swooping and counterattack that her prospective senatorial opponent, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, is such an ace at. No, Hillary shouldn't have walked out -- that would have been undignified and disruptive. But her double kiss and hug for Arafat, whether they occurred before or after the incident, were excessively effusive for that charged climate. And her speech should have been delivered in a sterner or more neutral tone, preparing the way for a later, more carefully considered, direct rebuke. That Hillary Clinton constantly requires emergency intervention and marching orders from her far-flung team of consultants -- above all the detestable, twisted Harold Ickes (who looks like a character out of "Faust") -- should be a warning to New York voters about her basic lack of talent as a politician. Hillary is as preprogrammed as Elizabeth Dole: Both these women lawyers are smart and polished when they prep and plan, but they're clumsy and off-balance under sudden, high-stakes pressure. It's preposterous that the Democratic Party of my home state can't come up with a better, more seasoned local candidate. The funniest political pratfall of the month has been Al Gore's bizarre entanglement with yuppie feminist Naomi Wolf, a favorite target of mine from early this decade. (In my published 1991 lecture at MIT, for example, I notoriously called Wolf "little Miss Pravda" -- as well as "the princess of the system," a "twit" and "a parent-pleasing, teacher-pleasing little kiss-ass.") Salon readers Charles E. Lincoln and Jacqueline A. Burns write from New Orleans to ask my view of the Gore campaign secretly paying $15,000 a month to Wolf for her advice, which included trying to inflate his malleable maleness from beta to alpha status. Frank Francomano, in a second contribution to this column, declares, "Naomi is perfect for Al Gore. She plays directly to the core of what the Democratic Party has become: a haven for the loose left-hand thread nuts in the great American Machine." What can I add to my remarks on the Nov. 7 broadcast of CBS's "Face the Nation"? I called Wolf a "lightweight" ("She was too lightweight even for the lightweight magazine George, for heaven's sakes!") and decreed that she's "a Seventeen magazine level of thinker." Well, first of all, I think Naomi Wolf's parents should sue her alma mater, Yale University, for malpractice. If we judge by her clarity of reasoning and command of language at age 37, her education was a fraud. She was injected with passé feminist and post-structuralist doctrine at an impressionable age, and she never received the kind of disciplined training in high-level philosophy and intellectual history that she desperately needed. Wolf has energy and ambition, but her mind is amazingly slack. It's as if she's frozen in the precocious but superficial brightness of adolescence, with her thoughts tumbling out in what a reviewer of her last book (Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times) rightly called "narcissistic babbling and plain silliness." Camille Paglia Camille Paglia's column appears in Salon People every third Wednesday.
There was a priceless extravaganza last week on Rush Limbaugh's radio program (which I was listening to in my car): For almost 40 minutes, Limbaugh played and replayed individual sentences from Wolf's appearance the day before on ABC's "This Week" with Cokie Roberts and Sam Donaldson. It was an excellent example of the genuine intellectual service that Limbaugh has done for American culture. No other print or electronic media source gave such instructive, microscopic attention to the murky labyrinth of Naomi Wolf's thought, for which the Gore campaign is still paying a very high price ($5,000 per month, as busted down by new campaign manager Donna Brazile). I laughed uproariously as Limbaugh heaped scorn on Wolf's "literary" pretensions by demonstrating the redundancies, clichés, contradictions, convolutions and pompous, self-interrupting mini-clauses in what he called her "nonsensical" patter. A male caller dismissed Wolf as a "pseudointellectual" vainglorious about her "credentials" and went on to express incredulity that she was ever a Rhodes Scholar (though Wolf evidently never completed her degree at Oxford University). Limbaugh asked why Tipper Gore couldn't teach her husband "how to be a man" in the first place: "Instead he has to go out and hire a true crackpot." That Wolf was embraced by the Gore campaign, which can't seem to shake her, should signify to Republicans, Limbaugh concluded, that "we're up against a wigged-out bunch of New Agers who don't have a grip!" While I resent the damage that Gore's seamy, under-the-table affiliation with the ditzy Wolf has done to my party (I'm keeping my fingers crossed that Bill Bradley's still-nebulous candidacy will gel), I'm pleased with the way the Wolf brand of me-first, upper-middle-class, Rolodex feminism has been exposed for its preening sense of privilege and entitlement. Wolf's career has in fact always benefited from backstage connections, covered up by feminist sympathizers in the media who seem finally to have turned on her. There was the friend-of-her-father agent and the roomful of editors and advisors who pulled the meandering manuscript of "The Beauty Myth" into semi-coherent shape. There was the older male relative (reportedly an uncle) conveniently positioned at the New York Times. Then arrived the talented editor/speechwriter husband whose precise, sober voice can be detected with questionable regularity. If many professional writers have disdain for Wolf, it's partly because her byline, as I've sometimes joked, should be "Team Naomi" -- contradicting her public posture of feminist independence, not to mention her stratospheric financial demands. The cloud of hype in which Wolf has enveloped herself (about her U.S. book sales, for example) appears to have turned delusional, as when she gratuitously confided to Cokie and crew that she had "taken a pay cut" to work for Al Gore -- at which a thousand horse laughs undoubtedly resounded up and down the Eastern seaboard.
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