What I've Been Reading: A Political Autobiography (Late 2015 to Early 2016)

Not only have I gotten behind on my reading lately; I've also gotten behind in writing about the few books I've managed to read. This is a small step towards getting caught up, but only a small step, because in this entry I only cover one book. I originally intended to cover all the books I finished in the first few months of this year, but due to this particular book's current relevance, I decided to talk about it at some length and save the books I finished more recently for a future post.

Living History by Hillary Clinton
This, of course, is Hillary Rodham Clinton’s autobiography, covering her life from her childhood to a little after the end of her husband Bill Clinton’s second term as US president and her own election as US senator from the state of New York. Given that she has a better than even chance of becoming US president herself after the next election, it seemed like a good time to find out more about her from her own perspective (to be sure, when I read the book at the beginning of the year the presidential race was still packed with candidates, but despite Bernie Sanders’s impressive performance and the train wreck on the Republican side, Hillary has remained the candidate with the best chance of winning pretty much throughout). I can’t say that the book dramatically changed my views of her, either for better or for worse, but it was informative nonetheless.

Unsurprisingly, I couldn’t resist comparing Hillary’s autobiography to the book written by the man she wants to succeed. Based on these two books alone, he is a much better writer and his story is much more colorful. This isn’t to say she’s a bad writer (or rather she and her co-writers, as she had three ghostwriters help on her book) or that her story wasn’t interesting, just that where she is competent, he is brilliant. In a way, this reflects one of the biggest problems that has plagued her in her political career; she has a great grasp of details and is good at explaining things, but she has difficulty generating inspiration. However, as I have noted before, in governance if not in literature, inspiration isn’t everything, and in some ways it’s more important that a president be competent than that they be inspirational. Anyway, it’s not really a fair comparison. Hillary’s is a solid political biography, whereas Obama’s book is really literature, the sort of life story that would be considered an excellent book even if the person who wrote hadn’t gone on to become president of the United States. What’s more, when he wrote it, even he probably didn’t have any definite ambitions on the national political stage, as he hadn’t begun his political career. In other words, Obama was not writing as a politician who has to watch every word lest it damage his future prospects. Hillary, on the other hand, was, and the difference is readily apparent.

Despite the success of the American right wing in painting Hillary as fundamentally dishonest, her account for the most part rings true. The story of her mother, though told very briefly, is particularly interesting, as is her account of her own evolution from young Republican to Democrat. This particular part of her background has become a club for some on the left to beat her with, as they like to cite her admission that in high school she was a “Goldwater girl”. Having undergone a similar political evolution I find such attacks absurd, especially since someone who has proved open minded enough to change their views through a rational comparison of the different sides is in fact rather more convincing than someone who has been a true believer all their lives. A more legitimate angle for criticism is that in describing the period of Bill Clinton’s governorship and presidency, she expresses support for many of the problematic centrist positions he supported. However, even here there are some points that her critics seem to miss. For instance, in talking about the various welfare reform bills, she says that she told Bill and his staff that if the bill was too harsh, she would publicly oppose it. In the end, the final bill that came out of the Republican Congress had enough protections for the most disadvantaged to satisfy her, so she didn’t oppose it, but that was only after Bill had rejected more draconian proposals. Granted, it came be fairly argued that the bill that passed was still far too harsh, and Bill and to a lesser extent Hillary can be faulted for going along with it. What’s more, those who insist that she is untruthful may not accept her assertion that she pushed behind the scenes for a moderate bill. But while the first point is reasonable, the second is not, as her account is consistent with the rest of her record, even if it to a certain degree punctures the view of her as bearing major responsibility for the negative aspects of welfare reform.

While at times she seems to take pains to portray herself a pragmatic centrist, providing ammunition for her progressive critics, she also makes clear her advocacy for a number of progressive positions, from improving the status of women to protecting the environment. I also appreciated her positive remarks about the Dalai Lama and her account of confronting Jiang Zemin, then president of China, on the issue of Tibet. On a less serious note, the book constantly brought to mind her appearance on The Colbert Show, which amusingly poked fun at her tendency to drop names. Though they were talking about her book about her time as US secretary of state, in this book she also seems to make an effort to mention almost everyone who crossed her path, famous or otherwise. In most cases, she also makes an effort to say something positive about them, though there are several notable exceptions. While she praises Dick Morris’s political skills and says she encouraged Bill to consult him, she also acknowledges that he worked both sides of the political aisle and that he has “the people skills of a porcupine”. Unsurprisingly, she has nothing good to say about Kenneth Starr and her comments about Newt Gingrich are largely negative. I share her views about Starr and Gingrich, but while I can appreciate her inclination to otherwise follow that old rule “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all”, especially if you are in politics, in retrospect she might have been wiser to, for example, more strongly emphasize the autocratic nature of Hosni Mubarak’s rule in Egypt as a counterpoint to her more positive remarks about him. Likewise, her relationships with people like Mark Penn and Rahm Emmanuel don’t look so good in retrospect. But all in all, given that she knew everything she wrote would be gone over for intemperate remarks that could be used against her, the caution that governs much of what she says about people is understandable.

Despite the cautious nature of most of her account, all the more inevitable given her personality and her political ambitions, Hillary still manages to get in flashes of the personal. Her stories of her childhood and college years give a revealing look at her background. Her discussions of some of the troubles she got into on the couple’s first political campaign are candid and occasionally show flashes of humor. Her defenses against the attacks launched against her and her husband, both during the campaign and during her husband's presidency, are generally quite credible, not surprisingly considering the outrageous nature of some of the attacks. Even at the time, it was clear to me that Whitewater, for instance, was much ado about nothing, and the partisan nature of Starr’s “investigations” (or, rather, desperate digging for the least little thing that could be used against the Clintons) were obvious to anyone with an ounce of objectivity. Certainly anyone who thinks there is anything to the “scandals” the right wing attacked Hillary and her husband for should read her account of them, and those who have acquired a vaguely negative view of her in general might find themselves seeing things differently after reading her book. While the dyed-in-the-wool Hillary haters will not believe anything she says, and even those on the left who dislike her will find as much to confirm their views of her as to contradict them, those who are more open minded but less knowledgeable about her are likely to emerge from the book with a picture of her as a person who, despite some missteps and occasional questionable viewpoints, is extremely talented and knowledgeable, and who has come through a lot of political fire to get where she is today. While the book is unlikely to convince readers that she’ll be an inspirational president who will institute dramatic changes, it may help persuade them that she would at least be a solidly competent one who will in general move things in the right direction, which is enough to make her vastly preferable to the potential disaster that her prospective opponent represents.