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Wednesday, Nov 25, 2009
Hillary Clinton's new memoir is her opening bid for the White House. No wonder it's driving her enemies crazy
Jun 16, 2003 | I had the worst nightmare last week: The Clinton impeachment circus wasn't over!
Like the rest of the country, I thought that freak show was long behind us. I thought Clinton had been acquitted by the Senate and forgiven by voters, leaving office with sky-high approval ratings. I thought his wife Hillary had been overwhelmingly elected to the Senate from New York, where she was widely judged to be doing a good job. I thought we had a new president, who appeared to be in political trouble for creating deficits faster than he was eliminating jobs and for telling whoppers about why we needed to go to war with Saddam.
But suddenly I was watching Chris Matthews' "Hardball," and the apoplectic host and his Clinton-hating chorus were partying like it was 1999! They were shouting "Liar!" -- but it wasn't about President Bush and Iraq. There was David Bossie -- he'd left Rep. Dan Burton's staff in shame for his excesses in "investigating" the Clintons -- accusing them again of "defrauding the American people." The Wall Street Journal's John Fund was holding forth on the first couple's foibles, too, as if his own troubled personal life had not made news of late (when will these Clinton scolds clean up their own houses first?). Newsweek's prissy Howard Fineman was doing that thing he did so well during impeachment, shaking his head with faux-sadness -- tsk-tsk, sigh! -- over the latest mess Bill and Hillary had gotten themselves into, barely hiding his glee. They were tossing around the old names and allegations all over again: Juanita Broaddrick. Kathleen Willey. Paula Jones.
Matthews even had a former Clinton staffer on the hot seat to defend the couple -- this time it was Hillary's ex-press secretary, Lisa Caputo -- and he was shouting the question that was the issue of the hour roughly 42,000 hours ago: "Do you believe that the president's conduct with a staffer like Monica Lewinsky is public or private behavior?" Caputo was briefly struck dumb. "Oh wow," was all she could muster for a moment.
Me too. Oh wow. What a nightmare. But of course I wasn't dreaming. Hillary Clinton's memoir "Living History" has awakened all the old demons. From "Hardball" to the Free Republic to the New York Times editorial page, the Clinton-bashers were at full throttle last week. The Times could not bring itself to mention Whitewater -- perhaps all that Jayson Blair-inspired soul-searching on 43rd Street has finally made the editorial board concede there was nothing to that non-scandal after all -- but it did dredge up Travelgate and those missing files, in a spiteful bid to pin something, anything on Hillary, no matter how silly, in her moment of publishing glory.
Why did a junior senator's unrevealing memoir merit such a furious barrage? There are no shockers in its pages, or even any news. But this didn't stop the book from flying off the shelves -- 200,000 copies sold on the first day, according to its publisher Simon & Schuster, a book industry record. One week after the book hit the stores, the publisher announced it had already made back the hefty $8 million advance it paid Hillary, after selling 600,000 copies. On Monday, Simon & Schuster said it was rushing to print 500,000 more copies of "Living History," bringing the total number of copies in print to 1.5 million. Average Americans are obviously much more forgiving of -- and curious about -- the Clintons than the noisy claque of Clinton haters in the New York-Beltway echo chamber. This at least partly explains the chattering classes' distemper -- they simply can't stand the fact that despite their best efforts, the Clintons are still basking in the public's glow.
Unlike the vast majority of its critics, I read "Living History" all the way through. Occasionally it was rough going, but it wasn't awful. As the Times complained, it is an odd mix -- a coming-of-age story, a memoir, a self-help book, a political tract. It is also, quite clearly, the opening salvo of Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign. This too explains the spluttering reaction from the couple's critics.
Some reviewers have scratched their heads about all the foreign travel tales the book contains; but that's Hillary telling you how much she knows about the world she wants to lead. Some have trashed the wonky bits on healthcare, childcare, the environment, the "Save America's Treasures" campaign. But that's Hillary showing you she knows policy. She appears to mention every world leader, and every local activist, she's ever met -- the better to hook all of them later to the "Hillary in '08" Express.
Yet "Living History" is more than just the diary of a political know-it-all. Clinton actually does a lot of things in the book her enemies thought her incapable of -- admits she's wrong, pokes fun at herself, and occasionally even cracks a joke. And, oh yeah, she talks about her husband's affair with the intern. Those sections are overwrought, a little bit "Can this marriage be saved?" meets "Oprah," but I actually believed the story of the way she found out the truth about Monica Lewinsky, the way she raged, and the way she recovered her marriage.
To be fair, there is plenty in the book for Hillary haters to hate, too. I know, because I used to be one. I just read a review I did of Gail Sheehy's Clinton biography, and I cringed. Boy, was I mean. Not Chris Matthews mean, but mean enough. But I really couldn't stand the sanctimony, the elitism, the entitlement, the importance of being Hillary -- and the fact that she, a half-generation older than me, had always tried to have it both ways, folding her life into a man's while kinda sorta pursuing an independent career, all the while blaming sexism for thwarting her.
And it's all still there in the book, in places. Every other person we meet is a Rhodes scholar. She admits she's wrong, sure, but not as often as she reminds us she was right. She writes a lot about sexism -- but this time around, she convinced me: Much of what she's endured really was because she served as a Rorschach test for the way we view female power, at a time when the role of women -- in the family, politics, world affairs -- was rapidly shifting.
My change of heart about Hillary isn't all about the book -- I've grown to admire her more over the years, especially after her tough run for the Senate, and every day I've become more convinced of the danger and perfidy of her political enemies. But the book helped. It made me like and understand her better. Oh, and more important: It made me hope she runs for president. And I think a lot of her critics -- especially her female critics -- who read the book will feel the same way.
Maybe that's why Clinton's enemies are determined to tell you how bad "Living History" is: If you read it, you might conclude they're wrong about her. She should have paid Simon and Schuster $8 million for this, not the other way around, because the book's potential windfall to her political future and presidential hopes is priceless.
