Proustian without tears

I enjoyed reading Hillary Rodham Clinton's memoirs "Living History" and hardly agree wih those who found the book a bureaucratic plod. True, there are moments when the description of policy options Clinton was interested in, requires stamina from the reader. But these moments are not so frequent. The policy areas and options she covers are highly salient especially in social terms (not just from the US perspective). After all, her life has been intimately bound with the processes of policy making and unmaking.

Many of us who read Rodham Clinton's book were interested to see how she would discuss the "sex" problems that besieged her husband when at the White House. Aware of this prurience, she has not pandered to our curiosity and refers to the scandals summarily, with dignity, treating them in chronological order. Too summarily some might claim. However, the Jones, Lewinsky and other scrapes were so overblasted by the media that Rodham Clinton was justified in trying to show that her life, and her husband's, were not just dominated by soap opera scandal. Both of them fought for serious causes, tackling a wide range of problems affecting Americans.

Clearly, the argument could still apply that if Mrs Clinton decided to write her memoirs, she could hardly skip personal details. Indeed she does not do so.

There are adequate descriptions of her early years as a young girl and woman from a working class family, going up the tree of education and socialising, learning to assert herself. One could have expected that on these topics, she would indulge in a binge of nostalgic remembrance, à la Proust. No sir: even when Rodham Clinton describes her family experiences, she remains dry-eyed, as is proper, and factual. Yet, the sketches given of her family relationships - especially where her father and daughter Chelsea are concerned - come across as deeply felt, genuine.

A problem with "Living History" is that being "a political wife", Rodham Clinton had strictly speaking a "minimal" political role. As becomes clear, the senator from New York always was a deeply political animal, with a huge appetite for the nitty gritty issues of political life, not just the drama and the publicity. A conviction that long determined her behaviour was that politics is about doing all you can, to convince communities about the options they need to adopt.

To be sure I found myself agreeing with practically all her choice of options, with the exception of the Middle East, where her anti-Palestinian mindset is deplorable. On new ways of making welfare relevant, on developing cooperation with the poor countries, on promoting women's rights and roles in civil and public life, on creating new institutions that help poor and maladjusted families work towards a better life, Mrs Clinton did not just care about problems, but also worked hard to develop solutions.

In political terms, her memoirs are also useful because of the analysis they make about how Bill Clinton's political enemies on the right, declared a no-holds-barred war on his administration. They delved into all aspects of his private, professional and public life, doing their best to smear and demonise him relentlessy. Conservative political foundations, financed by a clutch of very rich people, masterminded those efforts.

Journalists and their media organisations, as well as members of the judiciary, collaborated fully - indeed took lead roles - in the anti-Clinton crusades. Mrs Clinton's remarks about the partisanship and attitudes of Chief Justice Rhenquist are striking in what they reveal about the animosity and distrust that right wing manipulations generated between the main institutional players of the US democratic system.

She stresses that the right just could not stomach having lost the White House, and mobilised all available resources to neutralise and destroy the Clinton administration.

For a while, they almost succeeded. However, at huge personal and political cost, the president managed to survive the continuous barrage of attacks and achieved quite a good proportion of his legislative agenda. One must wait for Bill Clinton's own memoirs, as well as the later analyses of historians to be able to conclusively agree with this interpretation of the Clinton years, which sounds plausible. "Living History" persuasively argues that most of the anti-Clinton accusations raised by the right were either disproved, or related to matters that had no bearing on his conduct of public affairs.

Certainly the record of political give and take outside the US and inside, confirms that for the last decade and a half, the right has increasingly sought to mobilise around negative messages, personal attacks and the demonisation of opponents. Benefiting from generous funding, their campaigning has relied extensively on well-rewarded media allies - journalists, TV presenters, publishers - to keep hate-and-fear issues alive and flourishing, at the expense of substantive political debate.

The story of how Clinton's team outfaced their opponents, from judges to journalists, politicos and businessmen, provides lessons to those on the centre and left who are faced with similar attempts to destabilise and undermine their proposals and projects. In this, Malta is no exception.

Were I American, I would probably vote for Senator Rodham Clinton, should she decide to stand for US President.