Bill Clinton

Monday, Oct 8, 2001 6:03 PM UTC

“Our Monica, Ourselves”

Eggheads probe some seldom-explored aspects of Clinton's impeachment -- class-hatred, anti-Semitism, fake prudery -- with insightful results.

By Charles Taylor

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It’s hard to remember that there was a time in the whole Clinton scandal when we hadn’t seen Monica Lewinsky, those few hours between the announced suspicion that Bill Clinton had had an affair with an intern and Lewinsky’s public identification. And then that government ID photo was released to the news agencies. Collectively, there were two simultaneous reactions: revulsion, and immediate certainty that the rumors were true.

The inseparability of those two reactions remains the untold story in this picked-over tale. People looked at that unflattering picture and said, to themselves or out loud, of course this is exactly the type of woman Bill Clinton would go for: a mallrat tart for a trailer trash president. And when the later pictures of Monica appeared, pictures of her looking at Clinton with hungry adoration in her eyes or embracing him wearing that famous raspberry beret (cue Prince), few asked, as a female friend of mine did, what man wouldn’t fall for such coquettish voluptuousness directed at him?

But Clinton’s critics and the media, who by and large acted as Kenneth Starr’s lap dogs, left the logic of desire out of the public telling of the story in order to equate the irrationality of lust with reckless self-destruction. Sex, in a way it hadn’t been in years, was the new national threat. Clinton’s surrender to his impulses became grounds for an attempt to promulgate the myth that any sex that didn’t fit the accepted standard (monogamous, heterosexual intercourse) was a threat to our moral fabric and national stability.

The public didn’t buy the myth, and that gave the attack dogs license to lump it into the degenerate category. “The death of outrage,” William Bennett said in disgust as he envisioned a populace that heard the music of Nero’s fiddle (or, in this case, Elvis singing “I’m the king of the jungle, they call me Tiger Man”), and danced to the tune rather than getting their asses out of town.

But the public’s support for Clinton, which surprised almost everyone, from his defenders to his most vehement opponents, is a far more complicated issue, and it’s still nowhere near settled. That’s the story that various writers get — and miss — in dribs and drabs in the new collection of essays “Our Monica, Ourselves: The Clinton Affair and the National Interest.” In their introduction, the editors, Lauren Berlant and Lisa Duggan, describe the book as a chance to present the view from the left. The book contains more than its share of smart writing. But because it was written by academics, it only sporadically resembles recognizable English.

We’ve had time to get used to the excesses of the scandal — the near right-wing coup, Ken Starr’s flagrant contempt for due process and the sanctity of the grand jury. After what’s happened in the past few weeks, it all seems far away and trivial now, and that’s as it should be. But the scandal was, nevertheless, an attempt to overthrow an election.

What’s particularly troubling in “Our Monica, Ourselves,” though, is that many of the contributors are actually teaching students how to read and write at a university level when they can barely put together a coherent sentence themselves. Take “The Symbolics of Presidentialism” (and what does that mean?), by Dana D. Nelson of the University of Kentucky and Tyler Curtain of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Here’s a typical sentence: “That identification is structured by what might be called, for lack of a better phrase, the allegorical force of presidential heterosexuality: the supposedly paradigmatic triangulation of personal and, consequentially, constitutional relations (or in this case, betrayals) among the president, the First Lady, and the Other Woman/the people.” “For Lack of a Better Phrase,” might have been a good title for the whole book.

Still, the book is useful, if only for bringing up what hasn’t been credited about Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton — and even if some of that is hardly new. Much of what the contributors hit upon was already said, or at least intimated, in “Monica’s Story,” Monica’s 1998 tell-all book written by Andrew Morton. Dismissed as her attempt to cash in on her 15 minutes, the book wasn’t taken seriously by reviewers who zeroed on its self-pitying melodrama and missed that Morton had produced one of the few creditable pieces of journalism to come out of the whole affair (particularly on the machinations involving Linda Tripp, Lucianne Goldberg and alleged journalist Michael Isikoff). But the imprimatur of academia can work wonders (even if it can also drain the life out of a subject), and now perhaps those hidden issues can be discussed.

Marjorie Garber’s essay “Moniker” homes in on what few have talked about, the anti-Semitism in the public reaction to Monica Lewinsky. Some of that anti-Semitism was of the nutcase variety, like Louis Farrakhan telling Tim Russert that Monica was a Zionist agent sent to disrupt the Middle East peace talks (somebody’s bow tie is obviously a little too tight). Elsewhere, it was coded, as anti-Semitism almost always is (the documentary filmmaker Frederick Wiseman once told me of how a conservative Boston paper repeatedly identified him as “a Cambridge lawyer”).

A sampling of the descriptive words used about Monica in the press tells the story: “Pushy,” “ambitious,” “seductive,” “zaftig,” “typical Beverly Hills.” Men often delight in women who are as forthrightly and unapologetically sexual as Monica was, and women often loathe them. Other women see them as a sexual threat, someone who “gives away” the sexual currency they hoard. And that threat is often displaced in complaints that these open women are vulgar, gauche, have no taste. I’ve known several women like Monica (only some of them Jewish). In college I was friends with a girl who was short and voluptuous, with delightful big breasts and even more delightful big eyes; she had dyed raven-black hair that went to her waist. She was outrageously flirtatious, kept copies of Penthouse in her room (the letters turned her on) and went to parties dressed to seduce. She was also unfailingly kind and generous and ready to help out (she typed like a demon and it was common to pass by her room at night and hear her clacking out a friend’s résumé on her IBM), yet the most common thing other women asked me about her was, “How can you like her?”

Underneath the resentment directed at that sort of woman is the idea that she has gone too far. Garber speaks of this in terms of the boundary crossings that are always the case with “images of Jewishness, and especially Jewish women.” They cross boundaries “between homeliness and beauty; between Jewish mother and wayward daughter; between fat and thin; between proper and raucously improper.” So while Monica may have had the upbringing and money to be thought of as “typical Beverly Hills,” her story is the tale of what money can’t buy you in America: the seal of approval of WASP propriety.

Likewise, Bill Clinton’s story is that power can’t buy that propriety, either. The leader of the free world, yet never accorded the status that usually goes with that power, Clinton in the White House was, to Washington insiders and their media cronies, as out of place as Jethro Beaudine in that Beverly Hills mansion. “He came in here and he trashed the place, and it’s not his place,” said journalist David Broder, speaking as if it were his place. And in a sense it was. To the keepers of “official” Washington, the town belongs to those who recognize them as the dispensers of power and not to the people who sent them there. To them, Bill Clinton no more belonged in the White House than did you or me.

That attitude produced one moment of high comedy (and something more generally pornographic than anything in the Starr referral): Sally Quinn’s Washington Post piece about how Bill Clinton offended official Washington, as much by the challenge to the Washington power structure in his first inaugural address as by his later behavior. This coming from a woman who — as Esquire noted, referring to Quinn’s affair with and later marriage to Post editor Ben Bradlee — “fucked the boss, broke up his marriage, became the toast of Washington. Twenty years later, decides to get self-righteous with Clinton.”

No doubt Monica Lewinsky and Bill Clinton were attracted by each other’s sexual appetite. But beyond that attraction, both of them were outsiders, people who it is still acceptable to denigrate because of their race or class or style (in Clinton’s case because he is a white Southern male and, unlike Jimmy Carter, not a genteel one). You get that in James R. Kincaid’s essay “It’s Not About Sex,” where he says it was impossible to think of Clinton and Lewinsky’s affair sexually because he found them both so unattractive. Betraying the class prejudice that defined the denigration of Clinton, Kincaid (who is not a stupid man) writes, “It’s hard to keep lit a sexual fantasy when it is showered by K-Mart-quality details.”

In other words, Kincaid is telling us, he’s too classy a guy to get turned on in a trailer park. As Micki McElya observes, “Just as the category ‘white trash’ absorbs people and practices that menace white normativity [aarrgh!] and racial invisibility, insistent assertions of Clinton’s own trash subjectivity mark his deviance and his particular danger … You can educate Bill Clinton, dress him up, and even make him president, but you can’t take the trash out.”

Elsewhere in “Our Monica, Ourselves,” Bill Clinton becomes the repository for all sorts of meanings and fantasies. When the comedian Chris Tucker told Clinton his fantasy was to play the first black president, Clinton, echoing Toni Morrison, told a press gathering that he responded, “I’m the first black president.” In one essay in the collection, Clinton is cast as the first “queer president” because his secret, semi-public assignations with Monica echo the surreptitious nature of gay sex in restrooms or parks. (If surreptitious sex were strictly gay, then every high school boy who fingered his girlfriend in the basement rec room while her parents watched TV upstairs is a closet case.)

More plausibly, Clinton is cast as, if not quite the first female president, then as one who didn’t adhere to the reserved phallic strength that is a primary symbol of presidentialism (Oh, God! Make it stop!) Jane Gallop, one of the smartest contributors, acknowledges the link between male sexuality and power but notes that it breaks down “at that moment of what they call ‘spending’ and losing control and all of that.” When Laura Berlant adds, “What seemed disgusting was that he had a body,” Gallop says, “If the right-wing in this country is still really moralistic about sex, the left is moralistic about food. That’s where the new style of moralism about control is. Well-educated liberal people are supposed to be in control of the amount of body fat they have. The people who are disgusted by Clinton’s fat and by Monica’s aren’t the right wing, they’re the ones who want a yuppie president with the right amount of body fat at the helm.”

Elsewhere in the book, Clinton doesn’t receive nearly that much sympathy. Many of the essays are mired in the naive absolutist idealism of the left, and thus announce their insulation from the reality of politics that necessarily entails deal making and compromise. In other places, there is a sense of justice that has barely evolved from the elementary school playground. Janet R. Jakobsen contributes a woolly-headed essay that could stand as the definitive answer to those older women who puzzle over why so many younger women refuse to identify themselves as feminists. The title, “He Has Wronged America and Women” (cue Carry Nation) comes from a letter sent to the New York Times.

Jakobsen’s conclusion is that she can’t get upset about the treatment accorded Bill Clinton because he represents “the long-standing tradition of heterosexual monogamous marriage as duplicitious (at least for powerful men).” Also, according to Jakobsen, after approving the Defense of Marriage Act and welfare reform, Clinton was fair game. Or, to put it more succinctly: nyah, nyah, nyah-nyah-nyah.

“It was, after all, a conflict between white men over the sign and symbol of ‘woman,’” Jakobsen writes of the impeachment. Tell that to Monica, who was neither sign nor symbol but a real woman whose sex life was declared fair game by the government, who was denied access to counsel in a scenario that was pure Orwell, and whose life and public utterances were controlled by Ken Starr, who held the threat of prison over her head. This was one of the purest examples of institutionalized sexism ever, but Jakobsen can’t see beyond her prejudices. She does, however, have a suggestion for bringing women into the power fold, and approvingly tells the story of a woman who wrote in Tina Turner for president in the 1996 election because, as the woman explained, “if she were president there would be a battered women’s shelter on every corner.” (Either that or a good wig shop.)

“Our Monica, Ourselves” does suggest that, for many on the left, the hardest thing to reconcile is their disgust over Ken Starr’s moralistic vendetta and their belief that the affair was Monica and Bill’s business with the hallowed (and sometimes merited) feminist insistence that the personal is political. The book is best when it delves into the thorniness of that conflict. Jane Gallop argues that sexual harassment law has been a boon for the right, allowing them a chance to restore the image of women as nonsexual beings who need to be protected from any sexual behavior, and an opportunity to legislate what is and isn’t acceptable sexual behavior.

Gallop isn’t denying the need for sexual harassment law but, if I read her right, she’s saying it’s impossible to separate sexual harassment from sex because it is impossible to strip sex of its power dynamic. That dynamic was often misread in Clinton’s case. A newspaper editor who was railing against Clinton’s “abuse” of Monica was stopped short when my wife asked him, “When a woman is giving a man a blow job, who’s in the position of power?” (That’s what sex activist and writer Pat Califia meant when she referred to “the particular sound of pleasure and fear that men make when their manhood is taken behind someone else’s teeth.”)

Ellen Willis contributes an essay, “‘Tis Pity He’s a Whore,” that, thankfully, doesn’t beam in from Zontar in the manner of her recent writing (to wit: “More and more I am coming to the conviction that Roe vs. Wade, in the guise of a great victory, has been in some respects a disaster for feminism.” Uh-huh). Willis tries to get at how the desire for sexual privacy, basically the belief that consenting adults should be able to lead sex lives free of government supervision, contributes to sexual secrecy, which in turn mystifies sex and keeps desire from “compromising the enforced ‘innocence’ (that is, ignorance) of respectable women and children.” (Though she doesn’t admit that nothing reinforces sexual norms more insidiously than people presuming that they know what goes on in any marriage, especially marriages between public figures.)

Willis’ notion is that in seeking exoneration Clinton succumbed to the same conventional forces that were trying to destroy him. The problem with her argument is that it’s only tangentially connected to the sexual reality of American life. Willis writes that Reagan broke the taboo of a divorced president but that an openly homosexual president, or a heterosexual one living with a partner outside of marriage, is still beyond the pale. Why then does she think it would have been possible for Hillary Clinton, during the “60 Minutes” Gennifer Flowers interview to say, “Not every marriage is monogamous. Relationships are complicated, and ours is no exception”? Even after Clinton, there is still no way in American political life to present a nonmonogamous marriage as anything but a mistake that must be atoned for.

Willis’ is a Monday morning quarterback argument. It’s perfectly true that the public’s support for Bill Clinton probably had something to do with their own experience that marriage and sex are complicated things. But no one was able to predict that support in advance — not liberals, and certainly not conservatives who had made such political capital out of family values and banked on the idea that the details of the affair would disgust the public. I still maintain that Clinton was right to lie initially about the affair, not just from a personal standpoint (it was nobody’s business) but from a political standpoint. At the risk of sounding condescending, adults often lie to children about things they are not equipped to handle, and before Clinton the American public had simply never given any indication that it was mature enough to accept a public figure’s adultery without resorting to simplistic, moralistic condemnation.

With the Clinton affair the gap is between what Americans are willing to accept and what they will acknowledge they are willing to accept. Thus Clinton’s high approval ratings were accompanied by almost equally high disapproval numbers. (A meaningless statistic. What did they disapprove of, the sex or the lying? And if the latter, lying to whom, his wife or the nation?) A few months ago Frank Rich published an extraordinary article in the New York Times Magazine on the porn industry. In it he said what no other mainstream publication or program had been able to bring itself to acknowledge: that with annual revenues exceeding that of most major professional sports, porn is mainstream. And yet how many people do you know who admit to looking at porn? And reporters and broadcasters, when dealing with the subject, still pretend the need to inform their audience who Jenna Jameson is.

There is no doubt that, on one level, Willis is right. Despite what we thought about an adult’s (even a president’s) right to sexual privacy, the Clinton affair gave the media a great opportunity to reinforce traditional sexual and moral standards in the guise of maintaining public decency (and thus gave up any claim to objectivity in their reporting). Sasha Torres contributes a hilarious and infuriating — because it’s so right — essay called “Sex of a Kind” that takes apart the squeamishness of the media in reporting the details of the Starr referral. In her funniest passage, Torres writes about “poor Bob Schieffer [of CBS], who found himself in the unenviable position of translating the juicy bits of the report for the American public and his bombastic boss [Dan Rather].” The transcript of Schieffer’s report is pure Terry Southern: “While the president was on the telephone, according to her, he — let me just read this to make sure we don’t — he unzipped his pants and exposed himself and — and they had sex of a kind. Again, he stopped her before, I would say, he was completed, I guess would be the way to put that … Certainly this is living up to every expectation that it was going to be lurid, tawdry, and laid out in explicit detail.”

But tawdry and lurid only in the context of television, the way that mild everyday profanities like “hell” and “damn” seemed shocking when they started showing up on prime-time shows. Who but the very sheltered and conventional would find the idea of oral sex tawdry? Certainly not people, even married people, who practice it in their own sex lives. And surely there are enough people who use dildoes or vibrators or other sex toys to be more admiring of Monica’s ingenuity with that cigar than shocked by it?

But the media had to stick to their script of pretending to be shocked by all this (and judging by the constipated indignation of Cokie Roberts or George Will, two of them, at least, weren’t pretending) or else admit that their whole notion of propriety was hopelessly outdated. And of course that shock allowed them to exploit the case for all its juicy details without pretending they had become gossip columnists. They had to cast the blame for “cheapening” the national dialogue on Bill Clinton as a way of not acknowledging that the material they now had to address was the logical outcome of the media’s decision to make Gary Hart’s affair with Donna Rice a news story. (I was in a newsroom the day that story broke, and I’ll never forget a veteran news editor saying to me that he was ashamed of his profession.)

So the media coverage leaves those of us who supported Clinton in a quandary. As certain as we were that this was none of Ken Starr’s business, none of the media’s business and none of our business, it’s also clear that the media’s fearfulness in talking about sex contributed to an atmosphere in which normal and understandable sexual behavior (a blow job, for Christ’s sake) was presented as if it were an unimaginable perversion. The media insisted that we should be offended by Clinton’s behavior when what was truly offensive was their insistence that we be offended.

But because this case takes place at the nexus of what Americans know about sex and what they willingly admit to knowing, it’s also probable that at least some people were comforted by the media’s maiden-auntie routine. Just as that survey question “Do you approve of the president’s behavior?” gave people a vague, easy out that the more forthright “Do you think the president’s extramarital affair has anything to do with his ability to carry out the duties of his office?” would not have.

Nothing is harder to reinstate than a taboo that has been broken. Despite the fact that the impeachment was a political disaster for Republicans, it’s not unimaginable that a politician’s sexual life will once more be considered a threat to our national interest — though we can hope that, post-Sept. 11, it’s more likely that what a politician does in bed will finally be considered bupkis. The taboos broken by the public discussion of Bill and Monica’s affair are the ones about what does and doesn’t happen in even strong marriages, and what people do behind locked, or in this case ajar, doors. After Bill and Monica, Americans may, like Linus holding onto his blanket, still be clinging to traditional ideas of proper sexual relations. But somewhere gnawing at them is the notion that it might just be time to put childish things aside.

Charles Taylor is a columnist for the Newark Star-Ledger. More Charles Taylor.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012 11:00 AM UTC

Romney’s Bill Clinton gambit

He's praising the former president to paint Obama as a liberal – and to court his devotees. Why it won't work

By Joan Walsh

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(Credit: Reuters/Jim Young)

Desperate Mitt Romney is not only taking credit for the auto bailout he opposed, and pretending to be a “job creator” rather than a Bain Capital job destroyer. Now he’s regularly praising former President Bill Clinton as a centrist whose legacy has been betrayed by the “liberal” President Obama. Actual liberals laugh, but can Romney’s gambit work?

Of course not, but Mitt’s not giving up.

In Lansing, Mich., last week, Romney derided Obama as an “old school liberal” compared to Clinton, whom he called a “new Democrat.” Where Clinton “said the era of big government was over, President Obama brought it back with a vengeance,” Romney told a crowd of college students. A campaign official told CNN that Obama “really turned his back” on Clinton’s policies, including welfare reform and middle-class tax cuts.

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.

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

Tuesday, Apr 24, 2012 5:08 PM UTC

The politicization of the Secret Service scandal

What was once one of the right's favorite government agencies becomes a symbol of waste and moral degradation

By Alex Pareene

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The politicization of the Secret Service scandal

President Obama, surrounded by members of the Secret Service, upon his arrival in San Diego, Sept. 26, 2011. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

It’s hard to work up much outrage about the Secret Service prostitution scandal, in which 11 members of the president’s elite protective service and various military personnel were found to have picked up escorts in Colombia, where they were doing advance work for the president’s visit. I guess it is probably not a good idea for the people in charge of protecting the president to leave themselves vulnerable to sexual blackmail, but on the other hand we do not live in a John Le Carré novel or “24″ episode, and I don’t think the threat of a honey-trap assassination conspiracy plot is very credible. If members of the Secret Service want to get drunk and hire escorts after work, that is their business. (As Melissa Gira Grant says, the only actual scandal here — and the reason this became an international incident — is that all these guys tried to bilk one of the women out of the money she was owed.)

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.

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Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene More Alex Pareene.

Wednesday, Dec 21, 2011 2:14 PM UTC

Bill Clinton handicaps Obama’s 2012 chances

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

By Peter Finocchiaro

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Bill Clinton handicaps Obama's 2012 chances

(Credit: Fox News)

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.

“[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.

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Wednesday, Nov 23, 2011 1:00 PM UTC

Should liberals be more thankful for Obama?

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

By Joan Walsh

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Should liberals be more thankful for Obama?

(Credit: AP/iStockphoto/sjlocke/Salon)

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

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

Thursday, Nov 10, 2011 1:00 AM UTC

Bill Clinton’s alternate, unbelievable reality

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

By Andrew Leonard

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Bill Clinton's alternate, unbelievable reality

Bill Clinton (Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson)

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.

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