Hillary Clinton’s weird and fiercely loyal troupe of admirers is determined to make you love her.
They are so determined, in fact, that they will even rewrite the story of her life to make her seem more appealing.
The online streaming service Hulu, for example, has optioned the rights to Curtis Sittenfeld’s Rodham, a work of “alternate history” fiction that imagines Hillary Clinton’s life without Bill Clinton. Sittenfeld’s book envisions a world in which an unmarried Hillary Rodham becomes successful and powerful enough to make a run at the White House, all without riding the coattails of her eminently more charismatic and politically savvier real-life husband.
Hey, they don’t call it “fiction” for nothing.
“Sarah Treem is attached to write and executive produce the project. The Handmaid’s Tale executive producer Warren Littlefield will also executive produce Rodham,” Variety reports.
Should Hulu greenlight the show, it will become the second such program on the streaming platform to attempt to glorify the two-time failed presidential candidate. Recall that Hulu already released a four-part “docuseries” (hagiography is more like it) this year called Hillary, which failed utterly in its attempt to humanize and glorify Clinton, as noted at the time by my Washington Examiner colleague Tiana Lowe.
Also, while we are on the topic, the Hillary series failed miserably in its attempt to build up Clinton as some great champion of liberal politics. Indeed, the series went on to become a major headache for the Democratic Party, which, at the time of the program’s release, was in the heat of a hotly contested presidential primary.
Hulu’s Hillary features a scene wherein Clinton says of 2016 and 2020 Democratic presidential candidate Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, “He was in Congress for years. He had one senator support him. Nobody likes him. Nobody wants to work with him. He got nothing done.”
“He was a career politician. It’s all just baloney, and I feel so bad that people got sucked into it,” Clinton adds.
Later, when asked during her Hillary press tour to clarify her comments about Sanders, who, at the time, was running second place in the 2020 Democratic primary, Clinton refused to say whether she would support the Vermont lawmaker should he win the Democratic nomination this year.
Should Hulu produce a Rodham series, one should expect a graceless thud similar to Hillary. Indeed, with the “alternate” history’s impossible-to-ignore censoring of the most disturbing elements of Hillary Clinton’s real-life story (including her silence over the credible rape allegations leveled against her real-life husband), a possible Rodham television show will likely serve only as another reminder of the failed presidential candidate’s greatest faults and flaws, attempts to rewrite history notwithstanding.
