Sullivan blog [guest blogger] TALK ABOUT YOURSELF FOR A CHANGE: It's starting. God help us. On Fox News just now I heard Senator Evan Bayh handicapping his own chances for the presidential nomination and talking about running against Hillary. It reminds me of pro wrestling, this stuff. They get us geared up an eon in advance for a fake fight, the battle of the century, and the ticket-buying mania begins. The rivals plot and posture, working us up even further for a match whose outcome, we're led to think, will have titanic consequences for everyone, and yet when it finally comes, not much changes except that the political establishment has a lot more money in its pockets. The issues are mostly symbolic. As I sit here on my Montana farm, I could care less about the Ten Commandments, the past behavior of Supreme Court nominees, whether Karl Rove outed a non-spy spy, and if John Bolton likes to yell at people.
I do have some insight into Hillary and it makes me dislike her. A couple of years ago I had an office over a clothing store in my small town and the woman in the office next door was ghostwriting Hillary's memoir, of all things. She started out all excited and impressed. Hillary's so "down to earth" and so on. (She took an immediate dislike to Bill, who struck her as a narcissistic snake.) Then she went to Washington. She was away for a long time, but on each occasion she came back to Montana I could see her spirit dimming. The problem, the woman said, was Hillary's people, who were ghostwriting the ghostwriting, angling every anecdote for effect and literally rejiggering their heroine's life. I was there in the woman's house the day the book arrived and the first thing she did with her copy was angrily hurl it against a wall. Why? Because she'd discovered that there was no Hillary, really, just a creature concocted by her people who was happy to be a concoction of her people. Oddly, my friend, a deep-down liberal, considered Hillary a conservative, basically, with a lot of goody-goody suburban attitudes and pretty conventional good-government views. Another class president type, in other words.
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