Dan and I were recently discussing Living History, Hillary Clinton’s autobiography, and we both concluded that it was her sanitised pitch for the top job, cleaned up to be palatable to Middle America. Certainly, my impression was that she’d overplayed the whole Goldwater Girl thing. It would appear that David from Oxblog agrees:

One thing I can say with a fair degree of confidence is that Hillary certainly doesn’t want anyone to think of her as a liberal now days. In the first three hundred pages of the book, she never uses the ‘l’-word to describe herself, her husband or any of their policies. If you look in the index, there are no entries for ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive’ or anything similar.

In contrast, there are a good number of entries for ‘conservative’ and an extraordinary number of entries for ‘right wing’, which is Hillary’s preferred way of describing her opponents. I find this contrast especially interesting since Hillary herself was once a passionate Republican. More than just a rank-and-file voter, Hillary was a self-described Goldwater Girl and president of the Wellesley College Young Republicans.

Then, within the space of just over a year, Hillary travelled all the way across the political spectrum to become a left-wing Democrat who went up to New Hampshire “to stuff envelopes and walk precints” for Gene McCarthy. This dramatic evolution should have provided Hillary-as-author with the perfect vehicle for describing why she is Democrat and what the party stands for.

Instead, Hillary provides a one-paragraph explanation. In college, she started reading the New York Times, “much to [her] father’s consternation”. In addition, her political science professors pushed her to “examine [her] own preconceptions just when current events provided more than enough material”.

At minimum, this account is certainly plausible. Hillary certain wasn’t the first young Republican converted by liberal professors and a liberal newspaper. But the real question is how. What are the arguments and ideas that Hillary found so persuasive? If she herself was converted, shouldn’t she now be able to serve as a winning evangelist?