....And, then, there's........

"Clinton joked about all the attention she is receiving from the "men in the race." How is her gender (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3898804/) affecting the race for the White House? We will have insights and analysis on Decision 2008 with presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Kate O'Beirne of the National Review, Judy Woodruff of PBS, and Sally Bedell Smith, author of the new buzz-worthy book, "For Love of Politics - Bill and Hillary Clinton: The White House Years"."

"MR. RUSSERT: You do focus on the relationship in your book, and you also invoke Eleanor Roosevelt. There’s a particular focus early on in your book about Eleanor, and you write this: “After Bill published his memoir in 2004, he came close to defining their marital dynamic in a discussion with public radio interviewer Terry Gross about the marriage of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, who worked in tandem in the White House but led separate private lives after she learned about his affair with Lucy Mercer Rutherfurd. Musing about Roosevelt, Bill Clinton said...” And here’s his actual words with NPR (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/21407008/).

(Audiotape from “Fresh Air,” June 24, 2004) FMR. PRES. BILL CLINTON: "He and his wife had a very complicated relationship. They loved each other very much. They had a bunch of kids, but they had big pockets of estrangement between them then and pain, and they, they rendered enormous service to this country because they stuck with what they had in common. I mean that’s fascinating to me."

MS. SMITH: But, but at the same time, it, it strikes me that Eleanor Roosevelt was almost more independent of Franklin than Hillary is of Bill. They—there’s a—there’s kind of a codependency that, that continues. He—for example, he reads all the books and underlines them for her. I mean, she relies on him for so much. When they were in the—in the White House before, he was the one who said to the Time magazine editors before he took office, when they asked him “Who’s going to be in the room when you have to make a big decision?” He said, “Hillary.” He didn’t say the vice president. And I think that dynamic is now reversed. She’s very dependent on him. She—Mark Penn, in the, in the Senate race in 2000 used to use whole phrases from Bill Clinton’s speeches in her speeches. And, and so they, you know, they, they, they still have, whether they’re miles apart, they are still in constant contact. So she’s very, very dependent on him.

MS. SMITH: Yeah. I mean, there was, there was another moment when, when—which I thought was the most revealing of all, when Bill Clinton had just confessed on national television that he had, in fact, been lying about his relationship with Monica Lewinsky. There had been bombings in Africa. They had to go, they had to go to Martha’s Vineyard. Hillary had been humiliated before the world. She was obviously angry. He had to write a speech to give to the American public, and she put aside her anger and she sat down and worked with him on that speech. So it shows again how this glue has kept them together. It’s very unusual."