June 10, 2008
Richard Cohen gets it.
… [Hillary] Clinton has been a one-woman industry. By my inexact count, more than 50 books have been published about her, many of them highly critical and some so purple as to be suitable as evidence at their authors’ competency hearings. One is called “Why the Clintons Belong in Prison.” Another is “Hillary Clinton Nude: Naked Ambition, Hillary Clinton and America’s Demise,” and yet another is “Hillary’s Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton’s Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House.” My favorite, though, is “The Hillary Clinton Voodoo Kit: Stick It to Her Before She Sticks It to You!” — both a doll and a book of suggested spells. …
This is not to say that no one has written admiringly or fairly of Clinton, but the big bucks clearly went to those who wrote with a blowtorch. …
Books aside, a vast industry of bloggers and conventional old-timey columnists clearly felt compelled to write at least one Clinton column a week, usually in scorn and contempt. …
Years from now, historians will ponder the attention accorded Hillary Clinton and possibly compare her to Eleanor Roosevelt, another presidential wife who was inordinately admired and inordinately scorned. Maybe some historians will note that both are women and that maybe, just maybe, women come in for a special sort of vituperation — a kind of contemporary version of burning at the stake.
The same historians might note also that many of Clinton’s most persistent critics were women…
Now, though, an eerie silence has settled over the land. With Hillary Clinton out of the race, thousands of computer keyboards have been stilled, dozens of books have been abandoned in mid-chapter, and enormously influential bloggers, most of them unknown to me, have vanished from the Web. Some anti-Hillary obsessives (see the latest Diagnostic and Statistical Manual) must be feeling the sickening vertigo once experienced by Vaughn Meader, whose entire show business career was based on impersonating John F. Kennedy and who, in essence, died when Kennedy did.
It’s over, ladies and gentlemen. Hillary Clinton lost. And so did you.
Filed under: Election 2008, Hillary Clinton
