Hillary's turn

by Michael Tomasky

"It was without precedent. In July 1999 Hillary Rodham Clinton hit the campaign trail - the only sitting first lady in the history of the United States ever to seek public office. In her quest to become a New York senator, the nation's most polarizing woman would have to hold her own in the hurly-burly world of New York politics." "In this book, political columnist Michael Tomasky exposes the fascinating inner workings of that race. Hillary, he reveals, was neither a gladiatorial tigress nor the unreconstructed flower child conservatives so deeply feared. Constitutionally unable to embrace what Tomasky calls "the politics of personal narrative" and to bare her soul before the voters, she instead presented herself in a tradition of nineteenth-century women reformers religiously bent on problem solving. But would that play in a media capital that savored scandal and demanded that politicians parade their personalities?" "Here then is the witty, barbed month-by-month chronicle of how Hill