Outside Counsel

Every now and then I meet someone who I can't figure out. "There must be more," I think. "What lies beneath that exterior that I'm not seeing?" Frequently in this situations I will ask someone who knows the person better, and very often what I'm told is, "That's it. What you are seeing is what X is like."

This is not to say that these Sphinxes have no rich inner lives, or that their lives aren't as complex or messy as anyone else's-- it is just that sometimes I can't see what the person is actually like. It is a blind spot -- which means that the issue is my perception, not some mysterious attribute of the person I am trying to understand, and certainly not a willful effort on the part of that person to be pointlessly obscure.

I think something like this may be why so many people seem to have a Hillary Clinton problem. (I also think that the problem many, many people have with the Clintons generally is, at base, a Hillary Clinton problem, but that's a different discussion.) I am hard pressed to think of a public figure that we know more about, and yet here we are, puzzling over the question. Dude, we know what she's like, and there really doesn't seem to be anything sinister or twisted about her, except for the part about her wanting to be President. That part-- the idea that she has the focus and energy to work towards that goal-- is a little hard to get one's mind around, but it's hardly a unique quality. As we speak there are quite a few people running around who want to be President. Does anyone compare Lindsey Graham to a Shakespeare villain? In fact, in my life I've known quite a few people with a singular focus and determination, and although some of them have been artists, most of them were merely focused and determined to make money. Hillary Clinton is not an ordinary person-- whatever that might be-- but she's pretty open about her life, even though being open is a potential vulnerability, and even though being open has got to have caused her a great deal of personal pain.

I'm not over the Iraq War vote-- that was a bad choice, and it was made, I think, because she didn't want to be criticized down the line. Oh well, that fear is responsible for a lot of bad choices that people make, perhaps especially United States Senators. Iraq War vote notwithstanding, there is no call that I can see to think that Hillary Clinton is some kind of Lady Macbeth, and I'm surprised that so many people seem so confident that their blind spots about her are really some sort of penetrating insight. She is all there, in front of us, an open book.