UNLIKEABLE
The Problem With Hillary
Edward Klein
Regnery
256 pages; $29.99
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CRISIS OF CHARACTER
A White House Secret Service Officer Discloses His Firsthand Experience With Hillary, Bill, and How They Operate
Gary J Byrne, with Grant M Schmidt
Center Street
285 pages; $27
THE SECRET HISTORY OF THE DEMOCRATIC PARTY
Dinesh D’Souza
Regnery 294 pages; $29.99
HOW TRUMP CAN BEAT HILLARY
Dick Morris and Eileen McGann
Humanix
238 pages; $24.99
GUILTY AS SIN
Uncovering New Evidence of Corruption and How Hillary Clinton and the Democrats Derailed the FBI Investigation
Edward Klein
Regnery
266 pages; $27.99
I’ve been bingeing on a lot of anti-Hillary Clinton books lately. Some of their gripes are legitimate and verifiable; some are halfway down the six-lane expressway to bonkersville. But of all the unlikely themes to emerge from them, of all the conspiracies they propose and the outrages they cite, the strangest of all is quite straightforward: That Ms Clinton is a potty mouth.
Some of these books are as obsessed with her supposed coarseness as they are with Travelgate, Benghazi, Vince Foster and missing emails. In Edward Klein’s Guilty as Sin which came out last week, roughly two-thirds of the anonymously sourced quotations attributed to Ms Clinton are salted with obscenities.
In light of the recently leaked audiotape of Donald Trump talking to Billy Bush of Access Hollywood this fixation with Ms Clinton’s language makes for a uniquely peculiar reading experience. Yet Mr Trump’s supporters, as we’ve seen, do not care if he is a vulgarian. That, arguably, is precisely what they admire about him — that he says what he thinks, that political correctness gives him a rash. His words were simply “locker-room talk,” the muscular flourishes of an alpha male. But the prospect of a blaspheming Hillary Clinton is clearly repulsive to those who despise her. What is it about female profanity – or her possible profanity specifically – that’s such a potent signifier?
In Crisis of Character for instance, Gary J Byrne, a former uniformed Secret Service officer, writing with Grant M Schmidt, mentions Ms Clinton’s “obscenity-laced tirades” on the first page of his introduction, and the opening sentence from the first lady includes a hearty expletive. In The Clintons’ War on Women Roger Stone and Robert Morrow dedicate an entire chapter to presumed profanities from the Clintons, almost all of them coming from Hillary, almost all of them involving F-bombs.
Now, to be clear: It’s not at all clear that Ms Clinton is a cuss. The authors’ sources are generally unnamed or not what one might exactly deem reliable. (The Association of Former Agents of the United States Secret Service made the unusual move of denouncing “Crisis of Character” when it came out, implying Mr. Byrne couldn’t have witnessed all the events he claimed he did.)
There are some reputable reports of Ms Clinton’s using off-colour language to express her irritation — in Russell L Riley’s Inside the Clinton White House: An Oral History,” for instance, or in Mark Leibovich’s This Town — but these blue outbursts wouldn’t necessarily distinguish her from her male peers.
Anyway, that’s not the point. Surely no one would blink if told that a male politician spoke this way. Lyndon B Johnson most certainly did.
So what gives? One possibility: Objections to Ms Clinton’s swearing have nothing to do with profanity per se, but with hypocrisy. Swearing is the clearest evidence we have of how different her public and private selves really are. Sure, the former secretary of state may appear cool and disciplined on the outside, smiling and pleasantly nodding as her political opponent threatens to throw her in jail. But beneath that porcelain surface, she’s a scheming empress of fury.
You wonder whether this will be a problem for female politicians for years to come. They’re obliged to hew to a much stricter set of regulations when they speak in public.
This notion that Ms Clinton is secretly wrathful appears in another familiar motif in these books: She’s a thrower, the progenitor of her own asteroid belt. Among the objects she’s supposedly hurled: A lamp. (The only instance of this behaviour to be reported, as rumour, in the mainstream media; never confirmed.) A heavy water glass. A vase. A cellphone. A Bible.
It’s also possible that the preoccupation with Ms Clinton’s ostensible penchant for cursing isn’t about hypocrisy at all, but old-fashioned anxiety about the dissolution of traditional gender roles. There’s plenty in these books (and beyond them, for that matter) to suggest that we’re still keeping two separate sets of ledgers for our female and our male candidates.
“She is ruthless, she is grasping,” writes Dinesh D’Souza in Hillary’s America. “She is old, and mean, and even her laugh is a witch’s cackle.” To be fair, vulgarity is not a theme in his book. Then again, many fantastical ideas are — and he did call the first female presidential nominee from a major party a witch.
It’s that old, reliable standby: There’s something unfeminine about a woman’s quest for power. In Armageddon: How Trump Can Beat Hillary, Dick Morris and Eileen McGann call her “macho” at least twice, and assure us that if Hillary were elected, she would feel the power of the presidency “in every bone of her body and exercise it effortlessly and ruthlessly.” (Ruthless. That word again.)
Yet here’s the punch line: As with
Mr Trump, the very traits that make Ms Clinton so unappealing to her detractors may make her immensely appealing to her fans.
Once again, our two cultures are talking past each other. And they probably will, right until the bitter end, when someone places his or her hand on the Bible and says a very different kind of oath.
© New York Times News Service 2016
