1. The smiling, laughing picture of her on the cover.
2. The quote on the cover, “She and Bill are just enjoying ‘ordinary, everyday things.'"
3. On her relationship with the president: “The killing of bin Laden, she says, was a bonding experience.”
4.Grading her tenure as Secretary of State: “At State, she was the head of a smoothly running 70,000-person institution, and fully her own woman, whose marriage to a former president was, when it was mentioned, purely an asset. And now that she’s left State, Clintonworld is being refashioned along new lines, rationalized and harmonized.”
5. “Clinton’s State team argues that Clinton was a great stateswoman, her ambition to touch down in as many countries as possible a meter of how much repair work she did to the nation’s image abroad. Along the way, she embraced with good humor a parody Tumblr account, Texts From Hillary, that featured a picture of her in the iconic sunglasses looking cool and queenly. “She insisted on having a personality,” says Jake Sullivan, her former deputy chief of staff and now the national-security adviser to Vice-President Joe Biden. “And on stating her opinion.”
6. On marriage: “Hillary used her tenure at State for a more intimate purpose: to shift the balance of power in the most celebrated political marriage in American history.”
7. Casting her as the victim: “Benghazi will be the go-to bludgeon for Republicans if and when Clinton tries using her experience at State to run for president. It is a reminder that Clinton, despite the cool, centrist façade she has developed in the past four years, is only a misstep away from being a target of partisan rage once again. Regardless of the facts, Republicans are liable to use Benghazi as a wedge to pry back her stately exterior, goading her into an outburst, once again revealing the polarizing figure who saw vast right-wing conspiracies and tried ginning up government health care against the political tides of Newt Gingrich.”
8. “For now, Hillary’s strategy is to sail above these conflicts, mostly by saying nothing to inflame them. ‘I have a lot of reason to believe, as we saw in the 2012 election, most Americans don’t agree with the extremists on any side of an issue,’ says Clinton, ‘but there needs to continue to be an effort to find common ground, or even take it to higher ground on behalf of the future.’
9. On her appearance: “When she emerged from behind the curtain, she appeared much more youthful—smiling, upright, beaming in a turquoise pantsuit; she received huge applause and a standing ovation that dwarfed the response to Bill.”
10. “So all the activity and planning and obsessive calculation that go into a presidential campaign take place behind a pleasant midwestern smile. .. She’s a polarizing liberal with lots of Republican friends, the coolest of customers constantly at the center of swirling drama. She’s hung up on a decision over whether to run for an office she (not to mention her husband) has coveted for her entire adult life. She’s a Clinton.”
Honorable Mention: A Note on Bill Clinton
1. ‘Clinton groupies’: At the Sheraton Ballroom in Chicago last spring, Bill Clinton appeared before an eager crowd of Clinton groupies at the Clinton Global Initiative America, a special conference focused on domestic issues and set in Hillary’s hometown. Onstage, the former president looked older than in the past—thinner, stooped, more subdued, his hands trembling while he held his notes at the podium. Haloed in blue light, he spoke about the “still embattled American Dream” and then introduced his wife as his new partner in the foundation, the woman who “taught me everything I know about NGOs.”
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