Over the Hill

It's noisy, crowded, and hot on the floor of the Washington Convention Center, site of this year's BookExpo America (BEA), where the nation's publishers are pitching retailers their hottest fall releases. Among the book-related gimmicks vying for attention are a popcorn machine, the world's fastest balloon-animal sculptor, and an entire nascar race car. But one type of gimmick is conspicuously absent. Despite the fact that, over the next 18 months, conservative publishers will release about half a dozen titles aimed at swift-boating Hillary Clinton's chances as a presidential candidate in 2008, there are no poster-size book covers of Clinton with bad hair. No key chains commemorating sleepovers in the Lincoln Bedroom. No Whitewater Slip 'n Slide.It may be that Clinton has joined Lincoln, dogs, and the Holocaust in that pantheon of perennial favorites that have the power to sell themselves. That's certainly the impression publishers give when asked about Clinton's market value. "She's just a great villainess," explains Joel Miller, associate publisher at Nelson Current, which is releasing David Horowitz and Richard Poe's The Shadow Party: How Hillary Clinton, George Soros, and the Sixties Left Took Over the Democratic Party. But the lack of Clinton hoopla at the BEA may also suggest what publishers won't openly admit--that the prospects for the current round of Clinton books aren't actually that good. One explanation is that there's more competition for Hillary-hating readers. Whereas longtime conservative publisher Regnery kicked the Clintons around to great success during the 1990s, since 2003, major publishers Penguin, Random House, and Simon & Schuster have all created conservative imprints (Sentinel, Crown Forum, and Threshold Editions, respectively); Christian publisher Thomas Nelson has launched Nelson Current; and the smaller, independent World Ahead Publishing has set up shop on the West Coast. Together, they've flooded the market with Clinton hatchet jobs--nearly a dozen in the last three years. But there's another explanation, based on the disappointing sales of most of these previous books: The public is suffering from Hillary Fatigue. Clinton's bland senatorial personality and courting of conservatives like Rupert Murdoch have neutralized the liberal dragon-lady image. Readers, even conservative ones, are tired of hearing the same old stories about Clinton's sapphic secrets, her radical feminist beliefs, and her overweening ambition. They're no longer buying it. Not now. And, if the Clinton book market crash is any indication, not in 2008. For an example of the increasingly lukewarm reception that Clinton books are getting, take a look at John Podhoretz's latest screed. This call to arms, Can She Be Stopped? Hillary Clinton Will Be the Next President of the United States Unless ..., was just published last month by Crown Forum with a strong first printing of 75,000 copies. On the surface, the book possessed all the right ingredients for success: a big-name author with a proven track record; solid print, radio, and online publicity, including a rare exclusive with Matt Drudge; and a novel take on the subject. "It is the first book to take her seriously specifically as a candidate for the presidency," says Jed Donahue, Podhoretz's editor at Crown Forum. Yet, with only 2,000 copies sold thus far, according to Nielsen BookScan, the book hasn't lived up to expectations. Publishers often object that BookScan underreports sales, but Donahue admits that Can She Be Stopped? has had trouble getting started. "To be frank, it's not as encouraging as we would hope," he says. Podhoretz is still out doing media promos, but it's unlikely that sales will pick up much. "By and large, it's probably fair to say that, for a current affairs book that's very media-driven, the first few weeks are very important," Donahue says. The performance of Podhoretz's book isn't the only sign of flagging interest in Clinton. Between 1996 and 2001, at least eight of eleven anti-Clinton books appeared on The New York Times' best-seller list. But, since 2003, only three of eleven have done so--Dick Morris's Rewriting History (a rebuttal to Clinton's Living History), Christopher Andersen's American Evita: Hillary Clinton's Path to Power, and, last year, Edward Klein's The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She'll Go to Become President. Klein's book is also the only Clinton-basher in the last five years to sell more than 100,000 copies, the industry-standard definition of a hit. Rewriting History sold 70,000 copies two years ago, but Morris's latest effort, Condi vs. Hillary: The Next Great Presidential Race, has sold just over half that amount since debuting last fall. Marji Ross, the head of Regnery, expects sales to pick up as the 2008 election approaches. (She's publishing The Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy's Dossier on Hillary Rodham Clinton this fall, so she has reason to remain optimistic.) But she concedes: "With Hillary, I think there is a good argument to say to publishers, unless they have a very specific message in their Hillary book ... `Keep your powder dry.'" The successes and failures of recent books provide a blueprint--however unscientific--for what sorts of charges will and won't resonate with conservative voters in 2008. It won't be enough, for example, to make simple reference to the fact that Clinton's desire to be president "has long been an open secret," as Carl Limbacher did in Hillary's Scheme: Inside the Next Clinton's Ruthless Agenda to Take the White House (14,000 copies sold). The idea of Clinton as an ambitious woman no longer seems as threatening as it did before she held elected office. Instead, authors have to cast her quest for the White House as a conspiratorial "Dr. Evil"-esque strategy known as "The Plan," as Andersen did in American Evita (28,000 copies). Then there's Clinton's personal life. In 1999, Andersen's best-seller Bill and Hillary: The Marriage indulged in speculation that her "drab appearance and her brusque manner" signaled a taste for forbidden love. Klein, however, had to find an actual college friend who "was rumored to be Hillary's lesbian lover" to generate interest in The Truth About Hillary. Bill's philandering is also stale news. Since its May 2005 publication, Their Lives: The Women Targeted by the Clinton Machine has sold just 2,000 copies. In fact, after years of harping on Clinton's days as a student activist at Wellesley, conservatives even appear tired of the notion that she's a liberal ideologue. In Madame Hillary: The Dark Road to the White House (9,000 copies), R. Emmett Tyrrell Jr. couldn't captivate readers with his dissection of her early political influences (such as Saul Alinsky) or his argument that she would start "a national Cambodian re-education camp for anyone caught wearing an Adam Smith necktie or scarf." Instead of attacking Clinton as a loud-mouthed radical, critics might have slightly better luck attacking her as the sort of duplicitous corporation found in a Michael Moore film. In Rewriting History, Morris outlined what he called the "hillary brand," whose purpose is "to hide who she is, and to project what she isn't." "The worst thing about the hillary brand," he laments, "is that ... we get only the carefully coiffed, ultra- sensitive, hyper-programmed media package." There's really no better evidence that Clinton has successfully shed her liberal image: Conservatives are no longer taking issue with her ideology but with her overuse of hairspray.

By alexander m. belenky