"Hillary looked exhausted, as anyone might at the fag end of a hellish eight years of unrelenting pressure, including a punishing, if triumphant, run for the US Senate. Under heavy professional make-up her eyelids literally drooped with fatigue. The small attentive smile she always wears on the job was strained. Like many global superstars, she has a larger head than you expect, and it tends to nod slowly (and endorsingly, one thinks) as she listens. Her least beguiling quality is a flat, strong, Midwestern voice, and she immediately started pitching the book to us without any of the bonding and interpersonal foreplay you would have got with Bill. ‘I am the only one to have inhabited my own life,’ she said ‘and I am the only one to tell this story.’ The elephant in the room, of course, was how much she would inhabit the bit of her life about Monica Lewinsky, which was what publishers were lining up to write cheques for.
But there was something about the implacable self-belief in Hillary’s stare that made it very hard
to bring up Monica. Eventually we did. Sort of. ‘It will be there — the Monica section,’ the First Lady said levelly. The unspoken words in the long pause that followed were, ‘I will give you as much as I have to give you on that fat cow to collect eight million bucks.’ Hillary is nothing if not disciplined."
The bulk of the article sets out the way in which Senator Clinton has taken up centrist positions in anticipation of a run for the presidency. But it offers no real clues on the important question of whether Hillary's conversion to the centre is for real. Or is it just a smokescreen? And does it matter if we were to have another President Clinton?
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