That Was No Lady.(Book Review)

No Way to Treat a First Lady, by Christopher Buckley (Random House, 320 pp., $24.95)

Back in the early days of the Clinton administration, Barbra Streisand became known as a C-SPAN junkie, immersed in the nitty-gritty of public policy. She had the ear of the president and that ear needed to be filled- with her insights. According to the Wall Street Journal, Streisand also "holed up in her Manhattan apartment with a stack of books about Thomas Jefferson"; she was tackling politics with the zeal of a mid-life divorcee going back to college. When Streisand, who'd stayed in the Lincoln Bedroom very early in Clinton's first term, learned that another-more natural- blonde had stayed at the White House, she reportedly erupted with incredulity, "What does Sharon Stone know about policy?!"

This little episode is a useful reminder about Clintonism. Most sleazy politicians suffer from a tipping-point dynamic: Each successive scandal piles on the previous one until the combined weight tips him over like a man trying to carry one too many bricks. The brilliance and the horror of Bill Clinton was that each successive chapter of sleaze eclipsed the previous one. Like a Russian matryoshka doll, Clinton concealed muck by hiding it behind a larger pile of muck. The Lewinsky scandal and, finally, the pardons-for-sale scandal blocked from view our collective memories of the earliest manifestations of not merely the metaphysical tackiness of the Man from Hope but the moral hall of mirrors that was the entire decade-from the O. J. Simpson and Menendez trials to a Wall Street gold rush that made the alleged excess of the 1980s seem sober by comparison.

A side effect of this upward-moving shame spiral was that each episode served as a more powerful inoculation against the absurdity of it all, which is why Primary Colors was the last successful satire of the Clinton administration and why the Lewinsky affair has produced not one movie or novel that has remotely captured its incredible buffoonery.

Until now, that is. Christopher Buckley, the author of, among other triumphs, Thank You for Smoking, has produced the first successful satire of a decade many feared to be too outlandish to be effectively mocked. No Way to Treat a First Lady presents America's patchwork of fin-de-siecle arrogance, vanity, and piety in the form of an often hilarious and always fast-moving thriller.

Buckley wisely avoids sticking too closely to the real-life script. Remember when Hillary Clinton reportedly hurled a lamp at her husband? Some versions say it was an ashtray-as if it couldn't have been both. It was one of those small incidents that told America that the Clinton presidency was going to be like school on Saturday: no class. Immediately after the story broke, Mrs. Clinton publicly fulminated with accusations about a Secret Service conspiracy to undermine the historic mission of the Clinton administration.

Buckley creates a similar episode, involving President Ken MacMann and his wife, Elizabeth, and imagines the commander in chief being slain in the line of infidelity with a silver spittoon made by no less than Paul Revere himself. The First Lady is charged with murdering, i.e. assassinating, the Leader of the Free World-and the entire television-watching population of the planet is suddenly transfixed by the "Trial of the Millennium."