Hillary Clinton has been good for business. Exceedingly good. Whole segments of large industries rest on her being. No pundit need want for a topic while she is among us. The cable news channels are much in her debt. Magazines sell out, as do books about her. A Washington think tank sponsored a Hillary forum where foes and fans of the current first lady had at each other from nine in the morning till five. She has also, of course, been quite good for women, notably those who have made names and money critiquing her. As we prepare to bid adieu to Hillary the first lady and bonjour to Hillary the seeker of office, last year’s Hell to Pay by Barbara Olson and First Partner by Joyce Milton are joined by Laura Ingraham’s The Hillary Trap and Peggy Noonan’s The Case Against Hillary Clinton, both indicting the first lady from distinct conservative points of view.

Laura Ingraham, the law clerk turned pundit, makes the policy case against Hillary Clinton, a woman whose theories are harmful to her sex and whose pioneering life has been a fake. Thus, Hillary the free woman is ultra-dependent, Hillary the strong woman encourages theories of victim-hood, and she who claims to speak for the future has visions that come from the past. Hillary, Ingraham says, stands for policies that lock poor children into failed public schools; dumb down college curricula with “women’s studies” and other such drivel; strangle female entrepreneurs with regulations and taxes and preach a doctrine of women as helpless without the cover of the overseeing Nanny State.