Hill Has No Fury (Hah!)

Onward, Christian Soldier

Carl Bernstein traces the evolving religious commitment of a politician partial to triangulation

BY CHRIS LEHMANN

It’s the piety, stupid. Carl Bernstein’s mammoth new study of Hillary Clinton goes beyond the familiar theorizing about the gender politics of the New York Senator’s career, and instead homes in on her stolid Methodist enthusiasm for moral improvement. At key moments, Mr. Bernstein shows us a diligently observant Hillary, poring over passages in a small, well-thumbed Bible, underlining and pondering.

Read more ...

What Makes Hillary Stumble?

Does Carl Bernstein know what junior senators want?

BY ANA MARIE COX

Carl Bernstein is a rarity in the American electorate: He’s ambivalent about Hillary Clinton. Recent polls show as little as 3 percent of Americans have no opinion of the former First Lady, and the 97 percent that do split almost evenly between favorable and unfavorable. So what to make of a book that exhaustively (over 600 pages of exhaust) plumbs the depths of the known Hillary record—we learn about her prom dress, her religious beliefs, her endometritis, her fears of indictment—only to conclude, lamely, that she “is neither the demon of the right’s perception, nor a feminist saint, nor is she particularly emblematic of her time,” and, shockingly, “the jury remains out.”

Read more ...