Rewarding reflections

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 12/10/2024 (720 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Anyone looking for a juicy, intimate take on Hillary Clinton’s personal life should steer clear of Something Lost, Something Gained.

Not to say that it’s a lousy read. It isn’t.

But in the main, it’s intelligent analysis of a multitude of political and legislative issues and judicial decisions.

The only time Clinton even obliquely touches on her ex-president husband’s infamous infidelity with Monica Lewinsky, for example, is a reference to, in 1998, “joining Al Gore and a crowd of congressional Democrats in a show of solidarity with Bill after the Republican-led House that day voted to impeach him. I was holding my marriage together with wisps of faith, but I knew Bill was a good man and a great president, so I joined the fight to keep him in office.”

Often forgotten is that the author of this book actually won the popular vote in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, garnering almost three million more votes than Donald Trump. But by virtue of the mechanics of America’s electoral college system, the Donald ascended to the presidency.

She opens the book with Joni Mitchell’s appearance at the 2024 Grammy Awards, and her reflections on the lyrics of Mitchell’s classic song Both Sides Now, performed that evening.

Which sounds gimmicky, but in Clinton’s hands, isn’t; rather, it serves as a nice entrée to all that follows.

This is also a scary book. Clinton provides lots of considered evidence of what’s apt to transpire if Trump loses the 2024 U.S. election.

“A 2023 report from the indispensable Brennan Center for Justice detailed how Trumpists are planning a ‘more coordinated and sophisticated election denial campaign’ this time around and how ‘efforts to undermine the electoral systems have proliferated and expanded,’” Clinton writes.

“Trump has promised to pardon the January 6 insurrectionists and now celebrates them as heroes, laying the groundwork for more violence. Unbelievably, he has said, ‘Now if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.’”

Clinton writes lucidly about complex public-policy issues without dumbing them down.

She conducts a policy-driven tour of the current U.S. political landscape and Trumpian/Republican successes in abolishing women’s reproductive rights, colluding with foreign-power interference (via Russia and China) in American elections, curtailing minority group access to the vote and enlisting ultra right-wing billionaires’ funding of election campaigns.

Much of the book focuses on the notion of “sisterhood” — Clinton’s seminal relationships with other women, both powerful and not. The most gripping part of Something Lost, Something Gained details the hair-raising, life-and-death evacuation of prominent and vulnerable Afghan women from Kabul as the Taliban seized control of Afghanistan’s capitol in 2021. It’s here her writing gets gritty and detailed, as thousands flocked to the Kabul airport to get out before the Taliban could get them.

On that topic of sisterhood, there’s also a surprising, and gracious, defence of Melania Trump.

Melania’s marginally unorthodox attire (a grey, rather than black, suit) at former First Lady Rosalynn Carter’s 2023 funeral produced a lot of petty and catty media and social media attacks. Clinton describes and decries the widespread, bogus notion she and other current and former First Ladies in attendance — Laura Bush, Michelle Obama and Jill Biden — were pitted against Melania.

Early in Bill Clinton’s first term as U.S. president, Hillary acquired a public persona as a bit of a priss and cold fish, which unfortunately hung around through her 2016 run at the presidency. This book, in tone and content, belies that image.

It also evidences she would have made a good — maybe great — president.

Douglas J. Johnston is a Winnipeg lawyer and writer.