The race is on, and Hillary Clinton is looking to transform herself into a candidate that middle-Americans might elect as our first woman president. Can she do it? Positioning herself for her 2008 presidential run, Hillary has put away the trappings of a liberal and wrapped herself in a cloak of moderation. The senator who had been one of the stars of the Democratic Party's left wing is now being packaged as a centrist, with the willing help of the liberal media, which castigates any attempts to expose her real agenda. But now, in The Extreme Makeover of Hillary (Rodham) Clinton , Bay Buchanan rips the mask off Hillary, shows how she is susceptible to--and even a willing tool of--radical gurus, and makes clear that not only can Hillary not be trusted, but her "makeover" is exactly what one would expect from an unprincipled left-wing politician.
This book was very helpful to my understanding of what makes Mrs. Clinton tick. It focuses more on her psychology than her behavior in public life. It claims that her overriding character trait is insecurity. It's especially strong in explaining how her mind works. According to it, she is a memorizer and regurgitator of information; she has an unchanging "consummate student" mindset, always eager to learn facts; and she tends to automatically make herself an expert on any subject she needs to understand (such as healthcare, in 1993). (From other reading, I know that this is exactly how Jimmy Carter worked. he was compulsive about memorization and preparation.) But the book goes on to say that this habit is Hillary's compensation for her weakness: she is not an original thinker, not a visionary (Bill is the opposite). Also, all her life she has been extremely impressionable; this is why, when in the White House, she was always taking advice from political advisors, New Age gurus, psychics, etc.
The author of Extreme Makeover, Bay Buchanan, is conservative upfront (she is Pat Buchanan's younger sister), but is fair-minded and polite. It's not like reading an Ann Coulter book. Ms. Buchanan uses a folksy tone that gets slightly annoying at times, but it's not hard to ignore.
I recommend this book, along with the late Barbara Olson's book *Hell to Pay*, if you seek to better understand Mrs. Clinton.
A hard, cutting and critical portrait of Hilary Clinton by arch conservative, Bay Buchanan, sister of Pat Buchanan.
Her thesis is that Hilary’s trip to the Senate was only a cover up for her extreme makeover from an arch left liberal to a “centrist” so that she could position herself for a run at the Whitehouse. Buchanan uses evidence to support this idea including voting records and quotes from Clinton’s numerous speeches and books. Buchanan also portrays Clinton as very bright, a great student but unable to create policy or have a vision of the future. Instead, she relies heavily on hundreds of consultants to tell her what to do.
What I found really amazing was reading some of the "gobly gook" Clinton has written—it is completely unintelligible and not even good English, which in many ways was scary!
I find it hard to believe some of the author's wilder claims about Hillary, but there can be no doubt that she reivented herself as a moderate to be more palatable to the electorate. Thankfully, she is a highly polarizing figure.