Back in August 2015, Donald Trump drew predictable derision from the left for citing the Bible and his own "The Art of the Deal" as his favorite books.
Don't hold your breath waiting for liberals to react with anything remotely similar to Hillary Clinton making an even loftier claim. Asked during an interview with Vox to cite books on policy that have influenced her, Clinton first named "It Takes a Village", her largely ghost-written tome published in the mid-'90s.
Clinton's claim came across as so airily arrogant that Vox editor and stolid liberal wonk Ezra Klein laughed and mock-rebuked Clinton --
KLEIN: What are three books that have influenced how you think about policy, that you think everyone should read?
CLINTON (pause for effect): Oh my gosh, there's so many that I've read over the years. I wrote one called "It Takes a Village" (camera cuts to Klein, smiling) which I highly recommend ...
KLEIN (still smiling, shaking his head): You can't plug your own book! (laughs, Clinton laughing too -- good times!).
CLINTON (stepping off her horse): I think there's a lot of wisdom in Bob Putnam's latest book, "Our Kids" (subtitled "The American Dream in Crisis"). I think there's a really great story that he tells about going back to the town he grew up in outside of Cleveland where kids of all different backgrounds, economic, family standing, you know, they were all together, everybody was in it together. And there was so little distinction and there was so much economic integration in that small town and now he goes back to it and it's so divided. It's divided on income, it's divided on race, it's just a very different environment and winners and losers are preordained at a very early age. So I think that's a book that people should read right now.
I think that a lot of Christopher Lasch's work and Alan Wolfe's work and (Robert Bellah's) "Habits of the Heart," you know, that wonderful old sociological work that was led by Robert Bellah, are also really helpful because we need to be reminded of what is unique about the American experience. I mean, de Tocqueville saw it, "Habits of the Heart" came from his writings and you can see how the more difficult it is in a 24/7, 360-degree media environment to find the time to think, to breathe, to spend relaxation hours, getting to know people. We just don't do that. ...
And a book that obviously influenced Clinton, Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," is one she dares not cite, despite the fact Clinton devoted her senior thesis at Wellesley to an analysis of Alinsky's tactics. Even though "Rules for Radicals" was published in 1971, two years after Clinton received her undergraduate degree, the Clintons would come to fear that Hillary's admiration for Alinsky could embarrass them. After Bill Clinton became president in 1993, the Clinton White House requested that Wellesley shut down public access to Hillary's thesis, a request dutifully accepted by the college's administrators.
In true Clinton fashion, the book she first mentions was mainly written by someone else, as reported by the New York Times in April 1995 --
The book will actually be written by Barbara Feinman, a journalism professor at Georgetown University in Washington. Ms. Feinman will conduct a series of interviews with Mrs. Clinton, who will help edit the resulting text.
Feinman spent seven months on the book and was reportedly paid $120,000 -- which suggests her contributions were hardly minor -- but was mentioned nowhere in the finished work. Just as Hillary Clinton is loathe to take responsibility for her actions (sending highly classified government secrets over her unsecure email servers is Exhibit A), she's also shown an unwillingness to give credit where due.
