The Hunting of Hillary: The Forty-Year Campaign to Destroy Hillary Clinton by Michael D'Antonio

Author:Michael D'Antonio
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Campaigns & Elections, Political Process, Political Science, Politics & Government, United States
Publisher: Thomas Dunne Books
Published: 2020-07-28T03:00:00+00:00

8

Unstoppable

By the time she set her sights on Hillary Clinton, Peggy Noonan had created for herself a public persona that was a mix of modern assertiveness and gal-Friday deference to sexist convention. Modern Noonan cultivated an image of a glamorous woman who could thrive in the male-dominated world of the White House speechwriter, circa 1985. Deferential Noonan, a child of the 1950s, raised in a conservative Long Island suburb, retreated to the pronoun he when describing the speechwriter’s craft—her craft—and confessed, when she was in her thirties, that she had wanted to be admired for her virtue. A child of the middle class who had set her sights high and diligently pursued success, she was quite like Hillary Clinton, but her politics and her old-fashioned ideas about men and women seemed to blind her to this fact.1

Noonan just knew that an American leader should look like Ronald Reagan, not Hillary Clinton, and should speak the kind of words she had written for him. During her White House days, she made sure to signal to the press that she was the woman behind the man and responsible for many of Reagan’s memorable speeches, including his address at Normandy in 1984 and his remarks following the space shuttle Challenger disaster. After Reagan, Noonan wrote speeches for George H. W. Bush, two memoirs, a book about language, and columns for The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. That she detested Hillary Clinton was well established before she set out to prevent her from becoming a U.S. senator. That she would try with a weird little book that mixed heaps of fantasy with reportage and argument was a surprise.

At just 181 pages, The Case Against Hillary Clinton opened with seven and a half pages of make-believe about election night 2000, complete with six long passages about what Hillary Clinton was thinking as she offered a victory speech. According to Noonan, she was thinking, “This is my night. This time it’s me in the lights.… Now I’ve won and I’ve beaten more than Rudy [Giuliani], I’ve beaten Bill. He got it and he blew it. Now I’ll show him how it’s done.” A second imaginary scene, described in sixteen pages, depicted a gathering, just after the Columbine High School shooting tragedy, where two students killed thirteen people and then committed suicide. (Columbine would come to represent the moment school shootings became a national problem.)

Writing within months of the school shooting, Noonan was among the first to fictionalize the Columbine tragedy for political effect. In her fantasy, which included her attending with a tape recorder, Hillary Clinton gathered media moguls to criticize their products—especially those depicting “premarital sex” and “pornography”—and demand change. Noonan couldn’t resist including some digs about the Hamptons estates and private jets of the liberal elite, and she even reported that Hillary criticized Jane Fonda for strident activism against the Vietnam War. For Noonan, who came of age in the 1960s, phenomena like the sexual revolution, the anti-war movement, and feminism remained sore points that could be soothed by fantasy Hillary’s talk.

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