President Clinton has published a new book, Between Hope and History: Meeting America’s Challenges for the 21st Century (Times Books, $ 16.95). By all accounts, it had a remarkably brief gestation, a few months from conception to birth. You can’t blame him for wanting to get it out as quickly as possible. Presidential campaigns are traditionally heralded by books: Every four years the shelves at Crown and Borders fairly groan beneath the candidates’ authorized biographies, their memoirs, their comprehensive statements of vision, the thin, paperbacked collections of their bon mots. But what would an earnest voter find today on a search for published Clintoniana? There’s James Stewart’s Blood Sport, an account of Arkansas land-flips and S&L hanky-panky. Or Bob Woodward’s The Choice, which shows the president’s wife channeling Eleanor Roosevelt, who used to be dead. Or Roger Morris’s Partners in Power and R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr.’s Boy Clinton, which implicate the president in drug-running and . . . well, worse.
To balance the scales against this mountain of abuse, the president now offers his little wisp of a book, weighing in at slightly less than a box of Raisinettes. It’s 178 pages long, though if you adjust for typesetting inflation it is probably closer to 75, and if you further adjust for the inflationary effects of throat-clearing, repetition, and wheel-spinning, you can peg the final count somewhere below 50. On the dust jacket President Bill Clinton is listed as sole author, and the White House has circulated a photocopied page of manuscript, dark with presidential scratchings, to prove that the president labored over every word. In the acknowledgments he gives generous thanks to an improbably named “public policy consultant,” William E. Nothdurft, “who was primarily responsible for helping to draft this book,” and who, if I know the Clintons, will never be heard from ever again.
