It’s four days since the New York Times reported on Hillary’s Wellesley letters—an unbelievable stash kept by her high school pal John Peavoy. There hasn’t been a whole lot blogged about it, though, which turns out to be the part of the story that’s most interesting. The thing about the letters is that, above all, they make you long for an equivalent stash from any of the other candidates! Her letters are psuedo-intellectual and boring (it was Wellesley after all) and she was clearly more interested in presenting an idea of herself to her old friend than in revealing herself to him.

“Since Xmas vacation, I’ve gone through three and a half metamorphoses and am beginning to feel as though there is a smorgasbord of personalities spread before me. So far, I’ve used alienated academic, involved psuedo-hippie, educational and social reformer and one-half of withdrawn simplicity.”

They’re fine and all, no sin against youth to be self-conscious and self-absorbed with a pen pal (literally a ball-point-pen pal, imagine!), but it’s just exactly the kind of stuff Hillary the candidate didn’t need to be writing about as a twentysomething. What a boon to her campaign these letters could have been had they contained some unadorned reporting on real life—some Alanis-style crazy heartache, some exploratory personal sex-and-drugs dispatches, some thoughts on birth control preferences, some evidence of laughable music fandom. Anything with juice would have acted as a counter to her robotic hyper-controlled image today, and she couldn’t really be held responsible for any excesses. Imagine if pen-pal Hillary were going on about the meaning of songs by The Troggs or how you have to get really stoned after dabbling in George Orwell to fully appreciate The Doors or how Otis Redding was the sexiest man alive. It’s almost impossible to imagine. Hillary the Goldwater Girl may have been reading the occasional “alienated academic” contemporary novel (Salinger) but in the great popculture jungle that was the late-sixties, she was basically aloof.

Which remains the problem with Hillary the candidate. Who wouldn’t rather read a random, misspelled, ungrammatical, cocaine-and-conversion correspondence penned by ultra-C-student George W Bush than any of the Hillary Rodham material? If Dubbya wrote anything by himself during his college years, it was derned sure more likely to be notes from a powder binge than any college essay or research paper, much less self-reflective epistles to a fellow-traveling high school brainiac!

How about a compilation of the fast-food and dirty-love missives passed by Big Bill Clinton to his campus love slaves? Now that’s easy to imagine too, stuff featuring song lyrics and a confession of his longing to drop out of Yale to play sax for Sly and the Family Stone. Unlike the rough silence that met the Hillary letters, something equivalent from Bill or George would be an instant national bestseller. Boom! And there might be one of those out there yet…

“A Future Candidate Poured Her Heart Out in Letters” is how the Times headlined the Hillary story. She didn’t really pour anything out, though, she dribbled. Granted the letters read like she was simply maintaining an old persona with Peavoy, playing lightly with the Hillary he knew from the past and enjoying the act of writing to a sort of ghost of her present life about nothing in particular, sustaining a cerebral flirtation that had worked for her for years. Maybe her letters to her friends at Wellesley, if she wrote any, contain all the meat. In any case, these were not the letters we needed from young Hillary. If we are expected to vote for her, we need life from her. Isn’t one of the main problems with her candidacy the fact that most of the life in it is still Bill’s?

Tags: hillary clinton, john peavoy, letters