Tracy Flick, the teenage headband-wearing protagonist of 1999’s Election, remains the fictional character most frequently associated with Hillary Clinton - even though the movie is nearly as old as today’s youngest voters. “And you know what else I prepared for? I prepared to be president, and I think that’s a good thing.” Somewhere, fictional high-school honor-roll student Tracy Flick was beaming. And, yes, I did,” Clinton said, turning to look at him. Of the many Trump-blasting retorts Hillary Clinton delivered during last night’s presidential debate, the one that drew that most gleeful response from the type-A women in my life was the one designed to address a persistent critique of Clinton - her so-called overpreparation - and rebrand it as a strength: “I think Donald just criticized me for preparing for this debate. This review originally appeared in the California Review of Books. Indeed, the more comic foibles the characters reveal about themselves, the more human they become. Telling much more would give away the clever ending, though Perrota should be commended for the skillful way he manages to skewer his characters without ever making us feel that he’s being unfair to them. There are a lot of voices, but they usually manage to say their piece precisely and in chronological order, so the plot isn’t hard to follow in fact, it skips along at a brisk pace. We follow the other main characters - “Front Desk Diane” Blankenship, the school secretary Vito Falcone and Glenn Keeler, an “auxiliary” cop who couldn’t pass the physical, and whose brother (who committed suicide) was humiliated in high school by Vito - via third-person narration. Their voices are credible, even when Perrota places a heavy accent on comedy. Some - those by Tracy, Kyle, Jack, and two students on the Hall of Fame selection committee - are narrated in the first person. For political reasons, Tracy agrees to support the project, though it will mean celebrating Vito Falcone, the school’s only other celebrity, a former quarterback at GMHS who actually played - albeit very briefly - in the NFL. Tracy senses an opportunity, especially when nerdy but super-rich Kyle Dorfman, creator of the “Barky” app for people who prefer their dogs to live only on their phones, announces his desire to create a Hall of Fame for his alma mater. However, as the novel begins, Jack Weede, the current principal, has announced his retirement so that he can travel the country in a motor home with his wife, a cancer survivor. Tracy’s alpha personality has not changed, but she’s been forced to flatten her ambitions in a beta job. She’s now the assistant principal at Green Meadow High School in Green Meadow, New Jersey, and not loving it. After graduating from high school, Tracy attended Georgetown as an undergraduate and was just beginning law school at the same institution - a great future in front of her - when her mother’s illness required Tracy to come home and care for her. ![]() In Tracy Flick Can’t Win, we meet the title character 20-plus years later as she struggles with the lousy hand fate has dealt her. ![]() Still, that was a movie I loved: Wickedly funny and bursting with satire, it follows a high-achieving but obnoxious student running for school president and the civics teacher who comes to hate her. I must admit that I’ve never read Election, the novel by Tom Perrota on which the 1999 film - directed by Alexander Payne and starring Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick - was based.
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