E-Mail This Article to a Friend The trouble with being Hillary (continued)
	Related links Hillary Clinton for President A Clinton fan’s online shrine. When Edward met Sidney Media Matters for America’s analysis of Edward Klein’s new Hillary Clinton bio, The Truth About Hillary, which strongly suggests that part of it was lifted almost word-for-word from Sidney Blumenthal’s The Clinton Wars. Their Lives Official publisher’s site for Candice Jackson’s Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine. Blogs Against Hillary Feel the hate.

If there is an über-theme to Hillary hatred, it is that she is a shrewd, shrewish, calculating woman who covered up for her husband’s sexual indiscretions (and worse) in order to keep her own ambitions intact. It is the theme, too, of yet another new Clinton-bashing book called Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine (World Ahead). Written by a 27-year-old lawyer named Candice Jackson, who formerly worked for the anti-Clinton operation Judicial Watch, Their Lives is intended as a response to Bill Clinton’s 2004 doorstop of an autobiography, My Life. Jackson tells the story of seven women who fell into Clinton’s sexual orbit. Some are well-known, especially Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers, and Paula Jones. Most had consensual affairs, only to be subjected to (in Jackson’s telling) threats, IRS audits, and the like after their dalliances with Clinton ended. Two — Jones and Kathleen Willey — claim to have been crudely propositioned. Juanita Broaddrick levels the most explosive charge of all: that she was violently raped by the then–Arkansas attorney general in 1978.

None of these stories is new. Many of the tales (but certainly not Lewinsky’s or Flowers’s) fall into the hazy category of never-proved/never-disproved. Broaddrick’s disturbing claim, first reported in 1999, has always struck me as credible — although, as Bob Somerby, who writes the Daily Howler weblog, observes, " ‘credible’ is not the same thing as ‘true.’ " Jackson’s innovations are to cast each of these stories in the most anti-Clinton light imaginable; to claim that Clinton’s attitude about women says something revealing about modern liberalism (watching Jackson attempt to relate this logic to her libertarian-inspired opposition to zoning laws is, if nothing else, entertaining); and to argue that Hillary Clinton, as her husband’s chief apologist and co-conspirator, must be kept out of the White House.

"When it comes to electing our first female president, we can do better than Hillary Clinton," Jackson writes. "We need to do better than Hillary Clinton, or the symbolism of a woman as president will be marred by electing a woman who has done almost as much to inflict mistreatment on real-life women as her misogynist husband."

Right now, Their Lives is barely a blip on the horizon. On Tuesday, it ranked #1089 on Amazon.com — respectable for a new, unheralded book, but hardly a phenomenon. Jackson’s been on MSNBC’s Scarborough Country, Fox News’s Fox & Friends, and, she told me, a number of talk radio shows. She says that Hillary Clinton has "a somewhat well-deserved reputation of being a strong, independent, brilliant woman. I love that about her." But, she adds, "a woman in her position does far more harm to causes like the abuse of women in our society."

Jackson is young, articulate, and attractive, and she’s brimming with well-honed sound bites as to why Hillary Clinton shouldn’t be president. Prediction: if Hillary runs, you are going to see a lot of her.

The horror stiffie

What is it about Hillary? Some argue that her detractors are scared of a strong woman. Yet Condoleezza Rice, to name one example, doesn’t seem to rub folks the same way. Maybe it’s that Hillary is a strong liberal woman — or at least as liberal as the current Rush-and-Fox-drenched politics will allow.

That’s what Gene Lyons thinks. A columnist for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, he is the co-author, with Joe Conason, of The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign To Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton (2000). Among other things, Lyons and Conason argue that there’s another side to the stories told by women such as Broaddrick, Willey, and Jones — that they were used by the Clintons’ right-wing enemies, or that they waited too long to step forward, or that they have too many personal demons to be taken seriously.

If that’s the case, why do so many conservatives evince such irrational hatred toward the Clintons — and especially toward Hillary? "I guess I think scandal sheets always tend toward cultural conservatism, if not political conservatism," Lyons told me, "because the whole game is to pretend to be horrified by what gives you a stiffie." He adds: "I think there’s something about him that upsets people. I think there’s something about her that upsets people. I think people have a lot of problems with an extremely, ambitious intelligent person who makes no effort to hide either her ambition or her intelligence."

This past Sunday, Alan Ehrenhalt, reviewing John Harris’s The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House (Random House) for the New York Times Book Review, wrote, "The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics.... It surpasses even the liberals’ longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon."

Yet Hillary Clinton is arguably the most popular Democratic politician in the country — among Democrats, anyway. She is a fundraising star, a policy wonk whose only match is her husband, and a moderately inclined problem-solver who’s earned unexpected praise from New York Republicans — and even from Newt Gingrich.

Still, if she decides to run for president, the Clinton wars, reduced to a simmer for the past four years, will blaze anew. She will resume her status as the most divisive figure in the country, not because of anything she’s said or even who she is, but because of what she seems to represent. It may not be fair. But since when has politics been fair?

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com. Read his Media Log on BostonPhoenix.com.