Hillary Clinton may be riding a wave of popularity following her term as Secretary of State, but it turns out those popularity polls do not translate into record breaking crowds on her book tour.
The former top diplomat opened the book tour for her new memoir “Hard Choices” at Manhattan’s Union Square Barnes & Noble, but as company representatives confirmed to The New York Times , the hoards of people who showed for Clinton’s book signing paled in comparison to other celebrity authors .
“A Barnes & Noble spokeswoman said the crowd’s size was not particularly unusual. Mr. Clinton, the actor James Franco and Suzanne Collins, the author of ‘The Hunger Games’ trilogy, received similar welcomes. The Jonas Brothers and Justin Bieber got bigger crowds.”
For the event that was not unusual according to the nation’s largest bookstore chain, it sure did draw crowds. The Times reports that more than 1,000 people waited as many as five hours to see Clinton and have a book signed.
According to TIME , others waited much longer than five hours .
“She wasn’t scheduled to arrive until 11 a.m. Not wanting to miss out, some came at 9:30—the night before. Dana Watters, a 27-year-old New York grad student, said she was already behind several people in line when she arrived about 13 hours before the event.
‘I’m not 100 percent sure what came out of my mouth [when meeting Clinton], but it was somewhere along the lines of telling her I’ve been a fan of her since I was 6,’ Watters said.”
As TIME noted in the first paragraph of their story, many are viewing this as Clinton’s first stop in the long road back to 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue, where her husband had a tumultuous eight year run as the nation’s 42nd president.
Clinton has not said much about whether the book tour is the start of that campaign, but she has talked about her last experience living in the White House, explaining that when she and her husband left the White House in 2001 — when she was the junior senator from New York and her husband was becoming the nation’s latest ex-president — the couple was “dead broke.”
While it was true that the ex-president and his then-senator wife were deeply in debt due to his legal troubles during his time in office (i.e. impeachment, Paul Jones lawsuit, etc.), The Inquisitr noted earlier Wednesday (June 11) how her husband was able to command impressive speaking fees once he left office , practically eliminating the mountain of debt the couple left office with. Clinton has since backtracked.
Clinton’s book tour will bring her to numerous other sections of the country, though as TIME pointed out,”For a few hours, Union Square was the epicenter of American politics…”
[Image via Flickr Creative Commons ]
