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At The Plank, Mike Crowley points to Karl Rove's first Newsweek column, called "How to Beat Hillary." (That's an overt reference to the "How do we beat the bitch?" comment at a John McCain rally. Don't ever say Karl's not a gentleman!) Rove led with the following anecdote:
[Hillary Clinton] tends to be, well, hard and brittle. I inherited her West Wing office. Shortly after the 2001 Inauguration, I made a little talk saying I appreciated having the office because it had the only full-length vanity mirror in the West Wing, which gave me a chance to improve my rumpled appearance. The senator from New York confronted me shortly after and pointedly said she hadn't put the mirror there. I hadn't said she did, just that the mirror was there. So a few weeks later, in another talk, I repeated the story about the mirror. And shortly thereafter, the junior senator saw me and, again, without a hint of humor or light in her voice, icily said she'd heard I'd repeated the story of the mirror and she … did … not … put … that mirror in the office.It is a small but telling story: she is tough, persistent and forgets nothing. Those are some of the reasons she is so formidable as a contender, and why Republicans who think she would be easy to beat are wrong.Crowley interprets the story as a pre-cursor to Clinton's current media strategy, "a more personalized version of what Hillary's press operation does all the time: Aggressively stamp out any misstatement about HRC before it can take on a life of its own in the popular mythology." That might be true, but I also see something else: A female politician wanting to make sure she doesn't come across as less-than-serious, as the kind of woman so obsessed with her looks that she has a full-length mirror installed at work. --Dana Goldstein
