Hillary micromanaged every aspect of the book's development--Feinman flopped!

[candice]

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2008/01/28/080128fa_fact_packer?currentPage=4


Editors at Simon & Schuster reacted to early chapters with dismay, and worried about the quality of Feinman’s contributions, but they kept their reactions private. Over the summer, a manuscript emerged, but neither the publisher nor Clinton’s aides—nor, especially, Hillary herself—were pleased with it. When Feinman left for vacation, Clinton, a Simon & Schuster editor, and a few key aides, working on their own time, continued on the book without her. (Feinman fulfilled the terms of her contract, and was never told by the publisher that her work was unsatisfactory.) In November, the Simon & Schuster editor spent three weeks at the White House, working intensively to expand and refine the material with the aides and with Clinton, who filled yellow legal pads with incorrigibly wonky prose, in “round, schoolgirlish handwriting,” the editor told me. In private, Clinton was strikingly relaxed, padding around the Book Room and Solarium in sweatpants and Coke-bottle glasses, the editor said, calling her “buttercup.” Clinton’s personality, the editor found, “is refreshingly sharp and clear—but she can’t show it.”

“It Takes a Village” appeared in January, 1996, with an acknowledgments page that mentioned nobody. Clinton had apparently given in to the urge to pay her ghostwriter back (as had Simon & Schuster, which considered withholding the last portion of Feinman’s hundred-and-twenty-thousand-dollar fee but quickly relented). Clinton’s omission aroused the enmity of powerful friends of Feinman’s at the Washington Post, and journalists began covering the slight, their suspicions roused by Clinton’s explanation that she had forgone names in the acknowledgments for fear of leaving someone out.

As with so many other Clinton scandals, the press framed the story in the worst possible light, and got its essence wrong, suggesting that Feinman had written the whole book and that Clinton had stolen the credit. Instead, Clinton had micromanaged every aspect of the book’s development.

[enki23]

1. gosh, it's almost like she wrote it all herself. only, not really.

but, you know, he only wrote almost all the book, under her "micromanagement." which, of course, completely absolves her of taking sole credit for its authorship.

[adabfree]

2. but of course ;-)

[speedoo]

3. The next sentence of that article speaks volumes to me:

"The episode captures her habit of undermining herself, when the worst might have been averted by a little candor and grace—a tendency that has reappeared in the past few weeks, as her campaign has responded to the shock of Obama’s challenge."

That allows me to reconcile that there are some good things about her, but that her flaws ultimately kept her from accomplishing what she wanted, and will in 2008 as well.

[Occam Bandage]

4. "It Takes a Village," managed by Hillary Clinton.

[BooScout]

5. I guess Obama fans have been viewing right wing blogs again...

This shit about Feinman has been going around on the Right Wing Blogs for quite sometime. Can the Obama hacks not even come up with their own original attempts at smears? :eyes:

[speedoo]

6. It's The New Yorker, not a RW blog.

If it's a "smear" I'm sure Hillary will straighten us out.

Nice try.