Latest Biography of Clintons Tests Public’s ‘Fatigue’ Levels

Critics of Bill and Hillary Clinton talk of the public’s “Clinton fatigue” to argue against electing the New York senator to the White House. Now another biography about the couple will test whether Americans actually suffer from “Clinton book fatigue.”

Next week, Random House will release “For Love of Politics” by best-selling author Sally Bedell Smith, covering the Clintons’ White House years — rather, their marriage during the White House years. The major policies in which both Clintons played roles — budget-balancing and welfare reform, the North American Free Trade Agreement, post-Cold War foreign policies and even the health-care debacle that Mrs. Clinton led — are mainly background noise in a re-telling of the financial and sexual scandals that followed the couple from Arkansas to Washington.

But sex and scandal sells. Or does it? “For Love of Politics,” which The Wall Street Journal obtained in a bookstore not far from the White House ahead of its release date, follows two other much-anticipated biographies of Mrs. Clinton released last summer. “A Woman in Charge,” by Watergate reporter Carl Bernstein, has sold about 57,000 of the reported 275,000 copies that Alfred A. Knopf printed, according to Nielsen BookScan, which tracks about 75% of the book market. “Her Way,” by New York Times reporters Jeff Gerth and Don Van Atta, has sold about 19,000, Nielsen estimates; Little, Brown and Co. reportedly printed 175,000.

The two earlier biographies revealed little that was new. The same can be said of “For Love of Politics” by Smith, who has written books on John and Jacqueline Kennedy, Princess Diana, Pamela Harriman and William S. Paley. The author does have fresh material from the private memoranda of the late Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the New York Democrat who endorsed Mrs. Clinton as his Senate replacement. The memo, made available by Moynihan’s widow, Liz, confirms what is already known: That he had a frosty relationship with both Clintons in the early 1990s, when Moynihan chaired the Senate Finance Committee that had jurisdiction over much of the Clinton agenda, including health care.

Moynihan wrote that Congress’s budget director, Robert Reischauer, privately called the Clinton health bill “an act of hubris” and told him “the notion that this could work in the real world is absurd.” The senator’s friend, former Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, confided that he called President Clinton after the release of the 1998 Starr Report graphically detailing the affair with Monica Lewinsky, and told the president he should “begin thinking about leaving the White House,” that he would be “healthier and happier” if he resigned; the only other choices were a plea bargain or impeachment.

“Wow,” Kerrey replied in an email after learning of the account. “This is lost from my memory bank. Whatever conversation I had (and I won’t second guess the content of the Moynihan memo) it had to be more of a discussion of options than a recommendation. I would remember if I recommended he do this