Stronger unread

Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine claim the authorship of the campaign manifesto Stronger Together, released in paperback by Simon & Schuster on September 6. The book opens with the kind of bold statement that has served Clinton well in the course of her long career in public life: “It has been said that America is great because America is good. We agree.” Let it not be said that she has no differences with President Obama.

And give the authors of the book this much. At least they didn’t attribute the quote to Alexis de Tocqueville.

The book isn’t doing well commercially. Who wants to pay to read a party platform, even at a paperback price lower if it were published in hardcover? I’m holding out for the post-election remainder price.

At InstaPundit yesterday Glenn Reynolds mentioned the “amusing” reviews the book has garnered at Amazon. Could the “reviews” represent a groundswell of revulsion of the kind reflected in the famous Boston Globe editorial decrying “Mush from the wimp” in March 1980? I should like to think so. One reviewer — well, commenter — writes:

I was going to read this book…..I really was. But just as I got started, I found myself under sniper fire, passed out, and fell and hit my head. After that I got double vision and had to wear glasses that were so damn thick I couldn’t even see to read. Then I had an allergic reaction to something and started coughing so hard I spit out what looked like a couple of lizard’s eyeballs, my limbs locked up, and I passed out and fell down again, waking up only to find out I had been diagnosed with pneumonia 2 days earlier. Somehow I managed to power through it all, but it’s a good thing I was able to make a small fortune on this random small trade in the commodities market (cattle futures or some such thing) and then, miracle of all miracles, a few banks offered me a few million to just talk to their employees for a few minutes – and all that really helped out because I swear I was dead broke and couldn’t figure out how I was gonna come up with the 6 bucks to pay for this book, let alone pay the $1,500 for my health insurance this month. I still want to read it, but, honestly, what difference at this point does it make? I hear it sucks anyway.

Despite what he says, the commenter is not in the target market for Clinton’s manifesto. He knows too much. His memory is too good. He is too well informed. But what is the target market for the book? Probably those who believe that Hillary Clinton and Tim Kaine are the authors of the thing.

UPDATE: The Washington Post’s Carlos Lozada is as harsh as the Amazon commuters, but then Lozada actually had to read the book: “By the time I finished this book, I resented its existence….I don’t understand why this book was compiled — ‘written’ is too generous a verb — or why it was published.”

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