What's in a name?

• Author: Clinton, Kate
• Position: Unplugged - Column

I'm a sixty-year-old white woman with the last name Clinton. How do you think I'm doing? You think you've got Clinton fatigue? Puh-lease. I do and I am one.

It was fun at first, all those years ago. Especially since I actually do have an older brother named Bill.

And a sister named Monica.

In 1988, I was covering the Democratic Convention in Atlanta with the Gay Cable Network. We had to share floor credentials and my co-anchor was in the hall, so I was cooling my heels, waiting to tag-team my way back in, when a tall guy breezed up to me and drawled, "Have you got a pen?" I gave him a red pen. He sat at another table and frantically scratched paragraphs from a text. It was Governor Bill Clinton. He went in the hall and gave a Castro-long nominating speech for Michael Dukakis.

Years later, I met President Bill Clinton on his way into a gay rights dinner honoring him. It was after "Don't ask, don't tell" but before the Defense of Marriage Act. We were naive, desperate. I should have asked for the pen back. Instead, I told him my last name was Clinton. "Hey, we're family!" he laughed. I told him I had a brother named Bill. He gave me one of those famous hugs.

Hours later, after the dinner, I was watching him work his way through a line of admirers. He waved me over, leaned in, and said in my ear, "Hope your brother doesn't take too much crap for the name." Then we had sex. ... Kidding.

What followed was eight years of triangulating, compartmentalizing, equivocating. And relative peace. And a surplus.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

After Grand Theft Election 2000 and 9/11, we endured the Bush junta. We stopped thinking about tomorrow. That bridge to the twenty-first century buckled and collapsed. There was war and debt. Then another Clinton.

My sister-in-law, Hillary, immediately had more baggage than opening day...