Hillary may have another book to write
One of the great virtues of American politics is its endless capacity to surprise. And let’s face it, Hillary Clinton is a surprise, and to many people not a pleasant one. But here’s a woman who suffered two horribly public humiliations – one professional, one personal – in the debacle of her health reform scheme and the sexual dalliance of her husband that led to his impeachment.
And here she is now, a U.S. senator from New York, maybe the best-known Democrat in the Senate, and author of a best-selling autobiography, “Living History,” that is making publishing history. The initial print run of one million has just been upped by another 300,000 copies.
Hillary – the nation has been on a first-name basis with her for more than a decade now – has been industriously autographing her book, happily submitting to fawning interviews and gracefully answering cringe-inducing questions. Has she been faithful to her husband? “Yes.”
The book, as many reviewers have noted, is written, or ghost-written, at a curious emotional distance: The Clintons go through political life doing good, and awful things happen to them for no reason. Nothing – Whitewater, travelgate, filegate, shady pardons – is ever their fault. Practitioners of the “politics of personal destruction” are out to get them. But “Living History” falls into the category of campaign autobiography, and it’s actually much better than most of that ilk. What “Living History” does, aside from earning Hillary $8 million, is close the book on the White House years. The Clinton presidency now becomes the province of historians and those obsessives who are still trying to unravel Watergate or the Kennedy assassination.
As she campaigns for her fellow Democrats in 2004 and her own re-election in 2006, Hillary can blow off questions about her life before she was a senator with an all-purpose response, “I answered that in my book.” In that sense, this book is the kickoff to her 2008 presidential campaign.
Hillary says not, but does anybody doubt that she’ll run for president? Her book promotion has blown all the 2004 Democratic candidates off the public’s radar and even eclipsed George Bush in the bully pulpit. None of her political contemporaries has that kind of candlepower. A new ABC poll found that more people dislike than like her but Hillary has her husband’s knack of making her enemies overreach themselves, and the success of her book has goaded the ranting classes of the right into a spittle-flying rage.
“Living History” ends with Hillary leaving the White House. It would be no great surprise if the author envisioned the sequel beginning when she walked back in.
Scripps Howard News Service