Like, I suspect, quite a few others it was John O'Neill's Unfit for Command, the book that tore into John Kerry's Vietnam record, that put me on the mailing list for the book sales service of the US conservative Human Events magazine. The deal was that I needed to read the preview chapters for a piece I was writing on dirty tricks, to get them I had to "register" with the magazine pushing the book.
For around a year now, the latest books celebrating Ronald Reagan, knocking liberals and warning of the "threat" presented by Islam have been mailed to me weekly. While not quite Hillary Clinton's vast rightwing conspiracy, it is no doubt an effective marketing tool. But Senator Clinton, or at least her people, would perhaps quarrel with that after the latest mailshot put Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary at the top of its sales list. Her spokesman prefers to call it "muckraking", for reasons this Reuters report explains.
Ridiculing her as "The Big Girl", Klein's book offers a 305-page personal assault, asserting without obvious sourcing that she is a cheater, a liar and a backstabber, a late sleeper, and that's only in the first few pages.
Klein and O'Neill are different types – O'Neill was hired by Richard Nixon's aides in 1971 to argue against a youthful Kerry in a TV debate, Klein is a former editor-in-chief of the New York Times Magazine and foreign editor of Newsweek - but their books have the same purpose. "I do not want to see her become president of the United States," Klein told Reuters. Just in case you thought the next presidential election was happening anytime soon, this is 2008 he is talking about.
The odd thing, surely disappointing to the publishers, is that the two sides of the US political blogosphere are not mauling over the book like a couple of dogs at a dog fight. In theory there is something here for everyone – the left can attack Klein, the right can attack Clinton – but few are taking the bait.
Media Matters offers a comparison between the new work and Sidney Blumenthal's The Clinton Wars, suggesting Klein based some of his book on Blumenthal's – however, this is not exactly an unknown phenomena in the world of political biographies. Zaki at Zaki's Corner, who says he cannot fathom the "mad-on the lunatic right has for her", is meanwhile bewildered at the relevance of the revelation that Senator Clinton punched her fifth grade boyfriend on the nose when he gave one of her rabbits to a neighbour.
More interesting is the wariness some of the right have for the book. Comments from Dick Morris, that strange political maverick who worked under-the-radar for Bill Clinton and then more publicly for Ukip, that "these accusations do not belong in our public dialogue" win support from RedState.org, where Erick says his problems with Senator Clinton "have nothing to do with her personality or personal life".
The realists among us know that these attacks are uncalled for, inappropriate in modern political discourse, and both the left and the right would do well to shun people like Klein. The right, in particular, should work very hard to get beyond the appearance of being obsessed with Clinton.
The right has been making similar noises since details of the book first emerged. Still, Klein's work is at number three on Amazon's US bestsellers list (sometimes you can't beat Harry Potter) so it is hardly going to slope off quietly. But it is too early for another Unfit for Command. Around three years too early.
