When
Politico fashions a story out of nothing but old scraps
and ascribes their imaginary "shadow campaign" to Hillary, the internet
burns up with commentary and articles about articles about the
article. The
New York Times justifies its assignment of a single reporter to the Hillary Clinton beat with a
Sunday Magazine
feature, and both the article and the other-worldly cover draw such
attention that the reporter, like a moon reflecting the light of the
sun, is suddenly a celebrity herself appearing on CNN and C-SPAN and
granting a self-congratulatory interview to a
New York Times blogger
about how she broke through into the Clinton inner circle. Yet when a
reasoned analysis of the subject of Hillary's much maligned and largely
unread honors thesis from Wellesley appears in two digestible parts in
Forbes, like a tree falling in the forest, not a sound emanates.
I fully expected, upon wading into Ralph Benko's
The Secret Hillary Rodham Clinton,
to find yet another right-wing slam complete with name-calling and
labels galore. Instead, to my astonishment, I found well-balanced and
informative piece with a fair assessment not only of Saul Alinsky but
also of the degree to which Hillary's study of the man, his methods, and
his mission impacted her political trajectory.
Links to Hillary's thesis (
a scan of a rough draft)
have been available online for years. In his opus, Mr. Benko provides
yet another. Not having linked to the hit jobs published by
Politico
and the
NYT, I provide these links without hesitation and dub them my
must-reads for the month. You may or may not agree with everything in
Mr. Benko's analysis, but you will find yourself in an atmosphere of
intellectual inquiry that has been rare in connection to any piece about
Hillary Clinton in many a moon.
This Hillary has been a secret only to the extent that people have not gone on a search for her. We can thank Mr. Benko and
Forbes for shining a light here.
