Who Is Hillary Rodham?

The book has not yet been published, so we do not have to make an excuse for not reading it. Surely, the author Curtis Sittenfeld is a very capable writer, but the subject is so unappetizing that a team of wild horses could not get me to open it. I hope you appreciate the mixed metaphor.

The subject is Hillary Clinton. Or better, it mines a counterfactual: what would her life have been if Hillary Rodham had not married Bill Clinton?

To that the answer is perfectly clear. You will not find it in the book, and I do not want to keep you in suspense, but if she had not married Bill Clinton, Hillary Rodham would still be trying to pass the D. C. bar.

But, having married Bill Clinton, having sold her soul for political advantage, Hillary became a feminist icon. Just think about it, a woman who is obviously in the closet, who contracted an arranged marriage to neutralize the political liability that her sexual orientation might have been, who has become the nation’s leading enabler of sexual harassment, who would never have accomplished anything but for her marriage to Bill Clinton, has become a feminist culture icon. 

One notes that Hillary recently went on the Howard Stern show-- water finds its own level-- to deny the much discussed suspicion that she is gay. In fact, she brought up the subject. (When you out-vulgar Howard Stern, something is wrong.) And she said that she never felt the least attraction to a woman. Beyond the fact that her most recent love interest Huma Abedin is presumably a woman, scientific research has shown that every women feels at least a slight attraction to women. The only people who are defiantly not attracted to women are gay men.

Don't think that these are unrelated. The salient characteristic of an arranged marriage, from a wife's point of view, is that she is more than happy that her husband satisfies his sexual needs somewhere other than her bed. She will not care for a minute about what he is doing to other women. As long as he is not doing it to her. Do not imagine that the nature of the Clinton marriage did not promote sexual harassment. And don't imagine for an instant that Hillary cared what Bill was doing to other women. Not once did Hillary stand up and express the least smidgeon of empathy for the other women. Keep in mind, the Democrats are the empathy party. They are constantly attacking Republicans for not feeling enough empathy. Hillary was appalled that Bill got caught, because it damaged her political ambitions.

The notion that she would have stepped forth in glory if she had just remained single is risible. In none of the jobs that she gained through marriage did she demonstrate anything resembling competence. Heck, she couldn’t even beat Donald Trump in an election.

And she was a manifest fraud. Were it not for the fact that the FBI and the Justice Department were politicized under the Obama administration she would today be lolling away her days in federal prison.

Frank Bruni reports on the story, and frankly misses the point. As, apparently did Sittenfeld. There is nothing very ingenious about the conceit-- it's a counterfactual-- because it probably ignores the reality behind the Hillary image. And that includes the crushing irony that Obama laid on her: Hillary is not even remotely likable enough:

It’s an ingenious conceit, because it gets to the central paradox of real-life Hillary, the initial reason she became such a mesmerizing, polarizing, meta-cultural Rorschach. She’s a feminist trailblazer who first arrived at stratospheric celebrity because of her husband and was perceived and analyzed largely in terms of her relationship with him. She’s a voice for equal opportunity who kept biting her tongue. Bill indisputably lifted her up; he unequivocally dragged her down.

True enough, when Bill Clinton got caught as a serial philanderer, when he got caught harassing and molesting and assaulting women, it did drag her down. Getting caught was what really enraged her.

If we are to believe Clinton mistress Gennifer Flowers, the marital arrangement between Bill and HIll was that he could have as many girls as he wanted and that she could have as many girls as she wanted. Flowers suggested that, in terms of girl count, Hillary won the competition. And yet, if she did, she was surely far more discreet than her hillbilly husband.

Bruni is the first columnist to suggest that Hillary would have managed the pandemic better than Trump did. In truth, as I have noted, no one, and that means no one-- before Bruni-- suggested that the world would be a better place or that the pandemic would have been less lethal if Hillary had been in charge. An incompetent unaccomplished buffoon, Hillary would not have done better. The proof is that no one in the leftist commentariat has entertained the notion. 

I’ll be less decorous. Hillary obviously would have managed this pandemic better, because Trump could hardly have managed it worse.

Now, Sittenfeld has taken a novelist’s license and has pretended that she could define Hillary outside of her relationship with Bill. And yet, outside of that relationship Hillary was a zero, a nothing. If she had not married Bill, no one would have known her name.

In any case, Sittenfeld said, “I feel like my interest in Hillary Clinton is not as a first lady, it’s as the first female major party nominee for president. So, to me, she is not defined by her relationship to Bill.” The novel essentially formalizes that position — and then builds on it.

Of course, Sittenfeld lays it on thick, because she wants us all to believe what every woman with any sense knows in her heart and soul: that Hillary was not in love with Bill and that Bill was so little in love with HIllary that he was constantly looking out for new hookups. That they were attracted to each other, makes no sense. They were both very ambitious, neither was prone to monogamy, and Hillary had to hide a secret. She hid it well:

“If you look at pictures from their wedding, they have these dreamy expressions on their faces and he’s very handsome and she’s very pretty and I believe that they genuinely fell in love,” Sittenfeld said. “I believe they were attracted to each other.”

Bruni closes:

In other words the sex in “Rodham” isn’t just about sex. It’s about mystery and misperception, and it speaks to a hypothetical even bigger than Hillary’s parting of company with Bill. What if we’ve never really known her at all?

In truth, he stumbles on the truth at the end. We’ve never really known her at all. That is the bottom line. She is not a blank slate upon which we are projecting our fantasies, as the psycho world would have it. She’s a big lie that the feminist left has been tripping over itself trying to cover for.

Time for American feminists to get over their Hillary Rodham illusion. If that's what Sittenfeld's book is about, I will buy a copy myself.