Let me make a confession: I love this stuff. Anna, Mona and Mary each make a compelling case; I agree with them ail, in varying degrees, and with almost everyone else who has weighed in, too. There are lots of insights to go around; my appetite is ravenous, and so is yours-according to a Times Mirror poll, which says interest in Tonyanancy is “extraordinary.” This is one of those lovely, loony national moments. Foreigners could not possibly understand; this is family business, family therapy. This is about … sharing. And the person whose deepest thoughts I’d really like to hear is Bill Clinton. After all, he comes from the same psycho-mythical-socioeconomic turf as Nancy and Tonya. He understands their dreams, dedication and desperation better than most people do (certainly, better than we insight-addled pundits). It might even be said that Nancy and Tonya represent two sides of the president’s personality.
We know the Nancy side. It is Bill Clinton’s public persona, the man from Hope. Kerrigan comes from there, too. Her dad is a welder who worked three jobs to keep her in skates; her mother is legally blind. She and the president share the same belief, unencumbered (apparently) by doubt or irony: that if you work hard, you can rise up from your modest station and become a member of the natural aristocracy. The president is remembered by school chums as wall-to-wall thoughtful. He was beloved by teachers. His strength and decency held his family together. And yet, somehow, all the while, he was consumed by ambition-nice ambition. He was desperate to get out of Arkansas, to get himself educated, to become president, to do great things -but always with a smile. He doesn’t volunteer for the blind, as Nancy does, but he did run food and blankets into the riot-torn Washington ghetto after Martin Luther King was shot. Surely, he’s not the sort to knee-cap the opposition; he hugs it into submission.
We know the president has a Tonya side mostly by inference. It is, perhaps, a minor chord -but it’s there. We see it in his hungers and obsessions, his love of the precipice. His personal life has elements of soap opera. He has associated with unsavory sorts (that’s what Whitewater is about) and-like Tonya-has been able to remain only a step removed from their shenanigans. There is more: Al Harding sounds a lot like Bill Clinton’s mom, earthy and loving but not always there. Al taught Tonya to fix cars and shoot, then left for Boise; Virginia, after spending Bill’s formative years in New Orleans, taught her son to love knowledge and took him to hear great sax players. Bill and Tonya spent their childhoods staring into neighbors’ windows, wondering what life was like in normal homes; both knew what it was like to call the cops in a family dispute; both made their private vows to get away from all that. When asked -in Sandra Luckow’s extraordinary documentary, broadcast on “60 Minutes”-where her daughter would be without the challenge of greatness, Tonya’s mom says, “She’d be nothing. Absolutely nothing.”
I wonder whom Bill Clinton is rooting for. America’s heart is with Nancy. A substantial majority, according to most polls, want Tonya kicked off the team. That’s hard, but it stands to reason. Tonya and Nancy are made-for-TV versions of two dominant, American working-class predispositions. It’s not just lady and the tramp; it has more to do with assimilation and rejection, faith and resentment. Assimilation-the possibility of upward mobility-is the bedrock American faith, Nancy’s faith. Tonya’s mother, in the Luckow film, gives purest expression to the other view: “She can’t come up to their standards, no matter how hard we try … I can’t do good enough in anything. I can’t feed her right, I don’t get her to bed right … This is fine. I could care less.”
This-class resentment-has long been fodder for populist demagogues: the system is rigged against you; middle-class status is a mirage; the only way to succeed is to cheat or, better yet, to rebel. It’s a theory that works better in art than in life or politics -in real life, too many people succeed for the resenters to have much credibility. Tonya reeks resentment; she mocks respectability. Her scanty tank tops play garish, angry, next to Nancy’s classy turtlenecks.
Of course, pure Nancys and Tonyas don’t often occur in a state of nature-only in docu-dramas. Most of us are more like Bill Clinton, a roiling mixture of the two, of optimism and rebellion, with a wary fascination about the wilder, Tonyaesque precincts of our spirits. In the president’s case, the fascination may be more intense than most: Tonya Harding represents not just a part of his past, but also could serve as exhibit A for one of his most cherished dreams. She has said she married Jeff Gillooly, who had a state job, so she could be covered by his health plan. Now there, Anna, Mona and Mary, is a real lesson: if America had universal health insurance, none of this would’ve ever happened.
