This is the book which answers the question: what if Hillary Clinton were elected president and every terrible thing ever said about her were literally true?

A State of Disobedience is a first novel from Tom Kratman, published by military science fiction powerhouse Baen Books. Like most of Baen's authors, Kratman is a military veteran and extremely conservative. He enlisted in the infantry, left to attend Boston College and then returned to serve as an officer in the first Gulf War. He then went to law school and now practices law in Virginia. Since writing this novel in 2003 he has collaborated with John Ringo on two other novels and has two more solo novels coming out later this year.

Despite the alarming premise, this book is not a bunch of idiotic reactionary twaddle about a second American revolution like The Turner Diaries. It's better thought-out and more believable, once you've swallowed the basic idea that Hillary Clinton wins the 2008 election and then proceeds to do everything her worst detractors suspect she wants to do, by turning the US into a politically correct, socialist, police state. Kratman is clearly an astute political observer and keenly intelligent. His extrapolations from the body of anti-Hillary rhetoric are logical and fully explored. After you've read a few pages and begun to suspend your initial disbelief his distopian scenario becomes dismayingly convincing.

It's a tribute to Kratman's intelligence that even though the book was published in 2003 and ran the risk of becoming dated very fast, nothing which has happened since then has really failed to follow his version of history, except perhaps the rise of Barack Obama as a serious Democratic presidential contender. His story is made more convincing by his transparent use of historical figures with only small name changes, and with their well-known personalities clearly described on the page. Hillary Clinton becomes Wilhelmina Rottermeyer (after having divorced her philandering husband and taken back her maiden name). James Carville is James Carroll, and so on. Many of the central characters are fictional, although clearly drawn from life, and there are enough little tidbits of factual scandal and historical abuse of power to lay a believable foundation for the more extreme parts of the story. He even gets in a nice dig at ACORN and the largely ignored Democratic vote-buying scandal.

The story starts after the election of Willi Rottermeyer who has used her first two years in office to consolidate power, undermine the political opposition by blackmail and intimidation, increase taxes, expand welfare programs, weaken the states, increase federal power, and even provide various executive branch agencies with their own special police forces, including a much expanded secret service functioning as a secret police force. One of the things Rottermeyer has done is to give the Surgeon General his own police to protect abortion clinics, and this inevitably leads to conflict with right-to-life protestors whose politically incorrect freedom of speech is of no interest to the administration. A situation gets out of control when a bombing suspect takes sanctuary with a Catholic priest and the orphans he cares for in a church in Waco. A siege ensues, which in one of the weakest points in the book, is much too reminiscent of the siege of the Branch Davidian compound, with a similar outcome.