A new Hillary?

MADAME HILLARY: THE DARK ROAD TO THE WHITE HOUSE

R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. with Mark W. Davis

Regnery, $27.95, 231 pages, illus.

The seeming inevitability of a Hillary Clinton presidential bid puts in our hands — inevitably — another Hillary book.

I should add, that’s no put-down. The Clintons, Bill and Hillary, are a national soap opera of the most riveting and durable sort — vulnerable and invulnerable at the same time; always up to something that affects, well, everybody. You can love them or hate them; but they never quite disappear from sight.

And now the not-too-distant prospect of a President Hillary. Who is surprised to find one of the most persistent of all Clinton critics, R. Emmett Tyrrell, wondering what such a candidacy, such an administration, would mean for us? Who is surprised to see him less than charmed at what, to him, seems fully ordained at this point?

“Madame Hillary,” from title page to acknowledgements, is richly Tyrrellian: the rhetorical tics, the rococo vocabulary, the deft jabs and well-aimed saber slashes, the snatches of self-referential material (“Lady Thatcher told me,” etc., etc.).

After all these years, starting with the exposure by his magazine, the American Spectator, of the former president’s sexual exploits in Arkansas, Bob Tyrrell knows the terrain in question about as well as any journalist is likely to know it: the better, perhaps, owing to his collaboration here with veteran Republican speechwriter-consultant Mark W. Davis, who helped the late Barbara Olson research her own, best-selling book on Hillary.

The recent evolution of a “New Hillary” — centrist-seeming, a nuanced supporter of the Iraq war — hasn’t impressed (to say the least) the journalist she once favored with an icy stare while he was interviewing her husband. (Mr. Tyrrell relates the story.)

He finds Sen. Clinton, as before, “mendacious and grasping, philosophically corrupt, emblematic of the Coat and Tie Radicals of her generation.” Also “Dark, sour, conspiratorial.” And “determined to run for president.”

She is a kind of “Lady Macbeth [who] … has grasped the daggers and set out to capture a throne of her own.”

Well, you get the idea. And how does Lady Macbeth propose selling herself to the modern American electorate?

No problem. Women are her base. More to the point, women who feel, or whose husbands feel, left behind in the free-and-easy capitalistic society which, come to think of it, the last Clinton administration encouraged.

“Her greatest strength,” writes Mr. Tyrrell, “will be her connection with American women and an ability to grasp and communicate her concern for issues about which the average male Republican is oblivious, beginning with the time-stressed life of the American family.”

To understand her appeal, consider that which Mr. Tyrrell (following John Pitney Jr. of Claremont McKenna College) calls “Left-Behind America.” What would a multi-millionaire U.S. senator know about Left-Behind America? That’s to be seen. Mrs. Clinton appears anyway, on Mr. Tyrrell’s showing, to have cultivated some understanding of the hot-button issues for laid-off American workers.

Let’s be careful here, Mr. Tyrrell warns. She has moved center-ward only on account of having seen that the center outvotes the left. To beat her, Republicans will have to play up her record, not her pretenses.

How many centrists will such a book as this vacuum away from Mrs. Clinton’s reach? Not many, I would guess.

“Madame Hillary” is a sermon to the choir — a warning of the wrath to come. If you’ve forgotten why you ever disliked or feared Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Tyrrell will jog your memory — hard. He will remind you of the 1993 health-care debacle over which she presided. Her early radical associations are presented here for inspection. (Mr. Tyrell blames radical organizer Saul Alinsky for helping shape her politics.)

I am bound to note that about half the book has a recycled feeling: the feeling of a Clinton scrapbook laid open on the coffee table. On the other hand, Mr. Tyrrell talks instructively about Mrs. Clinton’s Senate career.

Or — better said — her non-career, just in terms of accomplishments. He compares her ruthlessly, and no doubt accurately, with the very literate, very hard-working Daniel Patrick Moynihan, to whose Senate seat she succeeded.

Mr. Tyrrell’s toting up of her likely strengths whenever she runs (a matter awaiting resolution this November) is smart and nicely focused. And he points to the stakes in such an election: freedom itself, assuming Hillary remains the radical he declares her.

“Madame Hillary” was obviously a quickie book — very quick indeed — but it raises in the short run questions that Americans must in the long run confront and resolve. Better to start now?

William Murchison is a nationally syndicated columnist.