THE CANDIDATE

Alexandra Jacobs writing in The New York Times Book Review:

I want the citizenry to elect Hillary Clinton as president of the United States next November — if only so that we might all get a respite from seeing her offhand, controversial 1992 comment that she could have “stayed home and baked cookies and had teas” (rather than pursuing an outside profession) parsed and squeezed and hung out to dry again and again like the moldy old dishrag that it is. Dull economic policy briefs? Droning States of the Union with senators clapping cheerlessly in the aisles? Forced marches down the stairs of Air Force One, striding in the hot sun across the Rose Garden to the familiar strains of “Hail to the Chief”? Bring ’em on, baby — bring ’em on.

THIRTY WAYS OF LOOKING AT HILLARY
Reflections by Women Writers.
Edited by Susan Morrison.
Illustrated. 254 pp. Harper/HarperCollins Publishers. $23.95.

Related
First Chapter: '30 Ways of Looking at Hillary' (January 15, 2008)
'30 Ways of Looking at Hillary,' (January 15, 2008)
Complete Coverage of Hillary Clinton

Cookies and teas; headbands and helmet hair; Gennifer Flowers and Tammy Wynette; cleavage and perhaps a soupçon of Botox. “Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary,” an impressive if somewhat exhausting anthology about the first feasible female presidential contender, is a prism focused almost exclusively on such familiar emblems of the domestic realm — not welfare reform, but the inner confines of the White House.

Indeed, reading the book, whose contributors are all lacking Y chromosomes and almost exclusively culled from the East Coast liberal establishment press, feels a bit as though a high court of American letters, or a line of literary Rockettes, were rummaging repeatedly through Mrs. Clinton’s past and perhaps future kitchen and bathroom cabinets, closets and underwear drawers: an experience both intimate and mundane. (It might have been fun to throw — well, not Ann Coulter, but maybe some saucy right-winger into the mix.) The title is a riff on the Wallace Stevens poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” but much of the contents also conjure the Paul Simon song “Fifty Ways to Leave Your Lover”: reflective, yes, but also resigned, repetitive and thematically ambivalent.

Many of the women here may be poised to pull the lever, or punch the chad, for Hillary Clinton, but none of them appear ready to do it with any degree of zest; even the noted feminist Katha Pollitt, back bravely in front of her computer Googling Hillary haters after writing a much-mocked article about cyberstalking an ex-lover, says it’s the “sulfurous emanations” she finds online that might drive her to vote for Clinton, not the candidate’s stance on the issues. And so they dance around this looming decision in slow, concentric circles, occasionally bumping up against one another. The Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post fashion reporter Robin Givhan praises Hillary’s penchant for pantsuits but bemoans that “she still hasn’t become what we crave, even need: an icon of female power.” Some 25 pages later, Leslie Bennetts, who earlier this year released the excellent pro-career treatise “The Feminine Mistake: Are We Giving Up Too Much?,” refers contemptuously to “an overwrought fashion writer” from The Washington Post — guess which? — who raised the dubious disgrace of Mrs. Clinton’s exposed décolletage last July. Me-ouch!

The full review.......

Alexandra Jacobs is an editor at The New York Observer.