POLITICAL PORN.(The Talk of the Town)(The Truth About Hillary)(Book Review)

On the strength of name recognition and a solid freshman term in the Senate, Hillary Clinton appears to lead all other potential candidates for the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party in 2008. But Senator Clinton cannot become President of the United States. The reason, as her latest pornographer, Edward Klein, makes plain, is the lesbian situation. It is entirely possible, Klein allows, that the junior senator from New York is not herself a Sapphic practitioner. But she imbibed the "culture of lesbianism" as an undergraduate at Wellesley College in the nineteen-sixties; she has certainly known a few lesbians in her time (many names are unearthed); she definitely read a Methodist magazine called motive that published, among others, Rita Mae Brown, the author of a "lesbian novel"; and once, at a White House reunion of her Wellesley classmates, she rubbed the "butch cut" hairdo of one Nancy Wanderer, remarking, lesbianically, "Maybe I'll get a haircut like this and really shock everyone."

Reading "The Truth About Hillary," one can easily envision Klein's wellappointed desk in mid-composition, an antique lamp casting a lambent beam on his files of political smut. The evidence of Senator Clinton's moral turpitude (beginning, but not ending, with her contact with known lesbians) is girded by a historian's sense of enterprise--interviews with disgruntled West Wing footmen, gratuitous political "analysts," and the "clinical sexologist" Dr. Claudia Six. And the craft? Ask yourself whether Samuel Eliot Morison could reel off sentences on the order of "But Hillary's celestial ambitions were thwarted by a catch-22."

And so "The Truth About Hillary" has, despite critical demurral on both the left and the right, been ...