Ms. Efficient, Tough and Joyless

I could swear it was just a week or so ago that Hillary Clinton was taking heat for laughing — or should I say, cackling — too much. I can't count how many times I heard various not-to-be mentioned television and radio hosts playing the tape, snidely asking whether this was the sound Americans wanted to hear in their living rooms for the next four years, or whether the cackler had failed to realize that Halloween was still weeks away.

How dare the frontrunner for the Democratic party nomination, the woman who is so often and so wrongly accused of being deeply challenged in the sense of humor department, actually sound like she was having fun running for president?

Who did she think she was?

Not that there isn't plenty to laugh about, with the former governor and the former mayor, Romney and Rudy, who are running on their experience as chief executives, promising to eliminate the nation's deficit while running them up in their own campaigns. Deficit spending in a political campaign the summer before a single vote has been cast! Now that's something to write about.

But Hillary is so much the juicier target, if you know what I mean. The widely read and much-quoted former Wall Street Journal bureau chief turned Bloomberg columnist Al Hunt is the author of this week's most talked about hit job, attacking the Hillary campaign for being "efficient, tough, and joyless." While acknowledging that, based on his three Washington insider dinners with her over the last 15 years, the real Mrs. Clinton actually has "the ability to charm" and a "decent sense of humor," Al claims this is not the Hillary people see on the campaign, owing to the fact that her campaign, for all its brilliance, is "joyless, humorless, and lacking in heart and soul."

To which I can only say one word.

Dennis Kucinich's campaign is full of joy, humor, and heart and soul. It's also going nowhere. Ditto for former Senator Gravel, the comic relief at Democratic debates, and Governor Huckabee, whose future as a diet book author seems far more secure than his future as a presidential contender.

Sad to say, but most of the political campaigns I've known, successful and not so successful, were not rollicking affairs. There's nothing particularly joyful about working 20 hours a day to stave off attacks based on such vital matters as tapes you supposedly listened to 15 years ago, according to the account of a single former campaign aide who didn't even have the guts to go on the record.

This is fun?

What surprises me is not that Hillary is joyless, but that she's managed to find any fun at all in the grueling process of raising tens of millions of dollars, or in waiting for tens of millions of dollars raised by other people to be transformed into mud to be thrown at her and her family.

Hunt makes the point, rightly, that while the Clintons certainly have close friends in the Washington establishment, beginning with Vernon Jordan, the lawyer and insider who is in a league of his own, other parts of the establishment, which is to say the media establishment, have never really warmed to them. Ever since insider par excellence Sally Quinn slammed Hillary mercilessly (A decorator from Arkansas? Imagine!) upon her arrival in Washington, Hillary has been wary of the fair-weather friends who court invitations one day and spike you the next.

Imagine taking offense at the fact that New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd has never had a nice word to say about you, or that blogmeistress Arianna Huffington has been running a nonstop campaign to block your nomination. If the definition of "joyful" is open arms to those with knives bared, I guess she's not joyful. Then again, when she makes it to the White House and they're still courting access, they may not be either.

To find out more about Susan Estrich and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.

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