If republicans are lucky, Comstock’s story will serve as proof that the early, paranoid years of Clinton disdain drew upon a very particular generational context, a civil war between the Boomers. The straightlaced types looked at the Clintons and saw everything they hated about the hippie 1960s and early 1970s: draft dodging, feminist excess (Hillary Rodham wasn’t “baking cookies”
, Saul Alinsky–style radicalism, casual drug use, and sexual promiscuity. Every time something came up that conservatives thought should be disqualifying—past pot use and the ridiculous “I didn’t inhale” defense; Bill’s infidelities with Gennifer Flowers, then Paula Jones, then Monica Lewinsky—somehow the Clintons got away with it (which is just a less flattering way of calling someone a “comeback kid,” the label that was attached to Bill for rebounding from exactly these episodes).
One of the more interesting elements of the cultural response to the 1990s Clintons was the feeling Hillary evoked in conservative women. In his book, Brock writes that Comstock told him she couldn’t get Hillary’s “sins off her brain ‘because Hillary reminds me of me. I am Hillary.’ ” Comstock has never confirmed anything in Brock’s book, and she declined to be interviewed for this article. But her comment lines up with what other women of that era have expressed. In her 2000 polemic, The Case Against Hillary Clinton, the former Republican speechwriter Peggy Noonan wrote of herself:
I look at Mrs. Clinton and see the kneesocked girl in the madras headband [meaning Noonan herself], the Key Club president who used to walk into the bathroom in Rutherford High School, wrinkle her nose at the tenth-grade losers leaning against the gray tile walls, leave, go down the hall, and mention to a teacher that they’re smoking in the girls’ room again. That’s my own private Hillary, or at least one aspect of her.
