Puffy and the pontiff

A worldwide movement to wipe out debt for poor countries is getting some star-studded support this weekend.

By David Moberg

Topics:Bill Clinton, Bono

Amid the current budget showdown in Congress, Republicans and Democrats are finding little common ground. Yet for all their tooth-and-nail scrapping over domestic priorities and overall lack of interest in spending to help foreign countries, there’s a very good chance that they will reach agreement on one surprising initiative — allocating nearly $1 billion to reduce or write off debts owed by some of the world’s poorest countries.

The idea has caught hold with some of the most conservative members of Congress as well as with the most liberal. Much of the credit goes to a loosely knit, grass-roots global campaign based primarily in churches and anti-poverty groups.

Operating under the banner of Jubilee 2000 — recalling religious traditions of “jubilee” years when debts are wiped out — these citizen campaigns have argued that enforcing payment of the heavy debts of very poor countries is immoral. In many cases the debts were incurred by illegitimate governments, like Mobutu’s dictatorship in Zaire or South Africa’s apartheid regime, and they are paid at a price of great human suffering by people who never benefited from them. They argue that it’s bad economics. There is no way that countries can grow or reduce poverty if they are sending so much of their income — typically 30 percent of the national budget — to rich creditors. Finally, nearly everyone realizes that the debts are not collectable. If the countries were businesses, they would have declared bankruptcy years ago, and creditors would have written off the loss.

But it has taken massive campaigning by a movement that teams such diverse spokespeople as the pope and Harvard economist Jeffrey Sachs to win over leaders of the G7 nations and big multilateral financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

Though the issue may not sound sexy, it has become the latest cause cilhbre. This Saturday, a star-studded concert, dubbed Netaid, is to be telecast on VH1 and broadcast over the Internet in the hope of raising $22 million for the cause. Sponsored by the United Nations Human Development Program and Cisco Systems, it will cover concerts in Switzerland, Britain and the United States. The shows will feature performers such as Bono, Sting, Sheryl Crow, Puff Daddy and Jewel. They will promote both contributions and action to end poverty in developing countries. Jubilee 2000 is one of the main collaborators and beneficiaries of the concert.

Three years ago, several of the world’s richest countries promised roughly $12.5 billion to relieve some debt of about 41 “heavily indebted poor countries,” or HIPC. The total debt of these HIPC countries is about $200 billion, but it costs much less to cancel the debt because it is typically worth less than 10 percent of its face value because of their inability to pay.

In the spring of 1998, despite protests that the debt relief programs weren’t working, the G7 countries refused to expand debt relief. By early this year, the governments of those countries were floating new proposals. When they met in Cologne, Germany, last June, they agreed to more than double the program to reduce debt owed to multilateral organizations like the World Bank and up to 90 percent of much bilateral, government-to-government lending.

By late last month the member countries of the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, as well as the two organizations themselves, had committed nearly all the funding needed for the new, ambitious program. When the IMF and World Bank held their annual meeting in Washington in late September, President Clinton told delegates that he had asked Congress for $970 million to cover not only the U.S. share of multilateral debt but also the full cancellation of debts the HIPC countries owed directly to the United States. “It was a great symbolic gesture,” said Oxfam spokesman Seth Amgott. “It put pressure on other countries to come up with more.”

But some said Clinton’s speech did not go far enough. “What’s needed from the president is not just a strong speech to the IMF and World Bank but to speak in his radio address or prayer breakfast and educate the public on this issue,” said David Bryden, communications director for Jubilee 2000/USA. In many ways, however, it’s the public that has educated Clinton and other political leaders here and abroad.

A year ago there were no bills in Congress to relieve debt. Now there are at least four. A little over a year ago, the IMF wouldn’t even meet with Jubilee 2000 representatives. Now it proposes that citizen groups be involved in drafting anti-poverty plans. What’s brought about the change?

It’s simple, said former Jubilee 2000/USA national coordinator Carole Collins: “grass roots mobilization and the cogency of the issue.”

Much of that grass-roots mobilization has come from religious organizations. They have directed their appeals to Republicans normally skeptical of U.S. foreign aid. With Republicans in control of Congress, GOP support for the issue was critical. Convincing members like Rep. Spencer Bachus, a conservative Republican from Alabama, was an uphill battle. But a local chapter of Bread for the World, a largely church-based anti-hunger group, met with the congressman and explained debt’s effects on poor countries. He was evidently moved; since then he has been speaking out passionately, making debt a moral issue among conservatives who tout their morality.

At a press conference during the IMF/Bank meetings, Bachus was joined in his crusade by Rep. Maxine Waters, one of the most liberal members of Congress. Bachus and Waters are among 117 co-sponsors of a debt-relief bill introduced by House Banking Committee chairman Jim Leach, R-Iowa, that requires recipients of debt relief to use their savings on education and health care. The plan excludes governments that sponsor terrorism or spend too much on the military. The Leach bill also grants the administration authority to support the IMF gold revaluation plan.

While the Leach bill has the best chance of passing, there are several other bills — including one introduced by Waters — that would expand debt relief or cancel debts outright. More important, unlike the Leach proposal or the present HIPC program, these alternatives would not require poor countries to submit to plans drawn up by the IMF’s Enhanced Structural Adjustment Facility (ESAF). Such plans typically call for countries to take measures such as balancing budgets, opening to unregulated foreign investment, eliminating subsidies for the poor and imposing user fees for health care. Critics argue that they deepen poverty and do little to promote growth.

Despite Clinton’s magnanimous gesture in canceling U.S. debt, the administration has been a staunch defender of multilateral debt reduction with strings attached. “Treasury says they don’t want to get rid of the debt because we can use it as leverage over these countries,” said Joanne Carter, legislative director of Results, an anti-hunger campaign. The debate over debt is “about money, but it’s also about power,” agreed Robert Naimann, an expert on the IMF at the progressive Preamble Center, a Washington think tank.

In response to the global debt critics, the IMF’s “structural adjustment” arm has been revamped and renamed the Poverty Reduction and Growth Facility. It will be under the jurisdiction of the IMF as well as the World Bank, which has supported but increasingly criticized the IMF’s policies in poor countries. Under the new proposal, poor countries are supposed to create the first draft of a plan for growth and poverty reduction, drawing on ideas of citizen groups, then negotiate with the new IMF/World Bank facility over the final terms. While that may look like progress, the big question will be which side will buckle when the austere macroeconomic policies that the IMF still defends conflict with a poor country’s plans for reducing poverty or improving education and health care.

Campaigners against debt are divided over whether it’s more important to get a half loaf of debt reduction (and some cancellation) or hold out for more comprehensive debt cancellation and elimination of the IMF role in dictating the development policies of poor countries. Although hostility toward the IMF comes from both the right and left in Congress, the decision on Clinton’s $970 million request may be more critical than any of the bills giving direction about how to spend the money. According to insiders, that may only be resolved in final budget negotiations between the administration and congressional leaders.

But Joe Engelhard, senior counsel to the House Banking Committee, cautioned that the bill is still not guaranteed congressional approval. “It’s still open whether Jubilee 2000 will have the momentum to create a groundswell where it will pass,” he said.

: David Moberg is a senior editor at In These Times and a fellow at the Nation Institute. More David Moberg

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Bubba weighs in on the president's shot at another term, and sizes up the Republican candidates

By Peter Finocchiaro

(Credit: Fox News)

Topics:Morning Clip, Bill Clinton, Bill O'Reilly

Bill Clinton sat down for an long interview with Bill O’Reilly last night on Fox News, where the two discussed everything from economic and immigration policy, to the horse-race politics of the 2012 election. Clinton issued a favorable forecast for Barack Obama’s re-election — saying his prospects were better than 50/50 — and commented that the president’s current, tougher political posture would help him in the long run.

: More Peter Finocchiaro

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He won healthcare and banking reform as well as the super committee standoff. Great. We have to keep pushing

VIDEO

By Joan Walsh

Should liberals be more thankful for Obama?

(Credit: AP/iStockphoto/sjlocke/Salon)

Topics:Barack Obama, Democratic Party, Bill Clinton, 2012 Elections

I got to debate Jonathan Chait about his much-discussed New York magazine piece, “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?” on “Hardball” Tuesday night. He’s aiming at President Obama’s liberal critics, but in fact his article proves that criticism is nothing new. Apparently, we’ve always been unreasonable, because Chait’s survey of Democratic presidents going back to FDR finds that the left has always found a reason to squawk. But he seems to think we’re particularly unreasonable when it comes to Obama. With Thanksgiving ahead, I found myself wondering whether liberals should be more grateful to the president.

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.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

: Joan Walsh is Salon's editor at large. More Joan Walsh

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Even the Big Dog himself would have an impossible time with today's GOP

By Andrew Leonard

Bill Clinton (Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson)

Topics:Bill Clinton, Books

As Democrats survey the political wreckage of the last three years, the temptation to imagine more pleasant alternate realities is irresistible. What if Hillary Clinton had been elected president instead of Obama? Would events have played out any differently? Or, even more tantalizingly (albeit technically impossible), what if the Big Dog himself, Bill Clinton, had been in charge the last three years? Would he have done a better job fixing the economy? Been more effective knocking heads with the Tea Party? Established himself as a better bet to win a second term?

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.

: Andrew Leonard is a staff writer at Salon. On Twitter, @koxinga21. More Andrew Leonard

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Should President Obama replace Joe Biden with Bill Clinton? Only if you can't think of an even sillier idea

By Alex Pareene

Topics:Politico, Bill Clinton, 2012 Elections, Media Criticism, Media, Barack Obama, War Room

Politico knows it must keep innovating in the field of political horse-race fanfic in order to maintain its position as the nation’s leader in inane presidential campaign speculation. Last week, Bloomberg published Jonathan Alter jumping on the “Obama might replace Biden with Hillary Clinton even though everyone involved has said in no uncertain terms that that will never ever happen” bandwagon. That was Politico’s beat! Rather than complain, though, Politico has decided to move on. They are now way beyond the Hillary chatter.

: Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon. Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene

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The former president tells Letterman that Occupy Wall Street needs to become more focused

VIDEO

By Peter Finocchiaro

(Credit: CBS)

Topics:Morning Clip, Occupy Wall Street, Bill Clinton

Add Bill Clinton to the long list of public figures who support Occupy Wall Street in principle, but insists they need specific goals in order to achieve anything. The former president was on “Letterman” last night, discussing the conditions of anxiety and frustration that spurred the nationwide protests. After issuing a critical appraisal of the movement, he voicing cautious optimism about the potential for change:

I think that, on balance, this could be a positive thing. But they’re going to have to transfer their energies at some point to making some specific suggestions or bringing in people who know more to try to put the country back to work.