American travesty

With a talking presidential penis and a shovelful of Hollywood dirt, Joe Eszterhas waxes trashy on the Lewinsky scandal.

By Peter Kurth

Well, blow me down! I had no idea before reading “American Rhapsody” — bad-boy screenwriter Joe Eszterhas’ “long-awaited,” “talked-about,” “must-read,” “buzz-generating,” “steamy,” “titillating,” “juicy,” “sensational,” “scandalous,” “tell-all” “blend of fact and fiction” (quotes courtesy of America’s fourth estate) — that former President Gerald R. Ford was famous for his flatulence.

I’m telling you the truth — I didn’t know that about Ford. I knew that Betty Ford normally had to be carried off Air Force One, drunk, after listening to her husband’s speeches, but not that, when she got home, she was subjected to blasts of wind beyond the call of love or duty.

Neither did I know that Lyndon Johnson had scrotum skin that hung “halfway to his knees.” I did know that LBJ had a big dong, Texas style, that he fucked his playthings on the floor of the White House, if not in the Oval Office, and that his creatures used to brief him in the morning while he was sitting (if you like) on the toilet — assuming he got that far. Johnson was known to conduct the high business of state in bed, lying on his side while one of his nontyping secretaries gave him an enema.

This leads me to another thing in “American Rhapsody” that I didn’t know before I read it. Are you ready? Because it’s a killer:

I didn’t know that the Hollywood party where New Line film producer Mike DeLuca got a public blow job was the same Hollywood party where Farrah Fawcett was seen “pooping” on the lawn. I knew that Hollywood producers like their blow jobs, of course — who doesn’t? — and that Fawcett, God bless her wizened, has-been head, had pooped on somebody’s lawn after her breakup with Ryan O’Neal. But I didn’t know that these things happened at the same time!

All the rest of the stories in “American Rhapsody” I already knew. Honest. Or knew enough like them, about the same or similar people, that they came as no surprise to me, much less as a shock, “titillating,” “sensational” or anything else.

I knew all of Eszterhas’ stories about Sharon Stone, for example — Stone smoking Thai, Stone washing out her mouth after kissing Billy Baldwin during the filming of “Sliver,” Stone not wearing her panties, Stone climbing on Eszterhas’ back, also during the filming of “Sliver,” to show him how a real woman masturbates: “She kept moving up and down, up and down … She clenched my sides tightly with her thighs, held them for a long moment, and then we both relaxed. ‘Better?’ she asked, laughing.”

I knew all these stories before I read “American Rhapsody” because, despite the much-touted embargo on the book, they were leaked to the press in advance. Not to mention excerpted in the current issue of Tina Brown’s Talk, and repeated in every entertainment wire story from here to the cold caverns of the moon. Indeed, Liz Smith declared not long ago that you had to live on the moon not to have heard about the “scathing” revelations in Eszterhas’ book. Liz and Joe were going to have lunch this week, and, boy, was she looking forward to it!

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Point of departure: There are Buddhists who believe that at the end of this particular cycle of time another Buddha will appear, Maitreya, who will preside over the final establishment of an enlightened society. Hindus, on the other hand, believe in more than one doomsday. Each cycle of Hindu time has four ages, called kalpa. We’re in the fourth age of the current one, the kali yuga. One Hindu scholar translates this as “the lousy age.” As the great American journalist Dorothy Thompson observed before her death in 1961, “The age of darkness is not something distant. It is upon us. We are in it.”

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You all remember Joe Eszterhas, don’t you? Child of poor Hungarian immigrants in Cleveland, ’60s radical, former gonzo reporter for Rolling Stone, National Book Award nominee and once the highest-paid screenwriter in Hollywood. Following a string of box-office flops in the ’90s, Eszterhas, the “wildman,” “rule-breaking,” pussy-poking author of “Betrayed,” “Flashdance,” “Jagged Edge,” “F.I.S.T.,” “Showgirls” and, of course, “Basic Instinct” — remember Stone and her ice pick? remember Michael Douglas’ pathetic, sagging ass? — has been so far off the Hollywood radar screen you’d think he was dead. If you thought about him at all, that is, which you probably wouldn’t. Why would you?

The buzz is that Eszterhas is so washed up in Hollywood now that no one will read his scripts. At the same time, somehow the “scabrous” revelations in “American Rhapsody” are said to ensure that he’ll never work in Tinseltown again. Go figure. Here’s Eszterhas on his disappearing act:

Nearly three years ago, afraid that my public persona as a screenwriter was overwhelming my creative life, I went to the Island of Maui with my wife and our three children, shut my phone down, stopped doing interviews, and pretended I wasn’t a public man.
OK, if that’s how he wants to spin it — a self-imposed exile:

I played with my wife and played with my kids, let the sun beat me up, and thought about things. About values and success. About the Sixties. About my past relationships with the women I’d used and my present relationship with the wife I adored. Somehow or other those thoughts about my life inevitably led me to Bill Clinton.
Did I hear “juicy,” “titillating,” “must-read”? Did I hear that “American Rhapsody,” in the current parlance, would rock my world? Because that, exactly, is what it didn’t do. I’ve read the thing from cover to cover now and I’m still waiting to be blown away. With “sizzle” like this, you’d take a long time to fry.
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Point of clarification: Salon asked me to review “American Rhapsody” because, as my editor says, I’m a “noncombatant.” That is, I’m neither part of nor partial to the hopped-up, hyped-up world Joe Eszterhas inhabits, or used to before Maui called. On top of it, I’m queer — as in homosexual — so the only thing Eszterhas and I really have in common is the pendulum between our legs. And, boy, paraphrasing Ms. Smith, do we have a different take on that!
One of the advantages of being a poofter is that you don’t have to play by the white man’s rules. The August issue of Talk also contains an item about a planeful of Victoria’s Secret models flown en masse to Cannes, France, last spring. This news comes on the first anniversary of the death of John F. Kennedy Jr., which is also being hyped this week to within an inch of its life. Thus, in regard to the difference between Eszterhas and me, suffice it to say that, as far as I’m concerned, the wrong plane went down.
Is that shocking? Is that in bad taste? Good. Because somebody’s got to give this story a jolt. Revelation-wise, a bigger disappointment than “American Rhapsody” couldn’t exist this side of Eszterhas’ “Burn Hollywood Burn!”
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Let’s face it, America: A straight man “telling all” isn’t telling much. Eszterhas is so straight he thinks blow jobs — “head” — were invented in the 1960s. He’s so straight he talks about “titties” and “holes” (although he’s careful to put the words in other people’s mouths). He’s so straight he can write a sentence like this, before falling completely silent on the matter: “Head also caused some men to open doors they had forced closed all their lives. Stoned enough or drunk enough, they discovered they didn’t really care if the form kneeling there in the lava light with lips bared and mouth open was a man or a woman.” Can you believe it? What next!?
All right, I’ll be honest. There are some Hollywood stories in “American Rhapsody” that I didn’t literally know about in advance. Mainly, these involve the aforementioned film producers (or, in one case, former O.J. lawyer Robert Shapiro) and their never-ending blow jobs, along with Eszterhas himself screaming at anyone who tries to alter his scripts:

I’m going to come down there with a baseball bat and bust your knees so you can’t walk. Then I’m going to bust your ribs so you can’t breathe. Then I’m going to bust your ears so you can’t hear. I’d bust your head, but you can’t think anyway. So I’m going to bust your balls so you can’t fuck.
Etc. But Joe’s Hollywood stories are all alike, and there aren’t that many of them, and they’re mainly about people you’ve never heard of, or won’t hear about again, or don’t care if you hear about at all. At one point, Richard Gere — he of the gerbil — showily changes his clothes in front of Eszterhas, and guess what: He isn’t wearing underpants! Don Simpson fucks a nymphet against the wall of his hotel room in Vegas and doesn’t even turn his head when he says goodbye to Joe! Gina Gershon — Gina Gershon? — gets hoity-toity with Eszterhas during a script conference and pays the price for it. Oliver Stone’s “Nixon” and “JFK” are pure fiction, “utter and absolute lies”! Goodness to Betsy — get out the smelling salts!
Point of curiosity: What does Gere’s dick look like, Joe? How big? Fat, skinny, long, short? White, pink, red, blue — veins or no veins? Cut or uncut? Were you stoned enough or drunk enough to … well, I guess not. And so what? Years ago, in the early ’80s, I used to see Richard a lot at Joe Allen’s in London, where he was filming “King David” with a cast of thousands. He used to come in with five or six Gere look-alikes in leather jackets, and believe me, the conversation at the next table wasn’t about baseball and boobs. OK? Tell us something we don’t know, Joe, or get back to your luau.
Eszterhas is equally tight-lipped when, musing about the contents of the Starr Report, he describes a deeply footnoted reference to President Clinton and Monica Lewinsky’s “oral-anal contact” — rimming, don’t you know — which he says was the report’s “most sexually incendiary revelation.” That it may have been. But while noting that no one in the press or the government “had the stomach, it seemed, not even Kenneth W. Starr,” to discuss “anilingus” any further, Eszterhas won’t discuss it, either. “Who was doing the rimming?” he wonders, and that’s that. Did either of them shower first?
Amateur.
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Of course, “American Rhapsody” isn’t about Hollywood in the way it’s hyped to be. It’s not about Richard Gere or David Geffen or Sharon Stone or Robert Evans or any of the other La-La Land names hauled out to build the buzz and drive the sales. Stuck with a 200,000-copy first printing, Eszterhas’ publisher, the once-gracious Knopf, calls “American Rhapsody” “the most basic, and basest, [book] in many years — an up-close and personal look at the people who run our world.” La Brown — that is, Tina — hoping her magazine will finally hit a nerve somewhere, describes the thing as “a mix of Hollywood memoir, political commentary and flights of fantasy about key players in Washington.” (She read it on the Concorde, naturally, on superagent Ed Victor’s recommendation. Both are thanked at the back of the book.)
“And, oh,” Brown adds, “[it's] about Bill Clinton’s penis as well.” As if you didn’t know.
In fact, “American Rhapsody” is a 432-page “fantasia” on the “American political landscape,” the “shadow culture war,” the legacy of the 1960s and the silliest, most infantile, most dispiriting and wasteful political scandal in history, the Clinton-Lewinsky follies. You remember — the impeachment drama; Monicagate; 1998, if you need a nudge, and a little bit of 1999. Last century’s news, you’d think, and you’d be right.
So what’s the catch? Here’s Eszterhas again, splashing about in the shadow of Kali:

I thought I recognized and knew Bill Clinton and what made him tick. I understood the ambition, the success, the political duplicity, the Hollywood charm. I understood the mad priapic obsession which had always fuel-driven his life … because it had driven mine until I met Naomi.
Naomi, you should know, is Eszterhas’ new wife, once the spouse of his best friend and currently great with child. (Geri, Eszterhas’ first wife, got the house, the car, the art and, I should think, the last laugh.) We’re asked to believe that Naomi’s love by itself has ended Eszterhas’ own lifetime of whoring, pumping, thumping, fucking, shooting and dumping into “holes” — and if you believe that, you’ll swallow for sure.
“I wasn’t just thinking of Bill Clinton anymore,” Eszterhas writes solemnly, “but about a generation, my generation, which, in some ways, even though it was entrenched in power, creeping up on sixty, was still struggling to find itself. I was thinking about the state of the union and the state of our hearts and privates, as we tried not to stumble and slide on the treacherous Internet ice of the new millennium.”
We did? Quoting Dorothy Thompson again: “There is nothing more terrifying than a society congealed in the pattern of an adolescent mind.” Too late to worry about that, unfortunately. And why shouldn’t Eszterhas have a crack at Fornigate? Everyone else has. Why shouldn’t he write about Clinton’s penis — “Willard,” as he calls it throughout, so named by Gennifer Flowers, apparently because, as Clinton says, Willard is “longer than willie.”
The conclusion is automatic, nevertheless, and “American Rhapsody” only bears it out: No one — no one — would read this book if it didn’t have a talking cock as its grand finale, if Eszterhas’ favorite word, “panties,” didn’t appear for the first time on Page 4 (“wet,” at that), if Brown hadn’t made it her baby, if it weren’t laden, larded — throbbing — with sentimental, he-man prose. Speaking of Bill and Monica:

He kissed her then and they moved to the hallway she’d missed so much. She unbuttoned his denim blue shirt … He kissed her again and unbuttoned the top buttons of her navy blue dress. They did what they had done before and she knelt down.
The rest, as they say, is history. Except there isn’t any history anymore, as everyone knows. There’s only Joe, in this case, and, by extension, you and me. An unhappy conclusion, but what else can you think when even immediate history is rewritten immediately, torn out of context and broadcast at a level of frightful noise?
Point of fact: Like most straight men obsessed with their own penises, Eszterhas knows nothing about women. I mean, he knows nothing about women. “Sympathetic” though he is to the president’s Willard problem, Eszterhas doesn’t understand that the reason so many women go for Clinton is that he has a strongly feminine nature. “Ain’t nothin’ so pretty as a white boy with lips,” as a black Republican friend of mine says.
According to Flowers’ own book, repeatedly cited by Ezsterhas, Clinton likes to be tied to the bed with silk scarves. He likes hot wax dripped on his nipples. He asked Flowers to “use a dildo on him.” He can give it and he can take it, in other words, and if he prefers jerking off to any other sexual activity — well, a woman can understand that, too, knowing full well that she can give herself a better blast than any thrusting Neanderthal can. (Take a look at Eszterhas’ jacket photo and you’ll see what I mean.)
In the realm of women’s character, moreover, as distinct from their holes, Eszterhas is dead wrong on every count. There’s not a woman mentioned in “American Rhapsody” who isn’t trashed and slighted, from the abandoned Geri to the fecund Naomi (who seems to have been put on this planet solely to reform Joe) to Jane Fonda, Arianna Huffington, Tipper Gore, Jean Houston, Elizabeth Berkley (of “Showgirls” fame) and right on to the book’s predatory female leads, Monica Lewinsky and Hillary Rodham Clinton. (I won’t even talk about the “Ratwoman,” Linda Tripp, or Lucianne Goldberg, the “Bag Lady of Sleaze,” who can take care of themselves.)
It’s a fact that, as yet, few people have understood Lewinsky — rarely does anyone get how intelligent and witty she is, for example, or how her energy and good nature alone could seduce a man, despite her naiveti, her gooey hopes, her weight problem and her Snoopy phone. Anyone whose favorite painter is Egon Schiele and who can send the president of the United States a card that reads “The only thing I’d like to see more than you is you naked, with a lottery ticket in one hand and a can of whipped cream in the other” is a character for the ages. She’ll come into her own yet, you mark my words.
As to Hillary — dream on, Joe. Love her or hate her, she’s a lioness. She can’t be dismissed as a coldhearted bitch, a putative lesbian or a screaming Mimi who narrowly escaped being raped in the third grade. And Sharon Stone, whom Eszterhas thinks and actually says he “created,” is laughing her head off at his characterization. Stone has recently adopted a baby. She’s getting $15 million for the sequel to “Basic Instinct.” She has been noshing with the Dalai Lama. “I knew he was funny,” she says about Eszterhas, “but I didn’t know he could write comedy.” And if Eszterhas thinks you can invent Sharon Stone without Sharon Stone, it’s no wonder he’s been grilling pineapples on the beach.
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Point of order: Near the start of “American Rhapsody,” Eszterhas gets all silly about his children. “We loved our kids and wanted the best for them,” he writes, speaking, as usual, about “our” generation: “We wanted them to be not like us, but like our parents, like grandpa and grandma sitting watching the sunset after fifty years of mostly monogamous marriage, talking about the long-ago senior prom as they sipped their warming his-and-hers mugs of tea and honey.”
Right. You bet we do. As an aside — cough, cough — the current issue of Talk features a cover photo of Elizabeth Hurley tonguing a rope of Harry Winston diamonds. Pundits are saying that Brown has hit her stride with this one, that she’s wrapped and packaged Talk to sit perfectly where she’s been putting it, at the supermarket checkout. Eszterhas’ bio insists that he has never missed a single one of his son’s Little League games, but somehow I don’t believe him when he says he’s worried about what the kids are lapping up in this national cesspool, this 24-hour televised motel room, which he has done as much as anyone to bring about. Grandpa and Grandma, my ass.
Don’t lie to us, Joe. More important, don’t lie to them. Just take the money and hope for the best. Someone’s bound to call, sooner or later.
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Point of honor: No writer’s book should be panned merely on the grounds of differing opinions or opposite tastes. Eszterhas is a good writer. Sometimes, he’s a very good writer, and while “American Rhapsody” tells us absolutely nothing about Clinton-Lewinsky that we didn’t know already — “As the impeachment psychodrama began, I watched every mini-second of it … I read everything, I saw everything” — it reads like a rollicking novel when he allows it to, when he takes himself and “us” out of it, that is, and just lets the story rip. His chapters on James Carville, Larry Flynt and Warren Beatty’s presidential aspirations — “The Man With the Golden Willard” — are worth the price of the book.
Eszterhas is especially good in the boldfaced imaginary monologues (from Clinton and Al Gore, from Bob Dole, from John McCain, from Dubya) he has invented both to skewer the powerful and to razz the Zeitgeist. These sections were written, Eszterhas tells us, by “a little devil,” “a writing partner who has cursed my career” and who turns out to be — what else? — his own Willard, now happily held in check by love, in the form of Naomi. These sections are funny and crazily insightful, and I’d be the last person on earth to keep anyone from reading them. Hats off to you, Joe, for naming Richard Nixon the “Night Creature” and reminding us that the lies and blather Nixon fed his own Monica before he died — Monica Crowley, girl amanuensis — and that Crowley repeated with a straight face in her book about the Dick of dicks, were “much deadlier” and more damaging to democracy than anything Clinton stuck in his Monica’s mouth.
So there, Joe — get a blurb from that. I mean it, every word. You should be writing novels if you can’t get work in Hollywood. Just make sure they are novels next time, and try to think of something besides us and that thing between our legs.
How big is yours, anyway, Joe? You never said. I looked and looked, but you never said.
Tease.

: Peter Kurth, a regular contributor to Salon Books, is the author of "Isadora: A Sensational Life." He lives in Burlington, Vt. More Peter Kurth

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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.