Hillary Clinton is headed to Seattle Dec. 11. (Screen capture, YouTube, CBS)
Hillary Rodham Clinton is headed to Seattle for a Dec. 11 appearance at which she will promote her book “What Happened,” which some critics have suggested is essentially a blame game chronicle that points lots of fingers in her stunning loss to Donald Trump last November.
The book, released last week, is getting praised or panned, depending upon who is talking. A review in Politico put it this way: “Hillary Clinton promised an unvarnished take on the 2016 presidential election in her new book, ‘What Happened.’ When it comes to her political foes and frenemies, she delivered.
“The vanquished Democratic nominee offers unsparing take-downs of both Republicans and Democrats who she believed treated her unfairly, while also going after media personalities and foreign figures.”
Writing in National Review, Kyle Smith offered this scathing critique:
“But the book only makes sense when you realize that What Happened is a fake title, a P. T. Barnum–style ruse to draw in the suckers. The real subject of this 500-page chunk of self-congratulation and blame-shifting — its real title — is ‘Why I Should Have Won.’ If Hollywood is a place where you peel off the fake tinsel only to find the real tinsel underneath, Hillary Clinton is homo politicus all the way through. It’s all she has. It’s all she is. She earned the Oval Office, dammit, and she wants you to know it. Peel off the phony, power-addled political hack, and all you’ll find is the real, power-addled political hack underneath.”
On the other hand, writing for Macleans, Anne Kingston turns her wrath on Trump while noting Clinton’s lessons from 2016 can “help us heal our democracy and protect it in the future.” Here’s how Kingston helps heal the country:
“It’s not been a year since an unqualified, undisciplined, misogynistic, serial liar was elected U.S. president. Donald Trump has diminished the nation’s standing internationally, abetted white supremacists, degraded the democratic process, tweeted threat of nuclear attack, and appears to have colluded with the Russian government. And yet somehow Hillary Clinton, regarded by many as the most qualified presidential candidate in U.S. history and a role model to generations of women, remains the nation’s paramount problem. Have these people learned nothing about false equivalencies? At a time civil liberties and women’s rights are under daily attack in the U.S., it’s worth remembering that democracies don’t erase history. Autocracies do.”
After hitting Seattle, Clinton heads for Portland where she will appear at the Arlene Schnitzer Concert Hall.
