Clinton Hillary Rodham - My turn : Hillary Clinton targets the presidency

2015 Doug Henwood

Published by OR Books, New York and London

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First printing 2015

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ISBN 978-1-68219-032-6 paperback

ISBN 978-1-68219-033-3 e-book

This book is set in the typeface Minion. Typeset by AarkMany Media, Chennai, India.

My two cents worthand I think it is the two cents worth of everybody who worked for the Clinton Administration health care reform effort of 19931994is that Hillary Rodham Clinton needs to be kept very far away from the White House for the rest of her life. Heading up health-care reform was the only major administrative job she has ever tried to do. And she was a complete flop at it. She had neither the grasp of policy substance, the managerial skills, nor the political smarts to do the job she was then given. And she wasnt smart enough to realize that she was in over her head and had to get out of the Health Care Czar role quickly. & Hillary Rodham Clinton has already flopped as a senior administrative official in the executive branchthe equivalent of an Undersecretary. Perhaps she will make a good senator. But there is no reason to think that she would be anything but an abysmal president.

Brad DeLong, undersecretary of the Treasury in the first
Clinton administration, 19931995, writing in 2003.
DeLong didnt respond to multiple queries about
whether he still believes this.

This book originated as an article for Harpers magazine. Id like to thank the publisher, Rick MacArthur, whose idea it was for me to write the piece; James Marcus, the editor who worked with me on it; Camille Bromley, who fact-checked it; Giulia Melucci, who publicized it; and others whose names I didnt learn but who helped as well. They have been wonderful to work with in every respect.

Id also like to thank Colin Robinson of OR Books, who asked me to expand that article into this broadside. This is my third book with Colin, who is not only an excellent publisher but also a very good friend. For assistance on the Haiti portion of the story, Id like to thank Greg Higgins and Nikolas Barry-Shaw. And many thanks as well to Sam Miller for research (and friendship).

The Hillary literature is vast but uneven. Some of the plentiful right-wing critiques are unhinged and unreliable, and Ive mostly avoided them for reasons of credibility (doubting theirs and protecting mine). On the sane side of the spectrum, though, I want to single out three books as particularly fine sources: Jeff Gerth and Don Van Nattas Her Way, Carl Bernsteins A Woman in Charge, and Gail Sheehys Hillarys Choice.

With its sleek dimensions, this book may look footnote-heavy, but Hillarys defenders are fervent. When my Harpers article appeared, Correct the Record, an HRC front group run by her former-enemy-turned-ceaseless-defender David Brock, posted a widely ignored 9,000-word refutation of ita voluminous response to a 6,000-word piece. (The refutation now looks to have been taken down, but Michelle Goldberg wrote about it in her profile of Brock in The Nation.) Conason couldnt get over the fact that Id quoted Dick Morris, who admittedly has some strange beliefs, but who also has a sharp political mind. (Conason & Co. find Morris thoroughly disreputable, forgetting, or perhaps remembering, that he was on the Clinton payroll for 20 years.) No doubt these grunts in the Hillary army will be scrutinizing this book for errors, and thats why Ive provided plenty of footnotes for their interns to work with. I look forward to their reviews.

On a happier note, Id like to thank my wife, Liza Featherstone, who is the love of my life and a crucial part of everything I do. I hope our son, Ivan, will inherit a world where people better than Hillary Clinton rise to prominence.

As this book was entering production, we circulated the cover to get people talking about it. We never imagined how successful that strategy would be.

The Washington Post and Cosmopolitan both wrote about the cover. On Twitter, former Obama speechwriter turned screenwriter Jon Lovett called it gross. Nation pundit Joan Walsh called it disgusting. Salon writer Amanda Marcotte diagnosed issues with women (the authors, apparently, not the artists). Writing in New York magazine, Rebecca Traister proposed that the image shows how a competent professional womancan be so intimidating that her menace is best portrayed as a violent threat. The right even took notice, with the cover featured on the front of Drudge and a link to an MSNBC.com story about the controversy (one of several meta-stories about the covers reception). The Drudge link described me as a lib, which is a cruel slur.

Tweets and think-pieces about the cover quickly became a subgenre of a larger argument that tries to portray tough criticism of Hillary as sexistinevitably so, given its incorporation into a dominant patriarchal discourse, regardless of the authors intent. One of the covers critics who also read the bookthe only one of the commenters who did, as far as I knowconceded that theres nothing sexist in it, but identified the fundamental problem as my inability to see the election of a woman president in itself as a significant feminist goal in itself.

It would be a good thing to have a woman president after the 43 bepenised ghouls and functionaries whove occupied the office. (OK, there were a few who werent half-bad you wouldnt need more than one hand to count them.) But, as I argue in this book, if youre looking for a more peaceful, more egalitarian society youd have to overlook a lot about Hillarys history to develop any enthusiasm for her. The side of feminism Ive studied and admired for decades has been about moving towards that ideal, and not merely placing women into high places while leaving the overall hierarchy of power largely unchanged. Its distressing to see feminism pressed into service to promote the career of a thoroughly orthodox politicianand the charge of sexism used to deflect critiques of her.

It was also distressing to read interpretations of Sarah Soles painting on the cover that were, as the writer Tracy Quan put it in a radio interview, middlebrow, philistine, and moralistic. When I first stumbled on Sarahs workscores of paintings and collages involving Hillary in various poses, ranging from the amorous to the violentvia Facebook a few years ago, I was drawn to it despite my lack of fondness for its subject. Sarah explained that she had a real libidinal fixation on Hillary. At first I thought that she had some sort of ironic relation to that fixation but she eventually convinced me that she really didnt. When it came to thinking of cover art for this book I suggested her work to Colin Robinson, the R in OR Books, precisely because of its power and its capacity to stir interest. I also thought it would be interesting to have a cover exist in some sort of tension with the book, a point lost on some of its critics, who seem more comfortable with straightforward agitprop. Colin agreed, and selected the gun-toting image.