Hillary’s Hard Choices, By The Numbers

The price of fighting Osama bin Laden? $1 trillion. Chelsea Clinton’s wedding? $2-$5 million. Appearing in the index of Hillary Clinton’s new memoir, Hard Choices? Priceless.

Ancient astrologers used to divine the future by counting the kinds of stars that appear in the sky. We’re doing the same thing, but instead of reading constellations, we’re reading the index of Clinton’s book.

First of all, her index is heavy on Presidents and light on First Ladies. Michelle Obama, Laura Bush and Barbara Bush are each mentioned only twice. By contrast, George W. Bush gets 13 pages and George H.W. Bush gets four. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama get too many to count. Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan get three mentions each, Jimmy Carter gets two, Richard Nixon gets seven. JFK got four pages, Jackie only one. Coincidence?

The only First Lady to outdo her husband in the index was Eleanor Roosevelt, with a cool five mentions to FDR’s paltry three. Clinton talks about how she’s lifting from Eleanor when she talks about women’s rights as “unfinished business” and pushes for “full participation” of all genders. She also has Eleanor’s picture in her office.

Benghazi got a chapter all to itself, as did Syria and Iran. And Angela Merkel got tons of love, especially since Clinton revealed that she has a German newspaper in her office that portrays Merkel and Clinton as interchangeable on the cover.

The Clinton index also freezes out the philanderers. Huma Abedin gets mentioned nine times, including a heartwarming story about that time when President Obama called her an “American patriot” after she got accused of sympathizing with the Muslim Brotherhood. But her disgraced husband Anthony Weiner is nowhere to be found. David Patraeus got 15 mentions, Paula Broadwell not a one. Is she taking the high road, or doing a complete whitewashing?

Guess who else didn’t make the cut? Monica Lewinsky or Gennifer Flowers. Surprise, surprise.