‘Happened’ stances
Hillary Clinton just released her memoir, “What Happened,” which, of course, has everybody giving their own take on “what really happened” in her botched presidential bid.
The New Yorker’s David Remnick, who scored an interview with Clinton, is considerate enough to distribute blame for her loss, taking aim at Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell’s “despicable act” (Clinton’s phrase) in threatening the White House if President Obama revealed what he knew about the Russians’ interference in the election. His interview also gives Clinton a platform to attack President Trump, who, she says, is a “clear and present danger to our democracy” and is unaware of how he is “being played by the Putins and the Kim Jong-uns of the world.”
But Remnick also tracks down a few former members of Clinton’s inner circle who were steamed at her for, in the words of one, “blowing the biggest slam dunk in history,” and for profiting on a book about the “disaster.”
While Clinton rues former FBI Director James Comey’s 11th-hour announcement on her e-mails, Remnick laments her inability to “find a language” that could convince enough struggling working Americans that she, and not a “cartoonish plutocrat,” was their champion.
New York’s Rebecca Traister, meanwhile, is a bit more sympathetic to Clinton, blaming her defeat on the sexism of her haters, whose furious reaction to her anger, she says, confirms her thesis that Americans hate women who rage.
Traister praises the former secretary of state for her unvarnished — albeit belated — honesty. The book is “100 percent more candid than anything she has previously expressed during her 25 years in national politics,” Traister writes. She also notes that Clinton is incensed at the New York Times’ continued “infatuation” with her e-mail story.
Elsewhere, Time’s cover story on how Irma’s destruction “could have been worse” because the “Sunshine state didn’t break; its cities didn’t tumble,” smacks of glorified weather reporting. The 10-page report offers a glowing — and somewhat sleep-inducing — review of the government’s response to the deadly storm, as if the US has this hurricane problem all solved. Of course, the fact that the magazine’s longtime Managing Editor Nancy Gibbs got swept out of her job last week probably didn’t help, either.