It's a Friday Flashback from 1999, the June 28 issue of National Review :

The Mystery of Hillary Clinton

The First Lady no one knows.

Mark Steyn

I confess I've always had a soft spot for Hillary Rodham Clinton. But then, asked to name my favorite Marx Brother, I usually cite Margaret Dumont. In A Night at the Opera and A Night in Casablanca, she was the haughty, imperious grande dame standing on her dignity while Groucho prowled around, waggling his cigar at every other woman in sight. The rock, the anchor of every great double-act is always the straight man, and the best straight man-or woman-is one who never really gets the joke in the first place.

And so it goes in that long-running gag-fest Two Terms at the White House: Like Groucho, the leering Clinto waggles his (unlit) cigar and staggers from one catastrophe to another, but through it all Hillary Rodham Dumont remains ever more serene and queenly. It's a magnificent performance, and harder than it looks: While most of the country seems content to have a president who's a laughingstock, the First Lady has to glide by, pretending that the thongs and DNA aren't there. To the public, Bill's the funny one, with his amusing pants-drops and distinguishing characteristics. But, to old showbiz pros, to connoisseurs, that kind of shtick's a little obvious: The genius in the act is Hillary. Not many of us would relish having to stand in front of an audience and crank out the same old lines night after night at rally after rally, in the stilted cadences of that computerized voice in your car that tells you to fasten your seat belt: "I. Am. So. Proud. Of. My. Husband. And. Our. President. Bill. Clinton."

One can sympathize with Mrs. Clinton's frustrations, but even so she seems determined on a huge gamble: The stooge has decided to step out as a solo act, a star in her own right. The precedents are hardly encouraging. True, Dean Martin made it after Jerry Lewis, but the First Lady doesn't sing-at least not to the authorities. Yet, amazingly, she's all but decided to run for New York's Senate seat. Local Democratic-party bigshots are deliriously egging her on with cries of "Six more years!"

HER TIME TO SHINE?

Now you might disagree with my take, but that's okay. With the First Lady, you can fumble around but you can never really get a firm grip on her: She remains all things to all men, unlike her husband, to whom all women are all things. To me, she's Margaret Dumont. To the American people, she's the beloved First Doormat. To those feminists who drove around with "I'm Voting for Hillary's Husband" stickers, she's always been the star: It's just taken the rest of us a while to figure it out. But now we're ready, and so's she. It's Tina after Ike! Cher after Sonny! The diva without the dork! Or, at any rate, Ethel Merman at the end of Gypsy, the stage mother who's sacrificed her own life to promote a child prodigy who'll never grow up: "What did it get me? Scrapbooks full of me in the background." Not anymore. The First Lady is stepping into the spotlight to claim her due: "This time-for me!"

And who can blame her? To the investigators in Ken Starr's office, she's always been the brains of the Clinton operation. In It Takes a Village, the account of her first steps in breast-feeding is prefaced by an aphorism: "We learn the rope of life by untying its knots." Mrs. Clinton's trick was in preventing the rope of her life from unraveling completely: Though one might detect a pattern of behavior from that long-ago Arkansas land deal to the firing of the travel-office staff, she was too clever to leave any fingerprints. Unfortunately, the chief executive of Clinton Scandals, Inc., left her husband in charge of one small branch office: sex. And, sadly, Mr. Clinton's small branch has done for the entire operation. Unlike his canny wife, the president left a trail of fingerprints and more on everything and everyone he touched. In the biographical dictionaries, instead of a few vague references somewhere in the 15th paragraph to "controversies surrounding their financial affairs," the entry for William Jefferson Clinton will now begin: "Second president to be impeached." His hapless consort's only chance of rewriting history is to gamble on double or quits: "William Jefferson Clinton, 42nd president, now best remembered as husband of 44th president, Hillary Rodham (q.v.)."

But, if you don't buy the First Doormat or First Feminist, how about this? To Tony Blair, in one of his creepier bits of sucking-up (even by his standards), she's another Princess Di. The two women shared, apparently, the same "qualities of dignity and grace." At the White House banquet at which he made the observation, the thought hung awkwardly in the air, it being perfectly obvious that the two couldn't be more different, save for the fact that they're both strong women married to wimpy, weak-willed adulterers. But try to picture Princess Hill demurely fluttering her kohl-ringed eyes and murmuring, "Well, um, you see it was all a bit difficult because there were really three of us in this marriage"-actually, for the Clintons, make that 33.

No, if Mrs. Clinton's a princess of any kind, she's a pre-Diana royal duchess. In Britain, Bagehot advised the Royal Family not to let "daylight in on the magic," something that's proved all but impossible in an age of forensic media scrutiny. But Mrs. Clinton has managed it: She's spent her entire adult life in public, and yet the mystery has been illuminated by not a shaft of daylight. Indeed, media deference in the United States is curiously reminiscent of that in Britain up to 20 years ago, when lame, awkward attempts at humor by, say, Princess Alexandra or the Duchess of Gloucester were fawningly hailed as evidence of natural wit and the ability to connect with ordinary people. Bill Clinton has discussed his boxers and briefs on TV; taken his penis along to a naval surgeon to be examined for the Paula Jones suit; and had his semen processed by the FBI crime lab. Now imagine asking Hillary what kind of bra she wears. We know everything about Bill Clinton except an inkling of what his wife is like. After a year of unparalleled public scrutiny, the truth of their marriage is more unknown and unknowable than ever. Is it, as longtime friend Sen. Dale Bumpers suggested, that Hillary was blissfully unaware of Bill's lapses? The First Family, roared the old Ozark hogswill peddler in a teary speech during the president's trial, "has already been about as decimated as a family can get . . . There's been nothing but mental agony, sleepless nights . . ." Maybe he's right, but who knows? Maybe back home Bill and Hill were watching ol' Dale and weeping with laughter.

TRUE CLINTONISM

"We all have a little Clinton in us," wrote Margaret Carlson in Time. The question America has to ask itself right now is whether any of us really need a little more. The Clintonistas (and there are still quite a few of them out there) are beginning to come on like those old-time Soviet Communists who used to insist that, despite all its evident failures, there was nothing wrong with Communism: We just hadn't had the right type of Communism. Likewise, we're told after eight years, there's nothing wrong with Clintonism: We just haven't had the right Clinton. It is, in its way, an audacious plan: an artful way to dodge the Twenty-Second Amendment and ensure that the Clinton era stretches lazily into the new millennium, to the 2008 presidential election and beyond. If it works, it will at least legitimize retrospectively Hillary's tenure as First Lady. This is the only country in the Western world in which the consort of the head of government is given a semiformal role, an office, and a staff. Mrs. Clinton's presence in the White House derives from the fact of her marriage to the president. If that marriage is a sleazy travesty of what most Americans, even today, understand by the term, then Hillary Rodham Clinton is not merely the most pathetic First Lady in history but also the most illegitimate First Lady.

For a year, Mrs. Clinton provided the respectable cover for the people's torpor: "If Hillary doesn't care," they told pollsters, "why should we?" Some went farther. The Republicans, wrote Susan Ager in the Detroit Free Press, "are punishing Bill Clinton for thrusting upon America a First Lady who is smart, gutsy, accomplished and opinionated."

Mr. Clinton has certainly been thrusting upon America, but the First Lady is one of his less successful efforts. "Smart"? How many other smart women would let themselves be maneuvered into posterity as a creepy psychological case study in denial and displacement? "Gutsy"? Undoubtedly. She pioneered the White House scorched-earth policy, assailing her husband's accusers as "a vast right-wing conspiracy." But, if there is a vast right-wing conspiracy, it seems most likely to turn out to be a cunning plan to plant an oral-sex fiend in the

Oval Office who's too busy being serviced or sued by subordinates to attend to his left-wing wife's schemes for mandatory federalized child care. "Accomplished"? Well, sadly, between the sex and the lawyers' meetings and golf with Vernon Jordan, the Clinton presidency ran out of time to accomplish things: That's the problem with trying to promote your agenda through a more popular, likeable partner. "Opinionated"? Absolutely. Mrs. Clinton has publicly come out in favor of a Palestinian state, not exactly a surefire winner in a New York Senate campaign.

Still, for now only two obstacles stand in her path. The first is the soi-disant "feral New York media": The First Lady could suddenly find herself facing brutal, searing questions like, "Mrs. Clinton, do you think part of the reason for this vast right-wing conspiracy is that many Americans still have trouble accepting the idea of a First Lady who is smart, gutsy, accomplished, and opinionated?" "I'm glad you asked me that, Katie . . ." The New York Times, for one, has already lapsed instinctively into the same disapproving tone of moral equivalence that distinguished much of its Cold War coverage. The First Lady and Mayor Giuliani: She's "controversial," but so's he; she inspires as much enmity as affection, but so does he; she's ruthless and unforgiving towards her enemies, but so's he; she hasn't been hit on by Bill Clinton recently, but neither has he. On the other hand, she looks good in pants, while he looks better in Julie Andrews's dress. So at least the voters will have a clear choice on something.

The other obstacle is the people of New York, renowned for their tough, in-your-face savvy. They're not like those patsies in New Zealand, to whom Mrs. Clinton revealed, concerning the distinctive spelling of her first name, that she had been named after Sir Edmund Hillary, conqueror of Everest. Those schmucko losers Down Under lapped it up, at least until the great man pointed out that he hadn't conquered Everest until 1953: Hillary Rodham was born in 1947, when Sir Edmund was an obscure New Zealand beekeeper and an unlikely inspiration for young parents in a Chicago suburb. If she tries that sappy stuff in the Empire State, she'd better make sure it's a beekeeper from Plattsburgh or Binghamton.

But by then it'll all be over. Nothing in Hillary's past suggests anything other than a tin ear for democratic politics. It was the First Lady, remember, who advised her husband to come down tough on Ken Starr in his speech to the nation after his grand-jury deposition last August. For three minutes, the public got a glimpse of the real Bill Clinton-petulant, vengeful, unrepentant-and his presidency briefly trembled. This is the woman who paid tribute to the murdered Yitzhak Rabin by recalling how, during negotiations with Yassir Arafat, she was generous enough to offer to let him stay inside for a cigarette, in violation of her smoke-free White House policy, if it were really, truly important to Middle East peace. Now there's tolerance for you.

The cruel fact is that, whenever the citizenry have been exposed to the smart, gutsy, accomplished, opinionated side of Hillary, they've recoiled in horror. She has a basic likeability problem, an observation I offer not in a mean-spirited partisan way because, God knows, the GOP's got it in spades. But she's the one woman President Clinton will never have to say "You might want to put some ice on that" to. She puts ice on everyone else: In the hurly-burly of a Senate race, she'll be frosting up the room at a hundred paces. If the Democrats want to nail their colors to the Clinton mast yet again, let them go ahead. Even the Republicans may not screw this one up.