Eleanor to Hillary: Listen Up

Hillary, this is Eleanor Roosevelt, remember me? I was supposed to be your role model, or at least that’s what you told everyone when you channeled me up in the first years of your husband’s presidency. At first I wondered why you stopped our late night reveries, but now that Shirley MacLaine has sent me a bundle of news reports on your husband’s administration, I know exactly why you haven’t called.

You’re embarrassed, and I don’t blame you for a minute. If my husband Franklin had become such a political hack, caving in to those heartless conservatives in Congress, I would have divorced him. Playing around with the ladies is something I was raised to forgive in a man, but cheating on his social conscience is the one thing I just never tolerated.

Why don’t you just sit your husband down and tell him that the principle we progressive women uphold is not that of taking from the rich and giving to the rich. Franklin also liked to smoke cigars and have cognac with rich people who could help him get reelected. But being born to the rich, he knew their limitations. Your Bill, on the other hand, seems to be hopelessly enamored of them. Hasn’t Bill learned anything from those Arkansas bankers in that messy Whitewater matter?

Franklin was raised among bankers and knew better than to trust them for a second. That’s why he instituted federal regulation of their activities. Surely you can see how positively silly it was for your husband’s staff to invite the government’s official bank regulator to a fund-raising coffee with the same bankers he’s supposed to be regulating.

That one bothered me even more than hosting convicted felons at the White House, since those crooks have already shown their stripes, so to speak. My dear, you and that husband of yours have simply got to get your priorities straight or you both will spend the rest of your lives talking to special prosecutors.

And now to my greatest disappointment. Remember when I warned you that turning over all poverty programs to the states was a bad idea because it will simply make the poor invisible? As expected, people are being forced off welfare, but where are they going? Deeper into poverty? Certainly, life was not wonderful for them before, but at least they had a federal guarantee of subsistence income, medical treatment and food, thanks to the aid program for women and children, which my husband instituted and your husband killed.

Hillary, I simply cannot believe that you stood by like some stupidly loyal wife while Bill betrayed poor women and their children in this shameful way. Can it be true, as I’ve read in the book by that cad Dick Morris, that you sacrificed the poor simply for your husband’s reelection? May I remind you that Franklin won four times because he served all the people without betraying the most vulnerable? It is an insult to my husband’s memory to suggest that there is something fabulous about reelecting a Democrat who destroyed his progressive programs.

Yes, I’ve heard Bill promised you that he would undo the harm of this so-called welfare reform, which has already ended assistance to legal immigrants and even put Vietnamese boat people once again at risk. And you believed him?

Well, what have you to say now that you’ve read his budget? Surely you, smart woman that you are, know it’s a disgrace. There’s a pittance for job training or any other programs to employ the people pushed off welfare. Don’t tell me that the president has appealed to the private sector to come up with those jobs. Indeed, if Franklin had taken that tack, the nation would still be in the Great Depression.

I know you well enough to believe you are not fooled by all this blather about a new commitment to education as the solution to poverty. Your husband’s plan would cover so many well-off families that there would be precious little left for those who sorely need assistance.

Finally, let me tell you why I made this effort to talk. Channeling requires considerable exertion at my age, but I am despairing that your commitment is not fully sincere. You still say you admire the Democratic Party of Roosevelt. But if we Roosevelts stood for anything, and on this my husband needed no prompting from me, it was that a society increasingly divided between rich and poor cannot hold.

Hillary, if I have truly been any sort of role model, listen to me now: Do as I did, spend the next four years traveling to where the poor live, make their plight visible, honestly celebrate what improves their lot and publicly expose all who fail them. And, my dear, that includes one’s husband.