Sen. Hillary Clinton has already banked $2.85 million in advance for her White House years’ spinography, “Living History.” The deal with Simon & Schuster is worth $8 million.
But she’s banking on more.
This is a campaign book: Hillary in ’08: “History Will Absolve Me.”
She’s not about to challenge a popular incumbent, so an ’04 run against President George W. Bush is out. Moreover, the timing of her book relegates the announced Democratic candidates to a publicity gulag and further diminishes their stature — and chances.
Sen. Clinton’s game plan is transparently pragmatic. She can continue to earn a hard-working reputation in the Senate, earn more chits as the Democratic Party’s top elected fund-raiser and look to be re-elected senator from New York in ’06. In ’08, the Clinton White House years’ focus is likely to be more on economic nostalgia than scandals, and there will be no incumbent to encumber her.
Plus, she now gets a chance to get all the seamier parts of the Clinton years out of the way — on her own terms. A little Whitewater whitewash, some victimization over Monica and a lot of humanizing for an otherwise calculating ideologue. She can spin it in the finest tradition of memoir bias.
Down the road, inevitably uncomfortable questions can be dismissed with a “that-was-then-this-is-now” refrain. She can underscore that with: “I’ve already dealt with that in my book.”
The woman is smart, tough, wealthy and increasingly viable as a presidential candidate in ’08. She’s doing it her way, with a little help and a lot of money from “Living Herstory.”