aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Tuesday, December 27, 2005

Pulp fiction

Who reads these books?

For nearly 15 years, she has been denounced, at various times, as a deeply subversive rogue feminist who equated marriage with slavery; an overreaching social engineer bent on nationalizing the American health care system; and a disturbingly acquiescent wife too willing to stick with a straying husband. Now, in the latest incarnation offered up by her critics, she is the scheming, probably unstoppable front-runner for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, currently presenting herself as a moderate - via another insidious “makeover” - but hellbent on returning to her left-wing agenda once in power. Dick Morris and Eileen McGann [aka Mrs. Morris], in “Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race,” can barely contain their alarm. “Do not underestimate this woman!” they warn.

In fact, the authors argue (over and over again), Hillary Clinton may be so powerful, so stealthy and so determined that only an extraordinary candidacy by Condoleezza Rice, the secretary of state, can stop her. As millions of right-thinking Americans realize the dangers of a Hillary presidency, the authors suggest, a draft-Condi movement will spring up at the grass roots, producing a kind of Manichaean catfight in the general election. That, at least, is the conceit of this book, its particular niche in the crowded marketplace of Hillary lit.

Very quickly, this argument begins to feel more obsessive than provocative.

The review also looks at The Case for Hillary Clinton By Susan Estrich:

Estrich has a rather touching belief that, if elected, Clinton would profoundly change not just the government but the culture, reinvigorating the feminist movement around the world. (Reading Estrich after Dick Morris produces a kind of ideological whiplash.) But she correctly identifies a core belief among many Democrats - that Clinton may have a lock on the nomination, but cannot win the general election because (not to put too fine a point on it) too many people hate her.