Hillary Clinton – The Great Gray Bridge

Clumsy Mansplaining Strikes the Republicans Yet Again

February 10, 2014/0 Comments/in Personal History, Family, Friends, Education, Travels /by Philip Turner

Clumsy mansplaining about the Clintons by Rand Paul & other Republicans shows, I suppose, that they want to try and shame Hillary out of the public square, and weary her of the race before it starts, before she can even declare in our out for 2016. But I don’t think it’ll will have that effect, not on her decision, nor on many key voting groups. In fact, it’s more likely to just lock in natural and growing Democratic advantages among key demographic groups nationally.

First, younger voters, many of whom weren’t even alive in the ’90s, will wonder why the enormous bother about illicit sex of a sort that surveys show is more and more common among that cohort. Women voters over forty will loathe the badgering of another woman, one whom history has shown they empathize with, especially when this issue is continually forced into the media by Republicans. In short, this is just the sort of innuendo campaign that drives negative inferences about the opposition up to the stratosphere. Over the past 2-3 decades, the Republican party has become an increasingly unsupportable proposition. I’m reminded of the Chinese finger trap, the toy you stick your fingers in at opposite ends where the harder you pull, the greater is its grip. That is the effect of Republican positions on their standing with voters—the more they cling to them pandering to their narrower and narrower base, the deeper they fall in to their toxic grip, making themselves less and less acceptable to large chunks of the electorate for national and federal offices in states that are not deep red politically.

Hillary’s Next Book–Thoughts on a 21st Century Blockbuster

February 27, 2013/0 Comments/in Books & Writing, Publishing & Bookselling /by Philip Turner

I was glad to be consulted by reporter Ruby Cramer of BuzzFeed.com for a story about one of the activities Hillary Clinton is likely to undertake now that she’s left the State Dept. That is, a book she’s said she plans to write and publish. Here’s a link to the story, “Hillary Clinton’s Unwrittten Memoir the Talk of the Publishing World.”

Because Cramer had space only for brief quotes from me and the other editors from whom she sought comment, here’s a bit more on what I talked about with her.

I pointed out that on each previous occasion when Hillary’s published a book, It Takes a Village (1996) and Living History (2004), the book world has been on the verge or in the midst of huge changes. In ’96, Amazon.com was barely a year old as an online bookstore and the Interent was just beginning to influence and define the wider culture, with the enormous impact it would soon exert on the book business. In 2004, social media was barely a blip, with Myspace one year old, and Facebook just getting started. Consider that a new Hillary book coming out, probably in 2014 or 2015, will exist in a world not only influenced by the prevalence of myriad social networks, but in a digitally dominant book space, with ebook adoption possibly on the upswing a year or two hence. I would add that while fiction has dominated ebook sales to this point, a new memoir from Hillary could become the first mega-nonfiction ebook bestseller.

While the Buzzfeed article spends a few lines discussing how high her advance might go in dollars, and for good reason, given the potential for a mammoth sum, I had suggested something different to Cramer. I said that if she was willing to take less money upfront, Hillary and her representative Robert Barnett might aim for an arrangement that would see her share profits in the book with her publisher, after expenses for production, design, distribution, and marketing were earned out. This 50/50 sharing model, though by no means common yet among authors and publishers, would also override the usual royalty structure that now applies where authors typically earn an average 15% royalty on hardcover sales, based on the book’s retail price, and 25% of the net price on ebook sales. Among brand-name authors, it has been reported that Stephen King has had this sort of profit-sharing arrangement on at least some of his titles. I should add that King publishes frequently with Scribner, an imprint of Simon & Schuster. S&S was also Hillary’s publisher for her two earlier books.

I’ll close here by saying that Hillary’s next book–given her instant name recognition and worldwide notoriety, and the cultural moment–is likely to present opportunities for connecting a book with readers in a way hitherto unavailable to any author or publisher. The marketing campaign that could be arranged and implemented, given the array of tools now available, ought to be something the likes of which the book business has not seen before. It’s a book I’ll be very eager to read.

[Please note the photograph accompanying this post also ran with the Buzzfeed.com story. It is credited to Gary Cameron/Reuters.]

A Human Rights Hero Visits D.C.

September 20, 2012/0 Comments/in Personal History, Family, Friends, Education, Travels /by Philip Turner

A photo I feared the world might never see: Burmese dissident and human rights hero Aung San Suu Kyi with an American Secretary of State. She and Hillary Clinton met the press yesterday in Washington, D.C. Credit for this photo: Mandel Ngan, AFP/Getty Images.

“Blood Sport”–Reflections on a Key Phrase in Bill Clinton’s DNC Speech

September 8, 2012/0 Comments/in Books & Writing, Philip Turner's Books & Writing /by Philip Turner

Bill Clinton’s DNC speech Wednesday night was such a barn-burner that a few things just whizzed by me as he delivered it. Reflecting on them later, this line jumped out at me.

“Democracy does not have to be a blood sport.”

I’ve been thinking about this since, and today I realized why the phrase has stuck in my mind–they are the same words as the title of James Stewart’s 1997 book, Blood Sport: The President and His Adversaries. Published just as Special Prosecutor Ken Starr was jailing Susan McDougal for 18 months on contempt charges* and targeting the Clintons; it was especially critical of Hillary who declined to cooperate with Stewart on his book. It’s significant to me that Bill chose to utter the phrase in this week’s speech, so many years after the Starr investigation and the impeachment by the House of Representatives, which was followed of course by the acquittal in the Senate trial that followed. I surmise he still views that toxic period as the nadir of the politics of personal destruction, and so knowingly used the phrase for the millions listening, to characterize the way President Obama has been demonized by his foes. The two words created an equivalence between the rampaging campaigns of hate toward each man and disdain for the office.

I should add that it was evidently an ad-libbed phrase, since according to the Atlantic‘s Dashiell Bennett, in his analysis of the prepared text vs. the transcript of what Bill Clinton actually said, the two words were not in the former. It’s also fascinating to juxtapose the prepared text with what was delivered. The word count of the former was 3,136, whereas the latter was 5,895, meaning Bill Clinton extemporized with 2,759 words, or nearly the length again of the prepared text.

The title of Stewart’s book may itself have been inspired by the ripped-up letter found among Vince Foster’s personal effects after his 1993 suicide, in the early days of the Clinton administration,

“I was not meant for the job or the spotlight of public life in Washington. Here ruining people is considered sport.”

I don’t own a copy of Stewart’s book, but when I find a copy I will check to see if Stewart provides the origin of his title anywhere in the book.

At the end on Wednesday night, when President Obama came out and the two men embraced like brothers, I saw a vulnerability in Bill Clinton. As he grasped the binder with the printed text he’d riffed on for 49 minutes, he was still holding on to the words, looking almost unsure of what to do with his hands. It was a very human moment.

* With Carroll & Graf Publishers in 2001, I edited and published Susan McDougal’s book, The Woman Who Wouldn’t Talk: Why I Refused to Testify Against the Clintons and What I Learned in Jail. One of the two times I met President Clinton was at a dinner given in New York City in 2002 by the directors of a documentary, The Hunting of the President: The Ten-Year Campaign to Destroy Bill and Hillary Clinton, based on the book of the same name by Joe Conason and Gene Lyons. Joe was there and Susan was an honored guest. I was pretty stunned when after the meal, Bill Clinton walked into the private dining room of the hotel restaurant. This was after his heart surgery–he’d lost a great deal of weight and he seemed smaller (I had something to compare with, since I’d also met him in 1992, when he was not yet the Democrats’ nominee for president, an encounter I wrote a few days ago on this blog). He put his arm around Susan, whom he’d pardoned before he left office, a noble pardon, I will add. She introduced me to the president, explaining I had been the editor of her book. He looked me in the eye, and said, “Well, you did a good thing, publishing her book. Thank you.”

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