You knew it had to happen. It was inevitable. Especially after Hillary Clinton’s failed 2016 campaign and then both Kamala Harris and Elizabeth Warren failing to win the Oval Office in 2020. With those losses, someone was bound to write a book about why there hasn’t been a female POTUS. Electable: Why American Hasn’t Put a Woman in the White House. . . Yet purports to be just such a book.Political reporter Ali Vitali penned the book, released just over two months ago. Published by Dey Street Books, an imprint of HarperCollins, my first indication the book might not be as groundbreaking as it could be was the number of reviews it’s managed to get on Amazon. Or perhaps I should say the lack of reviews and ratings. Seven reviews and 58 ratings. That isn’t good, especially not for a traditionally published book where you’d expect the publisher to do at least a little push both before and upon release.

My next red flag came when I checked to see where the book ranked and in which categories. Mind you, this is supposed to be about the last election and why America hasn’t elected a female president. So why is it categorized, among other things, in “biographies of journalists”?

With those red flags and others already flying, I opened the book and started reading. . . or at least trying to.

From the opening words of the book, I knew I was in trouble. Only paragraphs into the first chapter, Vitali stated that Elizabeth Warren could have been president. I’m not sure how she came to that conclusion and, as with so many other of her statements in the book, Vitali never explained. Instead, we get patriarchy, evil voters not willing to accept a woman, and more of the same when we elected yet another elderly white man.

It would be easy to sit here and do several lengthy posts picking apart not only the logic of the book, but also the so-called facts as they are presented. But I’ll be honest, my liver would never survive the experience. When I say reading HRC’s What Happened or even her novel, State of Terror, written with Louise Penny, was easier, I’m not lying.

Yes, the book is that bad.

Vitali falls into the same pit many so many so-called journalists have. She makes herself part of the book. No, that’s not quite right. She tries to make herself a major part of the book. Instead of reporting the news, she is trying to be part of it. The result is one of the worst cases of author intrusion I’ve seen in a very long time.

We get prose like the following:

“Hiiii!” Harris said as she walked through the front door of Styled by Nadia, a thrift store in Columbia, South Carolina, on Lady Street–which was exactly what it sounded like: a street of predominantly lady-owned small businesses, most of the owners women of color.

If you could read that without your eyes crossing, you’re a better person than I.

Then you have chapter titles like this: “Memorial Day Weekend. Campaigning While Female”. A chapter that includes the following sentence (and I use that term loosely).

Senators Amy Klobuchar, Kirsten Gillibrand, and Elizabeth Warren spending their holiday weekends barnstorming through Iowa.

Or this:

The 2020 race started with all these women being, some way somehow, compared to and tagged with the baggage of the former Secretary of State, made it clear that Clinton being the only female presidential paradigm in most voters’ recent memories presented a barrier for the women who were trying to pick up where she’d left off.

My brain was hurting by the time I got to this point in the book. Unfortunately, I was only on page 49 of approximately 342 pages.

Where oh where was her copy editor?

I wish I could tell you it gets better, but it doesn’t. The book reads like a first draft, one that didn’t benefit from a good copy editor or content editor. How else do you explain a so-called journalist opening the final chapter of a book published in August 2022 with “I don’t want to alarm you, but there are already people running for president in 2024.” What did she expect? It amazes me that someone proclaiming that they are a seasoned political reporter could write that sort of a statement with a straight face.

I went into this book hoping Vitali would present a well-reasoned, well-researched book that took an in-depth look into why a woman hasn’t reached the Oval Office yet. Yes, I know it was a high hope, one with a higher chance of going unfulfilled than fulfilled. I knew there would be the usual cries of chauvinism and patriarchy. What I hadn’t expected was to find an amateurish attempt at self-aggrandizement.

On the question of whether I’d recommend this book, that’s a big “NOPE!” Not unless you want to use it as a doorstop or as an example of why so-called journalists should be sent back to school to learn what it means to report the news and not try to be part of it.