On the eve of Steven Spielberg’s paean to journalism in its days of glory, “The Post,” comes a piece in the contemporary Washington Post with the odd title, “Hillary, please don’t reject romance novels — you are a romance novel heroine.” The article was written by an author of romance novels named Lisa Kleypas, apparently in response to Ms. Clinton’s panning the genre by suggesting that it is all about women being grabbed, thrown onto a horse, and ridden off into the distance.

I consulted my wife, who is more familiar with romance novels than I am, and it turns out that Kleypas is correct.

The bodice ripper style has gone out of fashion. Now romance is all about strong, independent women throwing off the conventions of the times when they lived and finding happiness against all odds. What that sort of heroine has to do with Hillary Clinton is a question that needs pondering.

Hillary Clinton is more of a wannabe Bond villain

First, for someone to be a romance novel heroine, one has to experience romance. Ms. Clinton married the typical romance novel rogue in the form of Bill Clinton, a man of monstrous appetites who has been cheating on her without shame for decades. Mr. Clinton is the sort of character that the romance novel hero challenges to a duel and then spares his life because he is not worth the bullet, sending him scurrying out of society never to return.

Second, Hillary Clinton has done things that no romance novel heroine would even conceive of not to mention commit. From destroying the life of a 12-year-old rape victim named Kathy Shelton to selling her office as secretary of state for money, Ms. Clinton’s life has not been a romance novel at all. If it is anything, she has been a wannabe Bond villain, even down to her choice of wardrobe.

Her plans to take over the world have been foiled twice, once by a con artist from Chicago by the name of Barack Obama and once by a New York wheeler-dealer and vulgarian, the eternally underestimated Donald Trump. Unlike Ernst Stavro Blofeld, Hillary Clinton has been consigned to wander the Earth forever trying to justify herself.

But guess who might fit the part of a romance novel heroine

Does a woman who exists in public life who might grace the pages of a romance novel? I give you Sarah Palin, frontierswoman, a successful governor of Alaska, successful businesswoman, the political force of nature, and someone who found love and romance with a man’s man named Todd Palin. Palin recently stated that no one has sexually harassed her because everyone knows that she packs heat and knows how to use it. That alone seems to me to qualify her as a heroine.

To be sure Ms. Palin would be out of place in the Victorian ballrooms of Lisa Kleypas’ novels. She would be more at home in the wild west, facing off outlaws and hostile Indians, making the ranch productive, and falling in love with the mysterious gunslinger with the dark past.

In a contemporary story, she would have shot Kathy Shelton’s rapist before he could do any damage and save the girl a lifetime of pain.

Sarah Palin even checks the box of defying social conventions, which in her case is that no one raised in a small town in the wilderness of Alaska should acquire political power. Palin has had scorn and calumnies heaped upon her for almost a decade because of her effrontery that she should have a say in how the United States is run. Yet she was one of the leaders of the Tea Party opposition that helped to hold President Obama in check. Palin was one of the early supporters of Donald Trump, an immeasurable help as it turned out transforming him from a joke candidate to president of the United States.

The only perfect ending would have been if Sarah Palin had run for the presidency and won in 2012 as many yearned for her to do. However, she let that cup pass from her lips, one presumes for the sake of her family which would have been dragged through the mud by her enemies. One might say that is the perfect romance novel heroine thing to do.
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