It was actually in the McGovern anti-war campaign that the two leaders of our current military engagement met and formed their political alliance. In the seven years they have been in charge of the nation’s security, they have authorized over 28 deployments of America’s military forces. To put this into historical perspective, that is an 18-fold increase over the frequency of military deployments (10) ordered by seven American presidents during the 45 years of the Cold War between 1945 and 1990.

Some of the Clinton deployments have been of the “wag-the-dog” type in Afghanistan and the Sudan (now officially admitted to have been a “mistake”). Some have been attempted intimidation-by-air-strikes against Iraq, or the failed attempt to restore democracy to Haiti. But most have been for so-called “humanitarian purposes,” including hurricane, famine, flood and riot relief.

The current Serbian adventure is justified by Clinton mainly on humanitarian grounds. “When we see slaughter or ethnic cleansing abroad,” the president announced three weeks after launching the Balkan raids, “we should remember that we defeat these things by teaching and by practicing a different way of life, and by reacting vigorously when they occur within our own midst. That’s what this is about.”

The phrase “when they occur within our own midst” was obviously inserted to justify this “humanitarian” response to Milosevic’s killing of 2,000 ethnic Albanians (the toll before the NATO attack), as opposed to the slaughter of more than one million Tutsis in Rwanda — an atrocity the administration studiously ignores.

NATO’s air attacks have been described by England’s Tony Blair as “the first progressive war.” Presumably, this is because the objectives of the war, as described by its authors, are not explicitly self-interested. Perhaps Blair forgot about Woodrow Wilson, the reluctant liberal warrior who justified his own European intervention as “a war to make the world safe for democracy.”

Remembering Wilson can be a sobering exercise. In an attempt to redeem the bloodshed of World War I by insisting on self-determination for the subjects of the conquered Austro-Hungarian empire, Wilson helped destroy the Balkan peace the Habsburgs and their empire had secured. In redrawing the map of Central Europe, Wilson therefore sowed the seeds of the current conflict.

Lack of clarity about national purpose, discomfort with military means, and utopian expectations for the postwar future are all hallmarks of the soft-headed leftism which informs the political views of both the Clinton White House and its principal NATO allies (with the exception of the French). Ironically, these are the same political views that led us into the last American quagmire, also under a Democratic president, in Vietnam. Again, we are intruding into a civil war, again we are applying “coercive diplomacy” ineffectively, trying to bring a nationalist adversary to the negotiating table. As in Vietnam, gradual escalation and reliance on air power has only strengthened the adversary’s resolve, in the present instance solidifying Serbians behind a man who is — however cynical and ruthless — their elected leader.

At this point, the only remaining difference between the two wars (and it is a crucial one) is that the Clinton administration has not had the political spine to introduce ground forces into the Balkans. More than a month into the bombing, the Yugoslav military is still “80 percent intact” according to Pentagon sources quoted in the New York Times, while the only military whose capability has actually been degraded has been that of the United States.

As a result of Clinton’s military exercises, America’s global mission is now increasingly compromised by shortages in ordnance, equipment and personnel. (The Pentagon, for example, has already asked Congress for $51 million to convert its stock of existing cruise missiles with nuclear warheads to conventional ones, in order to make up the deficit the war has created.)

Suppose, however, that Clinton and his progressive NATO allies suddenly acquired the political resolve they now lack, and prosecuted the war with vigor — as some conservatives have advocated. Suppose the White House were to go to Congress and ask for an actual declaration of war and the taxes necessary to support it. Suppose 200,000 troops were dispatched to the Balkans to conduct a land war against Serbian nationalism fighting for its very existence (that Vietnam parallel again). Suppose the 19 nations running the NATO war were ready to embrace this escalation. Suppose the American public, footing most of the bill, was prepared for the long invasion and campaign, and for the casualties necessary to defeat Serbia’s forces, something 33 Axis divisions failed to accomplish during a five year campaign in World War II. Suppose we won. What then?

Do Clinton and his NATO allies plan to restore the Habsburg Monarchy and bring back the Austro-Hungarian empire to administer the peace? Or are the United States and NATO going to administer this European backwater themselves, tying down vital military and political resources for the next decade in the hopes that the warring parties can learn to do what they have not been able to do except under a common monarch or a communist dictator - live in peace?

Nor should we forget that our “friends” in the Balkans, the Albanian Kosovars, are now dominated by the Kosovo Liberation Army which can only be strengthened in a ground war. The KLA is a military-terrorist force led by Muslim radicals and Marxist-Leninists, linked to the Albanian mafia and the international heroin trade, and inspired by political visions of a “Greater Albania” carved out of Serbia, Montenegro, Macedonia and Greece. Is this the pot we want to stir?

The only practical way to avoid the nightmare of a Balkan land war and post-war occupation is to drop the Wilsonian pretense that we can be a savior of the Balkans, or even of the Kosovar Albanians. We need to redefine our objectives to conform to a clear, practical national interest. In these circumstances, such an interest would be to end the war as quickly as possible, and to seek a partition of Kosovo that can form the basis for a stable status quo and, with it, the possibility of a more permanent peace. Instead of reigning terror on the civilian populace of Belgrade in the hope of forcing their government to surrender, we can salve our humanitarian consciences (and save a lot of money) by using our resources to relocate the refugees and help the bordering states resettle them.

There will be two objections to this perspective, one from the right and one from the left. Some conservatives claim that the credibility of America and NATO have been put on the line, and thus there is “no alternative” to military victory. “If you’re in it, you have to win it,” as Sen. McCain has said. On the other hand, the left claims that “human rights” is itself an American national interest, while accepting a partition of Kosovo that does not provide for the return of all the refugees would be to ratify the “ethnic cleansing” that has taken place.

As far as NATO’s credibility is concerned, until its intrusion into the Balkans, NATO was a purely defensive alliance. From its inception until the fall of the Berlin Wall, the NATO alliance worked because its focus was to provide a defense for the sovereignty of its member states against a clearly defined military threat. Though the United States itself was not directly threatened with invasion, it had a vital interest in preserving the independence of Western Europe and denying its industrial wealth and resources to the Soviet adversary. This coherence of purpose and convergence of national interests is why the alliance made sense for us. We were defending our allies against attack in order to defend ourselves. No such rationale justifies the NATO action in the Balkans today.

Without any national discussion and without an act of Congress, we have been led by the Clintonites into a new NATO, which is radically different from the old, and whose problems are far greater and far more disturbing. The very action that NATO has undertaken in the Balkans — an aggression against a sovereign nation over its internal affairs — constitutes a radical redefinition of NATO’s purpose and undermines the very logic that made it work, however problematically, in the past. As Mark Helprin put it, “NATO has gone to war to compel a sovereign state to forfeit a portion of its territory. This is what NATO was formed to oppose.”

This formal redefinition of NATO’s role was announced in a new declaration of purpose signed by the 19 nations who now make up NATO, at its recent 50th anniversary summit in Washington. The unprecedented war in the Balkans, along with NATO’s new self-understanding, are the work of a group of political leaders whose views are quite different from (even opposed to) the views of the men who led NATO in the years of its Cold War success. In fact, most of the principal leaders of the present NATO alliance  Clinton, Solana, Blair, Schroeder and D’Alema– have long been members of the political left. During the Cold War, they were either supporters of the Soviet side (D’Alema was a communist), or active anti-war protesters or backers of the nuclear-freeze movement which opposed the efforts of the NATO leaders at the time and the Reagan administration to preserve nuclear parity (and thus military parity) with the Warsaw Pact. That they are the architects of a “progressive” war of aggression in the Balkans, and a newly conceived NATO is hardly reassuring.

Indeed, if the present war has demonstrated anything at all, it is that the NATO alliance in its newly conceived form has already become a serious liability for the United States. At the 50th Anniversary Summit, NATO Secretary General Javier Solana explained NATOs re-conception in the following way: “We are moving into a system of international relations in which human rights, rights to minorities every day are much more important, and more important even than sovereignity.” In other words, NATO is no longer an alliance to defend its members against aggression. It is more like a white mans UN.

Not surprisingly, the French attending the Summit wanted to require UN approval in every future case of NATO military action in behalf of “human rights,” According to the text of NATO declaration, the UN Security Council “has the primary responsibility for maintenance of international peace.” But the declaration does not say that NATO needs UN approval for such action. So in the middle of the vagueness about “human rights” is a muddle about authority. If nothing else, this dramatically exposes the slippery slope down which the Clinton Administration has already taken the nation, without so much as a congressional hiccup.

We need to begin negotiations with the Serbian regime with whom we are presently at war and arrange our exit from the Balkan quagmire, under as face-saving conditions as possible. This will mean accepting a partition of Kosovo that will, of necessity, ratify a significant portion of the status quo but will also create the possibility of peace and stability in the region. The objection that this is also a ratification of “ethnic cleansing” is readily answered by many historical precedents, which have seemed unobjectionable in the past. For example, when the Indian subcontinent became independent from Britain, a million people were killed in communal violence between Hindus and Muslims. The solution was the partition of the subcontinent, the creation of a new Muslim state (Pakistan) and the transfer of millions of Muslims and Hindus to their respective “cleansed” zones.

Similarly, after the Second World War tens of thousands of Germans were relocated to East Germany from what is now western Poland, where they had lived for centuries. We can salve remaining concerns in the Balkans by devoting resources now used to destroy (mainly empty) buildings in Yugoslavia to relocate the displaced ethnic Albanians and resettle them in an “Albanian” partition of Kosovo.

Once having terminated this futile conflict, we need to ask ourselves some serious questions. Is there a way to restore American military credibility? After seven years of Clintons military and foreign policies, how much credibility does America even have left? In the Iraqi theater, Clinton has allowed the Gulf War coalition to disintegrate, and the only result he has unquestionably achieved through his ineffective military strikes in Iraq is to destroy UNSCOM and the systematic inspection of Saddams nuclear, chemical and biological warfare arsenal, which was the only concrete result of the Gulf War. What possible credibility would additionally be at stake in a face-saving surrender to Milosevic, that has not already been squandered in the multiple surrenders to Saddam?

This is the first president and the first national security apparatus that owes its power and authority to illegal campaign funds supplied by the intelligence services and military command of a foreign power. A brewing scandal which the current war has kept from public view is the massive theft by Clintons Chinese funders of Americas most advanced missile and nuclear weapons technologies. The same Chinese dictatorship, whose “good will” Clinton is still currying, is also the supplier of its stolen missile technologies to terrorist and adversary regimes in North Korea and Iran. And in an ironic, but telling footnote to these Clinton fiascos, the Chinese dictatorship, along with its North Korean client, is one of the few allies to rally around Milosevic and the Serbs.

We need to begin a national dialogue on Americas postwar role as a military superpower, in an ever-shrinking international environment. We need to face the reality that seven years of this Democratic Administration have made the world a far more dangerous place. We need to think now about re-arming our military and restoring our global prowess. Fear of American power, not NATO or the UN, as progressives like the president apparently still need to learn, is the principal guarantor of the peace. If American power is degraded or abused, not only is America endangered, but the international order as well.

To restore the credibility of American power that has been squandered, and shore up Americas security, we need to build the anti-missile defense system that has been irresponsibly delayed for six and a half years by the Clinton security team; we need to restock the weapons systems that Clintons wag-the-dog exercises have dangerously depleted; we need to restore the forces he has irresponsibly diminished an end the manpower shortage his policies have created (to cite one example, the Navy currently has 22,000 empty slots in its 327 ship fleet). We need to adequately fund our military research effort and increase the military budget by at least the $80 billion the military is asking over the next five years, and probably much more.

Congress should also think about re-instituting some form of a military draft. This would relieve some of the present economic burden of recruiting personnel. More importantly, it should serve to focus the American publics attention on the seriousness of foreign policy and the importance of the role of the commander-in-chief (which its recent complacency over the presidential character suggests is a lesson that needs to be re-learned). The re-institution of the draft, hopefully, will shock Americans into the realization that the new feminist order in the military, implemented by the Clinton Administration without public debate, means that they or their daughters are now draftable, and will be called to duty whenever a crisis calls for ground forces. Perhaps, as a result, a new realism will assert itself about the role of women in combat, and end the demoralizing impact of double standards now rampant in the armed services, which has had a serious impact on retention and morale. The current Chief of Army Intelligence, to take one glaring example, is a female who was jumped over 18 generals her senior in experience and skills.

But above all, we need to redefine our national security interests and take a hard look at our NATO commitment. In the current war, many conservatives are concerned to win, even with defective leadership, because “we are stuck with Clinton for another year and a half.” But why dig the hole deeper? Why not press for a solution that cuts our national losses? Why not use what is but another military defeat under the Clinton leadership to begin a debate that is long overdue?

Huh? Of course Obama cut taxes for the middle class in the 2009 Recovery Act, which Republicans consistently lie about, and Clinton controversially raised taxes on high earners (Romney would lower them) to cut the deficit in 1993. Meanwhile, Obama has left President Clinton’s welfare reform alone, despite rising rates of poverty and unemployment in the recession.

On Tuesday Romney took his attack up a notch, suggesting that “a personal beef” between the two men accounts for Obama allegedly rejecting Clinton’s centrism.

According to Romney, Clinton understood that “Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem. President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe it was a personal beef with the Clintons … but really it runs much deeper.”

There he is again, mean ol’ Mitt, trying to hype reports of personal tension between the last two Democratic presidents. It’s silly. Nobody denies there was trouble on the 2008 campaign trail during the Democratic primary, when the former president smarted at Obama camp charges that his overenthusiastic support for his wife’s candidacy, and diminishing of Obama’s, smacked of racism. And today, nobody suggests that the two guys are sneaking off to basketball games together or planning their next joint family trips. But whatever personal strain may persist, they put their problems behind them a long time ago.

Clinton stumped enthusiastically for Obama in 2008, and on behalf of the president and beleaguered Democrats in the 2010 midterms. Who can forget the current president calling on the past president to help him sell the idea of a compromise on the Bush tax cuts (to liberals, by the way) in December 2010 – and then walking away and leaving Clinton by himself at the lectern happily holding forth with the White House press corps (as Obama reportedly went off and did some Christmas shopping)? Currently Clinton is, of course, working hard to help Obama beat Romney. He recently attacked the presumptive Republican nominee for backing failed Bush policies “on steroids.”

As to the notion that Clinton was a centrist and Obama is a liberal: I think they’re both politicians with liberal hearts and centrist political instincts, working to make life better for the non-wealthy in an age when Republicans have become strident, extremist servants of the super-rich. President Clinton raised taxes on the rich. He signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, belatedly letting parents take time off after the birth of a child or when needed by a sick family member.  He let Newt Gingrich’s GOP shut down the government rather than agree to Medicare cuts; on that point, he might be more traditionally liberal than Obama, who entertained the idea of Medicare cuts while trying to get a “grand bargain” on the deficit last summer. (Since then, though, Clinton himself has come out in support of Simpson-Bowles, which would trim Medicare.)

Clinton vastly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one main reason why low-income people don’t pay any federal withholding taxes – a scandal (according to all the GOP presidential contenders) that Romney’s tax plan would remedy by imposing taxes on low-wage earners. The EITC is the absolute best proof that it’s Romney who’s moved away from the appealing mainstream ideas of his party’s past, not Obama. The low-wage tax credit Clinton and Obama expanded was originally a Republican notion (inspired by Milton Friedman) to make poorly paying jobs an alternative to welfare. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford, it was expanded by George H.W. Bush, and also supported by George W. Bush.

It’s true that Clinton tried to pioneer a “Third Way” attempt at Democratic centrism, balancing the budget and ending “welfare as we know it.” He thought if he met increasingly radical Republicans halfway, the country might make progress. He thought wrong. Instead Romney’s party attacked the man Romney now purports to admire; attacked him viciously, from Day One, culminating in a nihilistic effort at impeachment for sexual indiscretions that are common in Washington, D.C.

What Romney is really trying to do now, of course, is cause trouble with the segment of the electorate that admired Hillary Clinton but took a while to warm up to Barack Obama in 2008, particularly the white working class, as well as white female Democrats and independents. I don’t see it working. I’m on record saying repeatedly that dismissing Clinton’s support with working-class whites as merely racism was mistaken and divisive when Democrats did it four years ago. Working-class voters had valid reasons to doubt the charismatic newcomer whose economic platform was marginally less progressive than Clinton’s, and who talked riskily – and naively, as it turned out – of a post-partisan rapprochement with Republicans.

But that doesn’t make those voters easy targets for Romney. His record as Bain Capital job destroyer combined with his enduring prep-school entitlement should make him less simpatico than Obama to those voters. Romney lacks Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” empathy for working-class folks; he comes across as the guy who’s more likely to cause them pain.

Oh, and Romney, by the way, wasn’t always such a Clinton admirer. In his book “Turnaround,” he tells the story of visiting the White House in 1999, while Clinton was president (h/t Andrew Kaczynski):

When we got through the Secret Service checkpoint for clearance at the West Wing, the agent handed each of us a badge to wear around our necks. Mine had a big, red A. I turned to Cindy and, in front of the agents, said, “Why do I have to wear this?” Thinking I was confused, she tried to explain that all visitors to the White House had to wear a badge. “I know that,” I responded, “I’m asking why I have to wear the red A around my neck. I’m not the one that cheated on my wife. He should be wearing the scarlet A- not me.” I grumbled all the way up the drive and into the West Wing lobby. The look on Cindy’s face was priceless.

What a jokester! What a hypocrite.

But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.

Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.

For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.

NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)

The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.

In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.

The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.

This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.

But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.

“[Obama's] out there running against himself now,” Clinton said. “Soon as he gets an opponent, it will be about the next four years — who do you think is going to take us in the right direction.”

Clinton also weighed in a few of the Republican candidates, saying of one-time nemesis Newt Gingrich that he respected the man’s ability to “think and do.” The former president was, however, momentarily lost for words when O’Reilly followed up by asking if he respected Gingrich “as a man.” Clinton tip-toed around the answer, then spent the next few moments criticizng the former speaker’s “scorched-earth” political approach.

When questioned about Mitt Romney, Clinton damned the former Massachusetts governor with praise for his Massachusetts health reform legislation. He stopped short, however, of issuing any endorsements for the Republican primary, saying only that he would vote for Barack Obama regardless in the general election. In fact, the closest he would get to voicing support for any of the candidates was when he mentioned that he liked Jon Huntsman — though he then quickly poked fun at the Utahan’s meager support in the polls.

You can find the full, 40-minute interview here.

First, let’s take in the list of Obama’s accomplishments as Chait describes them. They’re considerable:

His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.

Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.

We could, and I do, quibble about details in each of Chait’s examples, but his overall point is important: Even if every measure he lists has its flaws, the list itself is impressive. That President Obama took office in the middle of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and with a nominal Democratic majority in both houses, helps explain why some people still expected more, but we should still stop more often and acknowledge what’s been accomplished in the last three years.

Having conceded that, I think Chait’s piece suffers from big definitional problems. First, how do we define liberals? Polls show self-described liberal Democrats are happy with Obama – in Gallup’s weekly tracking polls upward of 75 percent approve of the job he’s doing (and the same was true for Clinton), and that’s been true since he took office. There’s no crisis of liberal support for the president.

Also, Chait’s roster of unreasonable “liberals” includes MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. That’s silly: Schultz, cited along with New York Times centrist Thomas Friedman, rails against politicians who refuse to cut the deficit by trimming so-called entitlements and raising taxes. But that’s exactly what Obama tried to do with his proposed debt-ceiling “grand bargain”; Republicans wouldn’t cooperate. Those guys aren’t liberals; Friedman is a formerly liberal, formerly smart writer who got rich and stopped paying attention. (You’d think he could at least pay someone to pay attention for him, so he’d stop asking Obama to do what Obama has already done.)

What about actual liberals, people to the left of Schultz and Friedman – people like Rachel Maddow and, OK, sure, me. Yes, some of us have demanded more from Obama – on the economy, on Wall Street regulation, on gay rights, on civil liberties. But you know what? That’s our job. And when Chait goes down the list of the ways liberals have been disappointed with Democratic presidents going all the way back to FDR, I found myself thinking, Good job, liberals! Because we were usually right, and the country’s a better place for our pushing.

While liberals lionize JFK today, Chait notes, during his presidency (cut short 48 years ago Tuesday) they criticized him for not moving faster on civil rights. Yes, they did. Kennedy was trying to find a way to hold his party together and postpone the departure of the Dixiecrats, and he needed pushing. Should Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have said, “OK, Mr. President, we’ll skip the March on Washington, we know you’re doing what you can.” Liberals were right to push Kennedy. (I am not trying to say that Obama is compromising on anything equivalent to the basic human rights of African Americans, just that on the social justice issues of their day, presidents need pushing.)

Similarly, while FDR gets more historic veneration from liberals (mainly because there’s almost no one here with us who actually lived through his presidency as an adult), his New Deal only came about because of left-wing agitation (and corporate desperation) in the first place. And liberals were right to criticize some of Roosevelt’s compromises: leaving most African-Americans out of the Social Security program (again to mollify Dixiecrats) and easing up on government spending in 1937 (to mollify conservatives and business leaders), which reversed some of the progress he’d made getting us beyond the Great Depression. Japanese internment was a shame that more liberals should have criticized.

In my adulthood, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton got elected with liberal support but wound up disappointing the left, particularly on the economy. Sadly, both men accepted the Republican premise that the economic problems and social disorder of the late ’60s and early ’70s required that Democrats trim back on government and make nice with business. Chait himself admits that while we all love the outspoken human rights defending, “Habitat for Humanity” supporting ex-president we know today, we didn’t love Carter during his term, and for good reason:

The truth is that Carter’s domestic agenda carried only small bits of liberalism, and those small bits (a consumer-protection agency, tax reform) met with total failure in the Democratic Congress. Carter’s policy accomplishments tilted right of center—he deregulated the airline and trucking industries and cut the capital-gains tax. Most infuriatingly to liberals, Carter refused to push for comprehensive health-care reform. A Carter adviser later recalled that the president “did not see health care as every citizen’s right, nor did he think the government has an obligation to provide it.”

When it comes to Clinton, I think many liberals are frustrated with Obama not because of some supposed great contrast with his supposedly liberal predecessor, but because of similarities between the two. Both of these liberal presidents spent considerable political capital trying to compromise with Republicans, and they failed. That’s been a particular problem for Obama because he didn’t have the strong economy that made Clinton’s inability to wrest concessions from the GOP less painful.

It was precisely because Clinton failed to neutralize the critique of Democrats as the “big government” party that I objected to Obama’s effort to do the same thing in a time of economic crisis. Before it all fell apart, the president defended the idea of his deficit-cutting grand bargain to progressives. “Get this problem off the table,” he argued, “and then with some firm footing, with a solid fiscal situation, we will then be in a position to make the kind of investments that I think are going to be necessary to win the future.” But Clinton already tried that, balancing the budget and endorsing a welfare reform plan largely crafted by Republicans. He believed that getting the issue of bloated government “off the table” would set the table for a progressive agenda. Of course, it didn’t work.

Before writing his New York magazine piece, Chait got a lot of attention for a scathing retort to Drew Westen’s left-wing critique of Obama that ran in the New York Times in August. Chait made a lot of good points; some of the things the left blames on Obama either didn’t happen, or couldn’t have happened otherwise given the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. But he made one point I wanted to answer at the time, and didn’t. He accused Westen and other lefty Obama critics of romanticizing the power of the bully pulpit and the presidential speech:

Westen’s op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.

I think that’s a caricature of liberals’ criticism. I have an actual model of what I wish the president had done, and it doesn’t come from Bill Clinton or JFK or FDR, it comes from Barack Obama. Look at the way he tried to sell the deficit-cutting grand bargain, to settle the 2011 debt-ceiling stalemate, even though in the end, the GOP didn’t bite — and probably, predictably, never was going to. That let the president tell voters he was the one who really wanted to cut the deficit, but Republicans wouldn’t let him. He railed, he ranted, he ordered both parties’ leaders to work night and day on a deal. He told the American public to call their congressional leaders and demand compromise — and sure enough, they tied up the phone lines in Congress for a while. In the process, he accepted the Republican premise that deficit-reduction was more important than job creation, a hallmark of the Clintonian “third way” politics he’d supposedly rejected, but even critics had to admit it was a bold political move, and he worked hard and risked a lot for it.

Now, imagine the new president had told a comparably bold story about the recession in early 2009: that he was the one who knew how to use government to fix the economy — but Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats wouldn’t let him do all that was needed, so he was probably going to have to compromise to do what was possible. Obama failed to give voters a vision of the kind of government role that would be required to fix the economy — his advisors were telling him it would take at least $1.2 trillion in stimulus — even if he had to compromise and settle for less. And let’s be clear: He did have to settle for less. Since the Senate barely passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, even though 40 percent of it went to tax cuts, it’s hard to imagine the president getting more than that.

But what if the president laid out bigger, bolder plans for the Recovery Act? What if he’d gone on television every few days, as he did during the debt-ceiling crisis, and demanded the American people lobby Congress? Then, when the compromise stimulus worked as well as it did — and it did work, keeping the country out of a Depression and reversing the steep trend of job losses that began under Bush — but its effects trailed off, he’d have been in a much stronger position to push Congress to do more. But Obama never made that case. That was a missed opportunity that wound up hurting the president politically, and hurting the country.

One last thing about the debt-ceiling debacle: Obama’s approval numbers fell as he pushed for compromise with the GOP, and they have climbed since he’s begun pushing for a jobs bill he knows has no chance of getting Republican support. I think Obama’s liberal critics weren’t just right morally, they were right politically. But I’ll also give the president credit for what now looks like shrewd bargaining: He got the debt ceiling raised without cutting Social Security or Medicare, reckoning he could offer whatever he felt like knowing the GOP would never agree to raise taxes.

I think Chait’s right that liberals are less inclined than conservatives to close ranks around their president, right or wrong. Conservatives tend to defer to authority, by definition; our side, not so much. I think he’s right to remind liberals how much Obama has done. I’m grateful to Obama for a lot of those things, but mostly, I’m grateful to be a member of a party that fights openly about what’s right. When the president got heckled by some Occupy Wall Street protesters Tuesday in New Hampshire, he modeled that tolerance, listening to them; he didn’t have them pepper-sprayed. I guess I’m grateful for that too — but I wish I didn’t have to be.

Here’s our “Hardball” debate. Have a great Thanksgiving.

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These are questions that obviously can’t be answered with any certainty. We’ll never know how a Clinton (or a McCain, for that matter) would have tackled the recession or jousted with John Boehner, just as we’ll never know what would have transpired if there had been no stimulus at all, or if Obama had taken a more confrontational stance against his Republican opposition from the get-go, rather than pursue a doomed strategy of bipartisan cooperation. We’re stuck with the world we’ve got.

But in the wake of the publication of Bill Clinton’s new book, “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy,” there is simply no choice but to plunge into these hypothetical waters, however impracticable they might be. Because even though, when you boil it down, the agenda set forth by Clinton is not substantivally different from what Obama has attempted to execute, the implicit theme of “Back to Work” is that there’s a better way to go about the business of government than what we’ve witnessed in the last three years. As TalkingPointsMemo’s Josh Marshall joked in a tweet, the real title of “Back to Work” should be “If I Were Still President I’d Be Ownin’ These Bitches.” Clinton periodically offers lukewarm support to Obama, but he’d much rather be recounting the successes of his 1990s glory days. Just put him back in the Oval Office, and we’d get this mess fixed, stat!

Dream on, Bill. One could reasonably argue that Clinton would have done a much better job facing down McConnell, Boehner and Cantor on the debt ceiling and government shutdown showdowns. But his program for smart governmental intervention in the economy would have constituted exactly the same kind of anathema to a Republican Party determined to prevent him from accomplishing anything as everything hitherto proposed by Obama. Clinton would also have discovered that when you come into office on the heels of a fiscal quarter in which the economy contracted by almost 10 percent, while facing a Senate opposition determined to filibuster your every move at a historically unprecedented rate from Day One, recovery would be slow and painful and politically costly. Furthermoe, any notion that Bill Clinton might have been tougher than Obama on the banks or Wall Street, while fighting for his beloved middle class, seems especially dubious. Let’s not forget, Obama’s economic team was largely staffed by veterans of the Clinton administration, and some of the key deregulatory measures that contributed to the financial crisis were passed during Clinton’s administration with the enthusiastic support of those very same men.

“Back to Work” includes a cogent analysis of where the U.S. has gone astray, is full of sensible ideas to encourage job creation and economic growth, and makes a robust defense of the notion that strong government is a good thing. But so what? The people who will buy and read this book not only already agree with just about everything that’s in it, but they also already know it all. There’s almost nothing here that hasn’t been proposed by the Obama administration, or that isn’t already a stock part of the mainstream Democratic agenda. Which makes it all completely meaningless in the context of current political gridlock. Clinton wants us to get back to a government based on doing things that work — but as has become abundantly evident in the past few years, congressional Republicans are content with a system that doesn’t work. And neither Obama nor Clinton has any leverage to change that reality, unless Democrats enjoy a surprising victory in the 2012 election.

Any imaginary history that plucks Bill Clinton out of 1992 and time-travels him into 2008 has to grapple with some mighty big historical transformations. For most of his two terms, Bill Clinton enjoyed a huge wind at his back — a stunning period of economic growth that was in large part fueled by two things he can take zero credit for: the end of the Cold War and the massive tech boom. And even without the black hole of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression sucking at his presidency from the moment he moved into the White House, Clinton still managed to make a pretty big mess of things in his first two years. His efforts to push through the first priority on his political agenda — healthcare reform — failed miserably and contributed heavily to one of the worst midterm election defeats faced by a sitting Democratic president in a century. The Obama midterm debacle was even bigger, but in some ways less embarrassing. Until Clinton came along, Democrats had held a majority in the House of Representatives for 40 years.

Today, there is a rosy glow associated with the Clinton years. We tend to forget such things as the tawdry impeachment scandal, for a simple reason: The economy grew quickly and millions of jobs were created. If you couldn’t find a job in Northern California in the late ’90s, you weren’t breathing. The warm tint of the rearview mirror imbues Clinton with the authority to lecture us all now on how we should be doing a better job getting people back to work. But what about the responsibility that Clinton should shoulder for sowing the seeds of the financial crisis in the first place?

Clinton rightly dismisses the notion that his aggressive support of the Community Reinvestment Act was the root cause of the housing bust. We’ll give him points for that. But what are we to make of the one area in which he does acknowledge making a mistake?

I do think I can be fairly criticized for not making a bigger public issue out of the need to regulate financial derivatives. I couldn’t have done anything about it, because the Republican Congress was hostile to all regulations … But I should have spoken out more, especially after Congress included a measure barring financial derivatives from being regulated as securities or commodities in an appropriations bill that passed by a veto-proof majority.

Clinton then has the gall to approvingly mention Commodity Future Trading Commission director Brooksley Born’s strongly voiced opinion at the time that “financial derivatives should be subject to the same kinds of capital and transparency requirements as agricultural derivatives.” He somehow fails to mention the fact that Born’s push to regulate financial derivatives was cut off at the knees by Clinton’s own senior economic officials, including, notably, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. The heads of the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and SEC released a joint statement that left no doubt as to administration policy: “We have grave concerns about this action and its possible consequences. We seriously question the scope of the CFTC’s jurisdiction in this area.”

For Clinton to suggest that he would have made a bigger public issue “out of the need to regulate financial derivatives” implies that he agreed with Born — but there is very little evidence to be found for this revisionism in the historical record. The opposite is much more true. Clinton’s administration was extraordinarily accommodative of Wall Street’s desires; their priorities were his priorities. One can assume that the health of the financial sector would have been just as high a priority for a Clinton administration in 2008 as it was in 1999. The banks would certainly have been bailed out, fueling popular resentment and creating identical political problems for the incumbent party.

Before Bill Clinton decided to write a book arguing the merits for smart government, he should have fessed up to how his own dumb government played a role in creating the financial crisis that put so many Americans out of work and has made it so difficult to restart economic growth.

That having been said, however, anyone looking for a smart to-do list of what government can do to spur economic growth would not be ill-served by reading Chapter 6: “How We Can Get Back in the Future Business.” Clinton is a bit more supportive of the debt-reduction proposals that came out of Obama’s Erskine-Bowles commission than most serious liberals will feel comfortable with, but aside from that, most Democrats will find themselves nodding their heads at his proposal to spur green job creation through investment in renewable energy, his call for a big infrastructure buildup, and his plan to fix the housing sector. Clinton’s always been a wonk’s wonk — he clearly enjoys wallowing in the nitty-gritty details of policy. There’s meat in “Back to Work.”

But he gives away the game on Page 111:

If there are any militant antitax folks still reading this book, I can hear the counterattack forming in your minds: “Clinton wants European-style social democracy! He wants to tax us to death. He’s for too much government! He doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism! He doesn’t even love America anymore, or he wouldn’t be telling us all this bad stuff!

“That’s all nonsense,” he writes.

Well yeah, sure, except for the annoying little fact that it’s nonsense that represents the expressed views of most of the Republicans currently elected to Congress. And indeed, it’s mild nonsense that doesn’t even come close to the intemperate nastiness of the rhetoric routinely hurled at President Obama.

It’s cute for Clinton to pretend that any “militant antitax” folk would even purchase “Back to Work,” much less be reading it as far as Page 111 without their heads exploding. The sad truth — and this is something that Clinton is surely aware of — is that all the well-meaning and pragmatically effective job creation tools in the world are worth nothing when matched up against the scorched earth tactics and extreme calcified ideology of the current Republican Party. Clinton’s great 1990s nemesis, Newt Gingrich, is a moderate when compared to the GOP’s Tea Party backbone — something Gingrich learned to his shock when he had the temerity to criticize Paul Ryan’s budget as “right-wing social engineering.”

It is in the context of current political reality that all of Clinton’s suggestions must be evaluated, and this is where “Back to Work” is most lacking. It doesn’t matter how compellingly Clinton makes the case for smart government (and higher taxes) in an era when the opposition party has never been more antitax or more resolutely opposed to government action. It doesn’t matter how bad we look when compared to other rich countries, when we are considered by definition incomparable. It doesn’t matter how much sense Clinton makes — in Washington in 2011, sense is irrelevant.

If you’re in the market for an alternate reality, pick up “Back to Work,” mix yourself a strong drink, and pretend to your heart’s delight that if we just had the right wonk in office, pushing the right kind of policy proposals, unemployment would be falling while the economy boomed. But if you want to change reality, just make sure you go vote.