A book that all Democrats ought to read
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I bought this book because, as a former strong supporter of the Clintons through all of their thicks and all of their thins, I was alarmed at how angry I am becoming now at their current behavior in the primaries.
It was described as "sympathetic," and I was hoping to find things there to admire in order to take a more moderate view of her and what seemed to me to be an almost pyschopathic campaign designed (at worst) to bring down the Party and or (even at best) to position herself to be the candidate in 2012 by destroying the man who might win in 2008.
That didn't happen. I became more frightened than I was before of what might occur if she is elected president.
There is instance after instance of REALLY bad judgment on her part (for example, when the 1994 loss of congress (considered to be partly due to the highhanded way she treated members of congress and others) forced her to back off from her role as Bill's main advisor, she turned the job over to (guess who?) DICK MORRIS.
And she threatened Bill Bradley and Pat Moynihan with dire consequences if they even dared to question her healthcare plan. Then, she refused promising-looking compromises with Republicans that might have given us at least some kind of viable plan. And we have gone almost a decade and a half now with NO PLAN. Bernstein makes a strong point about her refusals to compromise and her arrogance about her own positions being above criticism. Can we really afford 8 years of that.
The scariest part for me was the account of how she took charge of the "bimbo erruptions" by trying to paint Bill's mistresses as "stalkers" so as to dilute the possible effects of eye-witness accounts from people who had seen them together. It is hard for me to believe that feminists aren't disturbed by this bit of doberman-like behavior.
The book is very interesting as a case study of an ambitious flawed woman who has expoxied herself to the fortunes of an equally ambitious, equally flawed man.
But there was NOTHING in it that made me want to live throught 8 more years of wondering when the next shoe was going to drop and questioning how many of my doubts I would have to repress in order to defend them. Again.