Posted on 06/14/2003 2:57:24 PM PDT by Carthago delenda est
President Bush and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton are philosophical opposites, but they have one thing in common: They both mastered the art of triumphing over low expectations.
Clinton was supposed to be so victimized by her husband's infidelity that she would abandon him and politics. She didn't. Republicans gloated that she was just an unelected ex-first lady carpetbagger who could not win a Senate seat in New York. She won easily.
Now conservatives are trashing her new book, "Living History." They contend that she is lying when she says she believed her husband's denials of womanizing played only a minor part in the administration's many scandals and can prove a secretive, well-funded right-wing cabal crusaded to cripple the Clinton presidency. They are also angry that she denounces independent counsel Kenneth Starr for overlooking "rules, procedures and decency" in a politically motivated invasion of her privacy.
If you like Hillary Clinton and acknowledge her acumen and accomplishments, you will like this book. Based on preliminary orders, it was already a best-seller before it hit the bookstores Monday.
It is her story, not her husband's. "I'm sure there are many other - even competing - views of the events and people I describe," she writes. "That's someone else's story to tell."
If you don't like Hillary Clinton, you won't like this book. Critics have accused her of writing it for the money (an $8 million advance) and of rewriting history and whitewashing her own role. Such complaints are petty, partisan and more than a little sexist. At least they no longer accuse her of murdering White House aide Vince Foster, whose death was ruled a suicide.
Clinton is accustomed to being a pioneer - "a lifetime in uncharted territory" as she puts it. But the safe, cautious course taken by Laura Bush was never for her. "Adjusting to being a full-time surrogate was difficult for me," Clinton writes.
Clinton is not shy about proclaiming all the good things she has tried to do, and there are many. She insists the White House scandals developed accidentally, through misunderstandings and miscommunication rather than by any deliberate wrongdoing on their part.
In this book she had a complicated task - to project herself as a woman with normal human feelings while simultaneously demonstrating that she is politically and intellectually qualified to be president someday. She is a serious person, and this is a serious book. It is as disciplined as she is.
There are flashes of warmth and humor, carefully rationed for maximum impact. She chatters on about familiar female woes such as bad hair days, ill-shod sore feet and sadness when their daughter left the family nest for college.
But the major thrust of the book is to explain her political and professional life. She positions herself on the center-left. She advocates feminist, middle-class causes but is ever the pragmatist. She challenges some of the president's decisions and is often right.
And she is a fighter, like her husband. She tries to emulate her political heroine, Eleanor Roosevelt: "If I feel depressed, I go to work."
What she tells about her anguish over her husband's dalliance with Monica Lewinsky is selective. "All I know is that Bill told his staff and our friends the same story he told me: that nothing improper went on," she writes.
She says it was not until Aug. 15, 1998, seven months after the story broke, that he confessed to her because he was about to testify under oath and would have to acknowledge what he had done.
Outsiders still shake their heads over her professed ignorance of Bill Clinton's behavior. Was she in delusional self-denial? How could she not know after all those years of flagrant skirt-chasing? But gossip in a highly charged political atmosphere is not necessarily true. She had developed what she calls "armor" toward it. And moving into the White House seemed to close that chapter. Monica was a surprise.
The expression "the spouse is the last to know" is a cliche because it is so often true. In the end, she does the pragmatic thing and stays with her husband; that is her nature.
In the middle of the Monica crisis, the president launched a missile strike in Afghanistan against a training camp where intelligence sources claimed Osama bin Laden might be. The intelligence was wrong, as it so often is. Republicans accused the president of trying to divert attention from his personal troubles. Hillary Clinton observes wryly that the GOP "still didn't understand the dangers presented by terrorism in general and bin Laden and al-Qaida in particular." Ouch. This senator knows how to wield a political saber.
This is a rich book, proof that Hillary wasn't kidding when she said during the 1992 presidential campaign that by electing Bill Clinton, the country would get "two for one."
Oh, really? Is this the escape hatch for the book? Let's see, there are as many views of reality as there are individuals. Very philosophical. One individual's view is just as good as another, right? Well, Senator, that more or less assumes that everyone is telling the truth as percieved. It might have a slightly different "texture" or "tone", but it wouldn't be ludicrous, now would it?
I still do. Foster was murdered.
--Boris
Considering that Hillary's entire career track has been built on riding Bill Clinton's gravy train, this is laughable.
Might just as well be Bonnie and Clyde.
Oh horsesh*t!
This would be like getting a double helping of 5h1t for your 5h1t sandwich.
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