More infuriating, Hillary is always compared, even if sometimes subconsciously, to Bill. When she attempted to distance herself from her fiercely antiwar rivals, asserting that there is, too, a deadly Islamist terror threat out there and the nation is safer than it was after September 11, it sounded like a "Sister Souljah moment" of the sort that Bill used to set himself apart from certain other Democratic candidates. But then Hillary tacked sharply left, to "a Dennis Kucinich moment" where she is more comfortable: "I think it's particularly important to point out, this is George Bush's war -- he is responsible for this war. He started the war. He mismanaged the war. He escalated the war. And he refuses to end the war."
Bill has his uses, beyond becoming the Flying Dutchman, endlessly circling the globe in her behalf. She uses him to scold reporters for portraying her as less zealous than she should be in knocking George W. Bush. He makes the tortuous argument that her vote to authorize the war wasn't exactly a vote to go to war. If Hillary makes this argument, she sounds like the fake, insincere, calculating politician so many of us think she is. He makes the argument for her, echoing his explanation of his support, when he was the governor of Arkansas, for the first Gulf war, when he said that he was for the war but actually agreed with those who weren't.
The campaign of '08 already seems headed into the homestretch, with only 517 days to go, and pollsters and pundits arguing over who's ahead, who's not, why not, and who has "the Big Mo." Try as she might, Hillary cannot escape the colorful past she shares with Bill. The pundits (and presumably the public) can't get enough of the reprise of stale scandals in the fresh round of Hillary biographies, which portray her as brilliant and bitchy, as brutally ambitious and the vulnerable victim.
The Hillary campaign wants to talk about the war, health care, education and "worthwhile domestic initiatives," but the beauty-parlor buzz is only about the characters who populate her past: Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Susan McDougal, Vince Foster. Perhaps the best of the new wave of Hillary books is "The Clinton Crack-Up," by R. Emmett Tyrrell, with lots of new details of sordid old stories. The crack-up is about Bill Clinton's life after the death of leaving the White House, but the juice is about Hillary. You can buy the book about Bill, and get one about Hillary free.