Kyle Smith

Kyle Smith

US News

Behold: The Hillary Rodham Clinton children’s book

LeUyen Pham
‘This whole thing is the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,’ Bill Clinton said of Barack Obama in 2008. In 2016, maybe it’s time for a fairy tale about Hillary Clinton.

Wait no longer.

The children’s book “Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls Are Born to Lead” by Michelle Markel and illustrated by LeUyen Pham, is dedicated to implanting the proper Hillary attitudes in the minds of the next generation. Aimed at ages 4 to 8, is meant to instill in girls a thrilling sense of gender pride, even if the book (like Hillary’s campaign) has a difficult time identifying anything she has actually accomplished, other than giving speeches and being in the proximity of famous men.

“Hillary Rodham Clinton: Some Girls Are Born to Lead” By Michelle Markel, illustrated by LeUyen Pham (Harper Collins)

Instead, the book focuses on who Hillary is. That identify can be summed up in two closely intertwined words: female and victim. Forever join them in your minds, girls!

On page one, we’re informed that “in the 1950s, it was a man’s world” and that girls “weren’t supposed to act smart, tough or ambitious.” Little Hillary, looking spunky in a bright-red dress, is set off against a gray and brown array of celebrated men of the time, including Nat King Cole and Jackie Robinson. “Only boys had no ceilings on their dreams,” go the harrumphing words.

So Nat King Cole, who was once attacked on stage during a concert by a gang of white supremacists, and Jackie Robinson, a sharecropper who on the baseball field had to listen to an opposing manager yell the N-word at him and shout “go back to the cotton fields,” had it easy compared to Hillary, the daughter of a wealthy businessman? And not only did they have it easy, they were part of a nefarious male conspiracy to hold back women.

After “upstaging boys in class” — not just succeeding but “upstaging boys,” because it’s important that your little girl learn to see life as an us-against-them situation — the teen Hillary “met with poor black and Latino teenagers in the inner city.” Brave Hillary! Later, in law school, we learn that Hillary “walked up and down dangerous blocks in Texas, registering voters for the presidential election.” “Dangerous” apparently means “populated by Latinos,” because below these words is a picture of Hillary talking to brown-skinned people on a sidewalk.

LeUyen Pham
Moms, let Hillary be your guide: It’s never too early to warn your little darlings that non-white people are “dangerous”!

As for genuinely dangerous people like accused child rapist Thomas Alfred Taylor, whom Hillary herself believed to be guilty in 1975 but managed to plea-bargain down to a year in prison after exploiting a technicality at a trial where jurors were told that his 12-year-old victim “sought out older men” — well, who cares about 12-year-old girls anyway? This book is for 4- to 8-year-olds.

They’d have to be really bright 4- to 8-year-olds, though: the kind who can handle two completely opposed ideas at the same time without exploding. Such as the idea that Hillary was inspired as a teen by a Martin Luther King Jr. speech in which the great man said, “There is nothing more tragic than to sleep through a revolution,” but then (five pages later) she “calmed everybody down” when Yale “was erupting.”

So which is she: a radical or a moderate? It’s a trick question: The answer is, “Check what the polls say this week.”

LeUyen Pham
Girls are also told that, in the early Clinton administration, Hillary was “tough as nails” but (next sentence) “after Congress turned down her health plan, she was crushed.” And that (page 17), they should be excited about Hillary’s Arkansas work “at a top-notch law firm,” even though the two people she is pictured with, Vince Foster and Webb Hubbell, respectively committed suicide and were imprisoned amid scandals.

LeUyen Pham
Any girls out there who feel they’re “born to lead” should learn early how to dismiss such contradictions, and how to frame any criticism as unfair. During her husband’s 1992 presidential campaign, we’re told that Hillary “couldn’t believe how people criticized her — in ways they’d never criticize a man.” If any first-graders being read this book raise their hands and say, “Don’t people make fun of how Donald Trump and Chris Christie look?” pay no attention. They’re probably related to the Koch Brothers.

(One baffling inclusion: Next to the “never criticize a man” quote is a caricature of journalist David Brock, who, a footnote in the back of the book helpfully notes, “wrote the story about Troopergate, a scandal that greatly affected the campaign.” Unmentioned is Brock’s later conversion to Hillary attack dog.)

The jacket copy of the book insists that everything Hillary did, she did it for you, young Ms. Emma or Bella or Molly: Hillary “paved the way for women everywhere.”

But given all the women — unmentioned in the book — whom Hillary had investigated by private detectives in an effort to scare them off after they called attention to her husband’s shameful treatment of them, perhaps that could be more accurately phrased.

Maybe it should mention that every Monica, Paula and Juanita was just a stepping stone for Hillary’s career. Maybe it should read, “Hillary paved her way with women everywhere.”