By Kyle Smith
Monday, September 18, 2017
The news that Hillary Clinton was writing a 2016 memoir
called “What Happened” caused rare bipartisan joy: Everyone, left and right,
was eager to hear what she had to say. What’s it like to think you’re about to
poke through that glass ceiling and instead have it come crashing down on your
head? What’s the deal with Trump? Would she throw shade at Bernie? What would
she say about presiding over a campaign whose failure was catastrophic to her
and, to liberals anyway, to the country? What
was the inside dirt? A joke made the rounds that the book’s working title
was What the F*** Happened?
But the book only makes sense when you realize that What Happened is a fake title, a P. T.
Barnum–style ruse to draw in the suckers. The real subject of this 500-page
chunk of self-congratulation and blame-shifting — its real title — is “Why I
Should Have Won.” If Hollywood is a place where you peel off the fake tinsel
only to find the real tinsel underneath, Hillary Clinton is homo politicus all the way through. It’s
all she has. It’s all she is. She earned
the Oval Office, dammit, and she wants you to know it. Peel off the phony,
power-addled political hack, and all you’ll find is the real, power-addled political hack underneath.
Sure, Clinton does give us a few stray morsels of what
we’re looking for, mostly at the very beginning, when she describes what must
have been an agony for the ages in tightly controlled, supremely measured
tones. She tells us about the pain and the Chardonnay and how surreal it felt
to concede on Election Night, given that she had never imagined what she might
say if she lost. “I just didn’t think about it,” she writes. Also, she took a
nap that evening and was asleep when the news broke that she’d lost Florida,
North Carolina, Iowa, and Ohio. But it’s all fairly bloodless — she gives no
explanation, for instance, of why she withheld her concession speech until the
next day. No doubt she cherishes her privacy, but guardedness is not what one
wants in a memoir.
The reserve is likely to disappoint both those who cried
on Election Night and those who spent the wee hours of November 9 spraying
their homes with the contents of a case of Veuve Clicquot. Yet there is
poignancy here: She had every expectation of becoming the most powerful woman
in the history of the world. Instead she’ll go down in the books defined by three
gigantic public humiliations: the Lewinsky scandal and two losing presidential
campaigns in which she was the heavy favorite. She wasn’t even the first woman
to be secretary of state. She wasn’t even the second woman to be secretary of state. History is unkind to losers
— quick, ask the nearest Millennial who Geraldine Ferraro was.
As the book proceeds, though, the reader’s heart sinks.
Why all this stupefying name-checking of campaign aides who never get mentioned
again? Why two pages about her hairdressers, but only two clipped paragraphs
about that time she collapsed on 9/11? Why is she still laying out the same
policy proposals America rejected last year? Why does she keep teasing us with
promises to tell us about her “mistakes,” without ever following through? Why
all the ordinary-citizen tales from the Just-So
Stories of Big Government, the ones along the lines of: “Then I met Jill
Shlabotnik, a humble weasel rancher from Sarasota, Florida…Jill told me how
[sorrow, tears, pain, injustice] . . . and that, ladies and gentlemen, is why
we urgently need a 5.7 percent increase in deputy assistant EPA
administrators!”
This is the norm for convention speeches, not for
campaign autopsies, especially not one written from the point of view of the
corpse. “In the past, for reasons I try to explain, I’ve often felt I had to be
careful in public, like I was up on a wire without a net. Now I’m letting my
guard down,” Clinton writes. Tantalizing! But there’s almost nothing she
couldn’t or wouldn’t have said when she had to maintain her political
viability, almost nothing she couldn’t or wouldn’t have said in one of those
eyeball-glazers she called speeches, almost no instances where she takes stock
of her flaws, except in the disingenuous manner of a job interviewee — “My
biggest failing? I guess it’s just that I’m so focused that sometimes I can’t let work go, you know?” In Hillary’s case? “I had been unable to connect
with the deep anger so many Americans felt,” “I was running a traditional
presidential campaign with carefully thought-out positions. . . . Trump was
running a reality TV show,” and (my favorite): “It’s true that I’ve always been
more comfortable talking about others rather than myself. . . . I had to
actively try to use the word I more.”
Her big flaws are that she’s so even-tempered, thoughtful, substantive, and
humble.
Clinton expends many pages damning Donald Trump, but it’s
all stuff anyone could have written. She criticizes things he’s publicly said
and done, but it’s all stuff anyone could have written — all stuff, indeed,
that everyone has written, everyone who can hold a pen, and thousands of them in
possession of more writing skill than Clinton, who has exactly none. She barely
knows Trump and has no personal stories about him despite having crossed paths
with him over the years in New York. The only inside dirt she offers is that
she thought it would be a gaudy spectacle to attend his wedding to Melania, so
she did; that she wanted to make it clear via body language at the first debate
with him that she didn’t want to shake his hand, so she didn’t; and that she
was rattled by his standing too close to her at the second debate, so she
wonders if she should have snapped at him — “Back up, you creep!”– which would
have been bonkers and great fun, but unfortunately she didn’t.
You have to scythe your way through a lot of weeds to
find a few gems, those rare, unintentionally revealing glimpses of why Clinton
failed. The one that really shines comes via actual skilled politician Bill
Clinton: He knows this guy in Arkansas, a store owner in the Ozarks who is the
perfect bellwether. The shopkeeper often votes for Democrats, has done so many
times, including for Bill and for longtime senator Mark Pryor. But sometimes he
just can’t pull the trigger and goes the other way. He’s like the hero of that
Kevin Costner comedy about a presidential election that is so close it comes
down to the vote of one guy. Before the 2014 midterms, Bill sent somebody out
to talk to the guy. How would things go? The guy said, “We’re going to give
Congress to the Republicans.” Neither party would do anything for people like
him, but “at least the Republicans won’t do anything to us,” he reasoned. “The
Democrats want to take away my gun and make me go to a gay wedding.”
Bill’s reaction would have been immediate triangulation:
How do I win over this guy? How do I talk to him? How do I find common ground?
Hillary’s reaction is: Sheesh, the voters are appalling! It doesn’t even occur
to her that she needs to figure out a way to appeal to the store owner over the
next two years. He’s a write-off. He’s a deplorable. Here’s what she writes:
The politics of cultural identity
and resentment were overwhelming evidence, reason, and personal experience. It
seemed like “Brexit” had come to America even before the vote in the United
Kingdom, and it didn’t bode well for 2016. . . . The political landscape for
the 2016 race was shaping up to be extremely challenging.
Yep, it’s challenging to make people like you when it’s
obvious you think they’re troglodytes and morons.
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