The aforementioned prom dress “reflected Hillary’s developing perfectionism.” At a debate among the candidates for Wellesley student-body president, she engages in “the same kind of vagueness that would work to her advantage as a candidate for the U.S. Senate,” even as she exhibited “one of her strengths as a leader, still evident today: her willingness to participate in the drudgery of government rather than simply direct policy from Olympian heights.” I suspect her quest to “find a better system for the return of library books” went better than health-care reform.
Which brings us to health-care reform. Mr. Bernstein’s rehearsal of the opening fiasco of the first Clinton administration goes into extensive detail about an era that most Democrats would prefer to forget. (Mr. Bernstein’s recollection of the sad “Reform Riders” bus tour that was supposed to rally support for the measure is particularly cringe-inducing.) We know how this movie ends, but it doesn’t make the plot points any less pathetic. Her 500-person task force, meeting in secret, inadvertently offered up the first of what would become a destructive pattern for the Clinton administration: a lawsuit, followed by frantic legal maneuvering, followed by more lawsuits, and so on. Mr. Bernstein suggests that “Hillarycare” may even have been the first link in the chain of events that led from Vince Foster’s suicide to the investigation of Whitewater to Monica Lewinsky to impeachment. But as central as Hillary’s mismanagement of health-care reform is to the story of the Clinton Presidency—and of the Clintons—Hillary’s behavior during that period seems to be the one true outlier in Mr. Bernstein’s otherwise unintentionally consistent portrait.
The pragmatist who ran the Wellesley student body with an eye toward results and not “philosophy” became embroiled in a political standoff that heightened the appearance of almost unhinged egotism. Mr. Bernstein depicts her as imperiously interrupting the President’s advisors, who wanted her to take a more gradual approach: “You’re right” and “You’re wrong.” Approached by liberal Republican John Chafee with a possible compromise, she barreled through with her plan anyway, setting up a confrontation with Republicans that would make the midterm elections all but unwinnable. Lawrence O’Donnell, at the time a senior aide to Senator Patrick Moynihan, lays at her feet nothing less than ruination: “Hillary Clinton destroyed the Democratic Party,” he tells Mr. Bernstein, using the health-care fight as his sole piece of evidence. “Hillary was a disaster for what we were trying to do in government.”
A chorus of Democratic Hill staffers insists that Hillary’s good intentions were undermined by arrogance, but that’s hardly what makes the health-care episode unique. (Arrogance, frankly, is right up there with ambition and pragmatism when one looks for her personality’s connective tissue.) Rather, it’s her naïveté and her tactical blunders—errors hardly in keeping with the cool mind that surveys the landscape with “military rigor” and that supposedly engineered the Deal of the Century, post-Lewinsky (i.e., trading the opportunity to leave Bill for a shot at the White House).
Mr. Bernstein offers a few possibilities for what made Hillary stumble so badly—she didn’t “get” Washington, mainly—but leaves alone Mr. O’Donnell’s sweeping characterization that somehow she brought down the modern Democratic Party with her. Of course, all sorts of people attribute to her a vast influence. Early on in the book, Mr. Bernstein posits, “With the notable exception of her husband’s libidinous carelessness, the most egregious errors of the Bill Clinton presidency … were traceable to Hillary.” (Yes, other than that, Mr. Starr, how did you like the play?) That a First Lady could be held responsible for so much overlooks some practical facts of governing, but it says a lot about the level of awe that she inspires in both supporters and critics. Mr. Bernstein isn’t sure which side he comes down on—and, even more unsatisfying, he doesn’t do much to tell us what the real source of that awe is.
In assessing the Clintons’ strengths going into the 1992 election, Mr. Bernstein writes, “the book on Hillary was awfully thin, suspiciously repetitive, and contextually lacking, whether the media narrative in question was admiring, hostile, or an honest attempt to separate the real Hillary from the myth generated by the Clinton campaigns past and present.” I’ll say this for A Woman in Charge: It’s not thin.
Ana Marie Cox is the Washington editor for Time.com.
