Hillary Clinton recently “wrote” a campaign book with her running mate, Tim Kaine. It’s called Stronger Together, and it sold fewer than 3,000 copies in its first week, which is pretty sad.
You’re probably not thinking about actually buying Stronger Together, but even if you were, the Washington Post has published a scathing review of the book that would probably convince you to reconsider.
The headline is fairly straightforward: “Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine have written a deplorable campaign book.” As is the opening sentence: “By the time I finished this book, I resented its existence.”
The review is chock full of colorful excoriations, but here are some of the best.
1) “A self-confessed cut-and-paste job of campaign fact sheets, speeches and op-eds”
2) “An embarrassment, sloppy, repetitive, dutiful and boring”
3) “The only people I imagine reading it are future fact-checkers, masochistic book critics and the most strung out of political junkies”
4) “Imagine a State of the Union address where nothing is cut, and every interest group gets not just a couple of sentences, but a couple of pages”
5) “Provides damning evidence that presidential candidates’ campaign books are almost always unnecessary, uninteresting and unenlightening”
The review also points out a number of similar phrases that appear to have been copy-and-pasted throughout the book.
“No one should face meager Social Security checks because they took on the vital role of caregiver,” they write. And you know they’re serious, because two pages later, we learn again that “no one should face meager Social Security checks because they took on the vital role of caregiver.” In their foreign policy discussion, Clinton and Kaine warn of the “wide arc of instability that stretches from West Africa all the way to Asia,” except two pages later, they fret over the “wide arc of instability from North Africa to South Asia.” (Is the arc shifting? Could be, it’s unstable!) And then, after they lament that “too many of our representatives in Washington are in the grips of a failed economic theory called trickle-down economics,” they tell us 60 pages later that “too many of our representatives in Washington are still in the grips of the failed theory of trickle-down economics.” Still.
There is also an amusing section on the rhetoric deployed through out the book. Clinton and Kaine are constantly complaining about “outrageous” things, while promoting other things that are “common sense.” They plan to solve our nation’s problems by coming up with “smart” solutions and making sure the wealthy pay their “fair share,” whatever that may be. “America is already great,” they write. “And we will make it even greater.” Riveting stuff.
TAKE THE POLL