Jonah Goldberg is not the only reviewer who has little good to say about Hillary Clinton’s new memoir of her years as U.S. secretary of state. But Goldberg is certainly among the funniest.
Have some sympathy for Clinton. She is an accomplished woman, but writing an exciting book about her unremarkable tenure as secretary of state would be hard enough. Doing so without throwing the president under the bus and telling tales out of school is simply impossible.
This is because Clinton is not an exciting person. Yes, many people are excited about her, favorably and unfavorably. Yes, she is at the center of many hot cultural and political controversies. But beneath all that, she’s a remarkably dull figure. …
… She’s exciting because of the stuff that follows her around, and to the extent she is interesting at all, it is to see how she tries to manipulate her image to her benefit.
Clinton may be president one day, but she’s already presidential in one sense: Her statements are never really taken at face value. Every utterance is examined for its ironic content and parsed like the rough draft of ad copy. What will people take away from this? What message is she sending to her fans? What spin is she offering to the media? What bait is she giving her enemies? How true is it?
The reason for this is that, unlike her husband, she’s not very good at faking sincerity.