KINDER'S COMMENTARY: NOW HILLARY WANTS TO BE THE CENTER OF WELFARE REFORM

For me, the great health-care debate's defining moment occurred quite early in 1993, when First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton allowed us to glimpse the little touch of Stalin lurking in her heart. Asked by a worried Democratic Congressman from Virginia how small businesses could pay the huge new taxes in her vast health-care scheme, Hillary snapped, "Look, I can't save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America."

Now it is welfare reform. The estimable Maureen Dowd of the New York Times has carefully dissected Mrs. Clinton's breathtaking arrogance recently expressed on this subject. First, Ms. Dowd quotes "an administration official who has worked closely with Mrs. Clinton," who called her play on the welfare issue "inadvisable but inevitable. `What she is doing is asserting her right, after all she has been through, to do whatever she wants in the second term.'"

Wow. There's more from Dowd:

"Speaking in Sydney, Mrs. Clinton again implied that her problems had more to do with sexism than her own errors in judgment. The only way for a first lady `to escape the problems of one's time,' she said, is `to totally withdraw and perhaps put a bag over your head, or somehow make it clear that you have no opinions and no ideas about anything -- and never express them publicly or privately.' She said we expect so much from the woman married to the president, but we don't know what we expect. Actually, we do." (This line is, of course, recalls Mrs. Clinton's remark during the 1992 campaign about how many Americans would have been happier if she had just "stayed home, baking cookies," rather than pursuing a career.)

Now, Ms. Dowd is just warming up. Consider these not-so-thinly veiled references to Mrs. Clinton:

"We expect her not to hide behind sexism when sexism has nothing to do with it. We expect her to be open, truthful, accountable. We expect her to recognize that only four years ago, she was given the single greatest and most far-reaching legislative and political mandate in the history of first ladyhood. We expect her to understand that our experience with her stewardship of a major effort in social engineering was a dismal failure.

"Maybe she was using sexism as an alibi for the fate of health-care reform, too. But her ideas failed not because they were a woman's ideas, but because they were bad, out-of-touch ideas."

Then Ms. Dowd delivers the coup de grace in words few males dare utter:

"Mrs. Clinton made it as her husband's wife, but now wants to be treated as though she made it on her own." (Exactly. She has always wanted it -- no, demanded it -- both ways.) "The alternative to Hillary Clinton, welfare czarina, isn't Hillary Clinton, cookie baker. If this first lady isn't permitted to preside over the most delicate and important domestic change facing the country, all women will not be set back."

Dowd discusses the dilemma Mrs. Clinton faced when her husband decided to sign the third welfare-reform bill sent him by the Republican Congress. There was a revolt by Hillary's long-time Children's Defense Fund ally Marian Wright Edelman, who organized a protest, and whose husband resigned in protest from the department of Health and Human Services. Mrs. Clinton may want to mend fences with these liberal allies, Dowd noted, "but it is hard to mend a fence when she's sitting on it."

Dowd relates that "someone asked Mrs. Clinton if she was worried that she would catch flak from the left for supporting her husband's decision to sign the welfare bill, she replied,~ ~~~~~`Not from the people who matter.' Chilling stuff, that, from the first lady who must wonder why she has the highest negative ratings in the history of first ladyhood.

~Peter Kinder is assistant to the president of Rust Communications and a state senator from Cape Girardeau.