And really, why would anyone block debate? There's plenty that's controversial about both the Senate and House bills -- things to dislike for both the right and the left. There could be a great historic reckoning about it all. Sadly, Republicans seem to want to ignore the real issues and make up lies about the Democratic bills. I saw that firsthand on Thursday when Wyoming Sen. John Barrasso, who happens to be a doctor, blatantly lied to MSNBC's Ed Schultz about the Democratic reform bill.

Like other Republicans in the last couple of days, Barrasso tried to pretend that the recent decision by the U.S. Preventive Services Task Force, recommending that women start routine mammograms at 50 and not 40, was related to the Democrats' push for insurance reform. Even Sarah Palin has had to admit there are no "death panels" in the Democrats' bills; so now we have "breast panels," where Republicans claim bureaucrats will deny mammograms to women under 50 thanks to Obama's push for reform.

It's an enormous lie. Various government advisory panels have been trying to ratchet up the age for women to begin routine mammograms (from 40 to 50) going back to the Clinton administration through the George W. Bush administration and now, again, in the Obama administration. I'm not sure which side is right; I know doctors and breast cancer advocates on both sides of the issue. All I know is that the recent recommendations have nothing to do with so-called Obamacare. But I watched Barrasso, who clearly knows better, lie to Schultz about it all on Thursday. Here's what he said:

"You see what happened now with this rationing of care, with this preventive task force, they're preventing services for women, with mammograms. That's really a preview into what may happen with healthcare in America, when you get the government standing in between a patient and their doctor….Washington says it knows best, it says 'No, don't do mammograms to age 50, stop after age 75. 'You know what that's gonna do? That's gonna cost lives."

Thanks to Ed Schultz for giving me the chance to answer Barrasso, and explain how badly he distorted the facts about the panel's origins and power, and how well he represented the Republican position: say absolutely anything to stop healthcare reform. Lie, if you have to. Of course, the preventive services panel has no standing to change policy, and both Health and Human Services Secretary Kathleen Sebelius and the American Cancer Society came out against the panel's recommendations. And Barrasso knows that.

That's what I said on "The Ed Show." One post-show correction: It's not the very same panel issuing these mammogram-restricting guidelines over the years; earlier it was the National Institute of Health's Consensus Development Conference that recommended that mammograms begin at 50. The point is that various federal panels under various presidents have suggested raising the age at which women start mammography, and three presidents in both parties over the last 20 years have had to decide what to do. Clearly it's a medical debate, not a political one, and Republicans are dishonest and fear-mongering to pretend otherwise. 

But the Palin assault keeps getting more surreal, and more intriguing. Wednesday night came the news that Palin wouldn't rule out the idea of Fox News host (and professional paranoid) Glenn Beck as a possible 2012 running mate.

Newsmax reporter David Patten says Palin "chuckled" when he broached the idea, but then gave Beck his props:

"I can envision a couple of different combinations, if ever I were to be in a position to really even seriously consider running for anything in the future, and I'm not there yet," Palin told Newsmax. "But Glenn Beck I have great respect for. He's a hoot. He gets his message across in such a clever way. And he's so bold — I have to respect that. He calls it like he sees it, and he's very, very, very effective."

Once again, I agree with Palin: Beck is indeed a "hoot" and he's very, very, very effective, at lying about President Obama and whipping his paranoid base into a deluded frenzy. So what is she doing: trying to sell books to that same base -- a nice potential book market but a sliver of the electorate -- or genuinely charting her 2012 course?

Judging by Palin's erratic behavior on this book tour, and her erratic handle on the truth within the book, it's honestly hard to tell. I think, as I said Monday, she is first and foremost about Sarah Palin Inc., becoming rich and powerful, but that may well be a path to Sarah Palin 2012. I will say it again: She will never be our president. But I can't rule out her being the 2012 Republican nominee.

When you look at the charisma-free roster of likely GOP candidates -- from 2008 has-beens Mitt Romney, Mike Huckabee and "I was for trying terrorists in NYC before I was against it" Rudy Giuliani, to that hunka-hunka burning boredom Tim "T-Paw" Pawlenty -- it's easy to see Palin creaming them. On the other hand, they might spend a lot on opposition research and/or get whatever Levi Johnston claims to have. Either way, the only person I see derailing Palin from the GOP nomination in 2012 is Palin herself.

And that's still quite possible. Whether you seriously care about policy or politics, she's a train wreck. I doubt she's silly enough to seriously consider someone as deranged as Glenn Beck as her running mate; I give her enough credit to assume that was just chicken-fried red meat for her base. But just look at her soliloquy on why her hateful and false claims about "death panels" are just like Ronald Reagan's rhetoric about the Soviet Union as an "evil empire." Here's what she told ABC's Barbara Walters, in all its syntactical, self-deluding glory. She admitted there are no death panels in Obama's plans, but goes on:

"It's kind of like what Reagan used to do, though, when he talked about, say, the ‘evil empire.' You're never going to find the evil empire on a map of the world ... And yet he talked about that, in terms that people could understand -- kind of rationing down, not complicating the issue. [Just a question, does she mean "ratcheting down?" My head hurts.] "But he, with the issue of the evil empire at the time, used those two words to get people to shake up, wake up, find out what's going on here. Now, had he been criticized and, and mocked, and, and condemned for ever using a term that wasn't actually there on a map, or in documents, we probably would never have succeeded in, in crushing the evil empire, and winning that."

Dear Baby Jesus, where should I start? First of all, let me defend Ronald Reagan (despite global warming, hell keeps freezing over!): He did not mean the Soviet Union was literally an "evil empire" you could find on a map. It was his opinion, a turn of phrase, and well within the bounds of political rhetoric; there were many evil things about the way Soviet leaders treated dissidents, Jews, minorities, anyone who dared to differ from their dreary party line. So Palin's wrong in the way she depicts Reagan's "evil empire" argument.

Of course she's also wrong about the way the political world greeted that argument. Reagan was, in fact, widely "criticized" and "condemned" and probably even mocked for using the term; many people felt it wasn't the best way to keep peace with the Soviet Union and win them over to our side -- especially since there was a lot of evidence the Communist giant was crumbling even before Reagan's rhetorical assault (at least partly because of its Afghanistan folly; Palin's advisors might want to mention that to her!). Sunny Ronald Reagan shrugged off such criticism; Sarah Palin laps up the bile and turns into a victim and of course a self-described "pit bull," albeit with lovely lip gloss.

Whatever! Palin's book tour will be a political success; her book will sell and make her the money she brags she's never had. And Palin may well be the 2012 GOP nominee. But as she cozies up to Glenn Beck and mangles even her own party's history, it's increasingly clear she will never be our president. But trust me: She and her know-little followers will cause trouble for President Obama and the Democrats for the foreseeable future.

Here's a great video of MSNBC's Norah O'Donnell trying to ask Palin supporters in Grand Rapids, Mich., on Wednesday what she believes in. They get her position on TARP wrong (she supported it) and two of them just lapse into paranoid right-wing ranting about how she'll defend the Constitution. Nice to see O'Donnell asking real questions; scary to see how they're answered: 

Criticized by right and left -- even my friend Markos Moulitsas thinks Newsweek went too far; Media Matters has been blasting Newsweek all day -- Meacham told Politico: "We chose the most interesting image available to us to illustrate the theme of the cover, which is what we always try to do. We apply the same test to photographs of any public figure, male or female: does the image convey what we are saying? That is a gender-neutral standard."

Really, Jon Meacham? Did you really want to say that? OK, then, let's deconstruct the cover entirely. The photo of the lovely, bare-legged Palin is paired with the headline: "How do you solve a problem like Sarah?" For those too young to recognize the reference, it's from a "Sound of Music" song, "How Do You Solve a Problem Like Maria?" about a young novice who is too cute and flighty to be a nun ("she's a flibbertyjibbit, a will o' the wisp, a clown!"). That's a great way to describe our first GOP vice-presidential nominee. Not sexist at all. (The "how do you solve a problem like" cliché is typically applied to women, although I'm proud of once asking "How do you solve a problem like Joe Lieberman?" who is certainly a clown.) Oh yes, Jon Meacham, your answer is proof-positive that there was no sexism to your imagery. Fail.

A few liberals are trying to suggest that Palin has nothing to whine about since she willingly posed for the picture, but that's silly: What she wore to a Runners' World shoot is different from what she'd wear for Newsweek. I've heard people defend the photo because Palin uses her sexuality as part of her political appeal, and I think that's also unfair. She didn't campaign in daisy dukes and crop-tops; she's a good-looking woman who wore flattering but professional jackets and skirts. Of course her looks are part of her appeal -- I don't think the gulf between men and women who "approve" of Palin (yup, she's more popular with men, go figure!) is about her policy ideas -- but attractive women are damned whatever they do with their looks. And let's be clear -- this wasn't an article about Palin's sex appeal, or the role of her gender in the campaign -- this was an article about her political assets and flaws. The out-of-context photo was, in fact, "sexist and degrading," as Palin says.

That's about all the time I have to spend feeling sympathy for Sarah Palin: I detest her political ideas and her divisive approach to politics. But I call out sexism when I see it. Jon Meacham used a nice pair of women's legs to sell his political magazine this week, reducing a powerful, ambitious woman to her shapely body parts, and that's sexism. (On Twitter, the Washington Independent's Dave Weigel linked to this alleged video of a Newsweek editorial meeting.)  It's nice to see a lot of men and women on the right and left agree about something for a change. Maybe we can agree to get rid of the Stupak amendment! Nah, I didn't think so. 

Now that her Oprah appearance is over – and boy, did Oprah let the liberals in her audience down; what a waste! – let me confess to my own Palin fatigue. I just can't take seriously the idea that she'll ever be president, even after her moderately successful softball game with Oprah. Palin sealed that fate when she quit being governor (although maybe she can run with Lou Dobbs on the All Quitters ticket in 2012). She'll never obtain the record or the reliability she needs to run credibly for president now that she gave up the modestly challenging job of running Alaska. I don't see her ever having the self-discipline or the humility to admit how very much she'd need to learn to be remotely qualified.

On top of everything else, she seems like a vindictive, spiteful person, judging from her reputation in Alaska politics, her open warfare with the McCain campaign and her juvenile tit-for-tat with her 19-year-old grandbaby-daddy Levi Johnston. If she can't brush off Levi's provocations, how would she handle Ahmadinejad? Or Joe Lieberman? I'll even allow that there's some sexism in the equation: Women suffer more from being perceived as vindictive and spiteful than men do. (It clearly didn't stop George W. Bush or John McCain.) Not fair; still true. But to be completely fair, McCain and even Bush accomplished more than Palin in the same life span, which maybe made their vindictiveness a little bit less defining than hers.

The main reason not to fear a President Palin can be seen in recent polling among independents and moderates. In a the most current ABC News/Washington Post poll, Greg Sargent drilled down to find that: only 37 percent of independents and 30 percent of self-described moderates think she’s qualified for the presidency, and 58 percent of moderates view her unfavorably. Even more intriguing (but not surprising): Palin's approval rating with men is higher than with women, 48 percent to 39 percent, and just a third of women believe she'd be qualified to be our first female president. (So much for Palin's appeal to Hillary Clinton fans!)

So I think the Sarah Palin rehab tour is more about Sarah Palin Inc. than Sarah Palin 2012. She'll rack up the speaking fees, raise some money for red-state, red-meat Republicans, further polarize the party and live the high life she thinks she deserves. Still, even as I dismiss Palin as a serious GOP threat, increasingly I believe that the faux-populism of the right is something to worry about. It may be fun to mock Sarah Palin, but Democrats shouldn't laugh at many of the people who admire her – who see a folksy, new kind of self-made mom trying to fight the bad old Eastern elites.

Two great blog posts last week made me worry: Timothy Egan's "The Betrayal," and my friend Digby's "What if they don't," about how liberals are too complacent that moderate Republicans and the rest of the country will laugh off the likes of Palin, Dobbs, Tom Tancredo and all the silly nutjobs who listen to them.

Egan intensified my growing fear that Democrats may be unable to ride the rising tide of populist rage, given their ties to Wall Street and K Street. "If health care reform gives people a choice, and doesn’t just fatten the rolls of insurance companies, it will be something to run on," Egan wrote. "If the recovery helps millions of people who don’t have a well-staffed lobby in Washington, it too will be a plus." But Egan made a good case that the party increasingly identified with Goldman Sachs may well pay at the polls nationwide in 2010, as Jon Corzine did in New Jersey this month.

So while I'm not worried about President Palin, I remain worried about President Obama. I'm particularly concerned that his increasingly triangulating, anti-deficit administration will do the wrong thing, morally and politically, and move to the right, without understanding that some right-wing rage could be rechanneled by acknowledging its roots: That the economic system seems rigged for the have-a-lots v. the have-a-littles, and despite their promises, the Democrats haven't done enough to change that. Palin can't change any of that, but Obama can. There's still time for him to do so, but the clock is ticking. 

Two Harvard researchers chose today to release a study showing that 1.5 million American veterans have no health insurance, and more than 2,200 die every year because of it. Working-poor veterans are at particular risk -- they earn too much money to qualify for certain Veterans Administration programs, but they work in jobs that don't provide insurance and they don't earn enough to buy it themselves.

"The uninsured have about a 40 percent higher risk of dying each year than otherwise comparable insured individuals," David Himmelstein, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and co-founder of Physicians for a National Health Program, told Agence France Presse. "Putting that all together you get an estimate of almost 2,300 -- 2,266 veterans who die each year from lack of health insurance." Fourteen times as many vets died for lack of health insurance than were killed in Afghanistan last year. Meanwhile, conservative Sen. Tom Coburn continues to block a needed veterans' healthcare bill because it's too expensive.

With Congress taking a break for Veterans Day, and President Obama leaving for a 10-day Asia trip, there isn't likely to be much movement in the House or Senate on healthcare reform soon. We're left with the profound disappointment of the House bill, marred by the Stupak amendment selling out women, and a less than ideal public option. The Senate isn't likely to go for the Stupak amendment, but on the other hand, the public option will have more trouble there, with Joe Lieberman (I-Aetna) promising his "conscience" will force him to filibuster any bill with the public plan. The conscience-free Lieberman is probably just feeling the pangs of a phantom "conscience," like what amputees report experiencing after they lose a limb.

MSNBC's Mark Whitaker just shared his latest reporting from White House and Senate aides, who he says are insisting Sen. Olympia Snowe's public option "trigger" proposal is still alive. Those aides, Whitaker says, are now spinning the idea that the trigger may be more progressive and more robust than the opt-out public option. That's a new one on me, and likely portends a relapse into spinelessness by the White House and Senate Democratic leaders. 

Soon Salon will have our Twitter streams alongside our blogs; until then, I thought I'd try this blogging short cut. If you hate it, let me know. But don't be too cruel: I'm on vacation! Give a girl a break!

I just want to say one extra thing: It's got to be great to be Dede Scozzafaza today. She gives me hope that moderate Republicans will either come to their senses and take their party back, or more likely, become Democrats.

Just because I love you all, I'll take five extra minutes and put my Twitter stream in chronological order. Oh, and follow me in real time @joanwalsh.

Couldn't do Hardball tonight because I'm on vacation, but I'll watch election results with...Anne Lamott! Who's jealous? We'll Tweet.. I don't think Anne Lamott does Twitter but...she will tonight! If you can't tune in, here's what we're going to say: If the GOP sweeps, it's meaningless; if Dems do well, it's realignment, baby! RT @TonyFratto: I didn't make @marcambinder's election night Twitter list, so I'll tweet Ugly Betty updates/Tweeting Sadie's bowel movements Eugene Robinson: Lieberman is the Senator from Aetna; nice! Awww, @maddow wants to talk to lying Dick Armey about "adult discipline;" I'd say adult diapers are more relevant (OK, that was a cheap shot. Sorry. I'm on vacation.) I promised to Tweet with Anne Lamott, but our dogs are going wild. Plus, nothing good to Tweet about Anne Lamott and I think @harrislacewell looks beautiful and is super smart on this difficult night with @maddow @harrislacewell, I know you're right, but NY23 is pretty sweet. Another loss for Sarah Palin. I didn't expect it.about 14 hours ago from web Annie just left, I didn't succeed in getting her on Twitter, but we both felt like NY23 was the big story tonight. Pollyannas? Doug Hoffman concedes, and pledges to work with Bill Owens to help the district...once he finds it Pat Buchanan, on Hardball rerun, keeps insisting Crist will have a problem on gay issues in FL. What is he referring to?

See you Monday -- unless there's really big news, like Sarah Palin quits whatever she's currently doing, again.

Good for Scozzafava. The loyal Republican assemblywoman was rewarded by conservative carpetbaggers like the jobless Sarah Palin, who found her moderate, pro-choice, Rockefeller Republican views distasteful, with a well-funded campaign against her. Seeing her funding dry up and her support wither, Scozzafava faced reality and withdrew from the race -- but quickly endorsed Democrat Owens. Here's part of her statement:

In Bill Owens, I see a sense of duty and integrity that will guide him beyond political partisanship. He will be an independent voice devoted to doing what is right for New York. Bill understands this district and its people, and when he represents us in Congress he will put our interests first.

Hoffman remains the favorite, but this very interesting piece in today's Albany Times-Union, written before Scozzafava endorsed Owens, offered a few reasons not to write off the Democrat. For one thing, Army Secretary John McHugh, who held the seat, was a moderate like Scozzafava; for another, the district voted for Obama. Scozzafava is just one more Republican woman who's seen her party reject her; Palin and her right-wing friends seem determined to make sure the GOP is small enough to hold its 2012 convention in the Wasilla Sports Complex.

On that note, I'm taking a few days off, and won't blog again until next week -- although an Owens upset might change my mind. Happy November!

He had a lot to complain about, and conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer has had enough. In Friday's Washington Post he called Obama a whiner:

Is there anything he hasn't blamed George W. Bush for? The economy, global warming, the credit crisis, Middle East stalemate, the deficit, anti-Americanism abroad -- everything but swine flu.

Wow, I look at that list and I think those are all things we should all blame Bush for, except swine flu. But what Krauthammer is really trying to do is elaborate on the Dick Cheney slur from last week: That Obama is "dithering" on Afghanistan, and he's "afraid" to make a decision.

Again, coming from the neocon Iraq war boosters who countenanced the abandonment of the Afghan war to fight a pointless war in Iraq, the criticism is galling. And the idea that the president may have been "dithering" when he went to visit the war dead at Dover Air Force Base this week is offensive. Obama knows what he has to do this week, and it's a good thing he took the time to let the mortal implications of his decisions sink in.

Even worse than Krauthammer's column today, though, was David Brooks in the New York Times. Partly it's because Brooks likes to pretend to be open-minded and reasonable, while spouting neocon talking points, and occasionally liberals get pulled in by him. But today was trademark lazy ideological Brooks. As Glenn Greenwald notes, unbelievably he bragged about "doing what journalists are supposed to do" -- which he defined as talking to a handful of anonymous pro-war sources, who uniformly criticized Obama's inaction to date on McCrystal's troop request.

That's some brave shit. Not quite David Rohde brave, but hey, he made the calls! If it was unanimous, that means he didn't call retired Marine Matthew Hoh, who resigned from a civilian post in Afghanistan this week because he said we can't win, and our presense is only fueling the insurgency. Hoh told the Washington Post's Karen de Young he's "not some peacenik, pot-smoking hippie who wants everyone to be in love" and that he believes "there are plenty of dudes who need to be killed," adding: "I was never more happy than when our Iraq team whacked a bunch of guys."

That question of toughness, macho, manhood, always comes up when we discuss what it would mean for Obama to get realistic about his two wars and get really serious about winding them down. David Brooks' worst Obama slur in his Friday column was the quietly outrageous, ad hominem, Peggy Noonan-ish revelation that his unanimous pro-war sources don't question Obama's smarts or understanding: "Their first concerns are about Obama the man." Oooooh. And here's how Brooks defines manhood: "tenacity, the ability to fixate on a simple conviction and grip it, viscerally and unflinchingly, through complexity and confusion."

Brooks might protest that he meant "man" as a stand-in for "person," but it's hard to imagine him writing that sentence about President Hillary Clinton and saying, "Their first concerns are about Clinton the woman." Man equals warrior, and like Maureen Dowd before him, another Times columnist seems to be questioning Obama's manhood.

And yet I'm going to give Krauthammer one point: We're awfully close to a deadline for a big Obama decision on Afghanistan, especially since the president took one crack at the Bush-Cheney mess with a "comprehensive" new policy last March. Sure, after seven years of GOP neglect, it's a lot to expect an Obama plan to turn things around in seven months. Still, he committed himself to a new path in Afghanistan; so far there's little to show for it; his top commander in the country is publicly demanding more troops; it's time for him to lead. I am personally hoping he leads us out of the war, so I'm a little more patient than neocons who just want him to jump on McChrystal's recommendations. But even I have limits to my patience.

Next year we'll have been in Afghanistan longer than the Soviets were. Increasingly, we know we're propping up a corrupt, illegitimate government. Hamid Karzai's brother is on the CIA's payroll. Today talks between Karzai and presidential challenger Abdullah Abdullah broke down, and while it's going to be hard to trust next week's runoff election, it's looming as crucial. I don't think Obama can or should be expected to launch a brand-new strategy with so much uncertainty this week, but I'm hoping he's listening to the folks preaching counterterrorism, and not McChrystal's version of counterinsurgency, which seems a blueprint for a Soviet-style quagmire and defeat. Most important, I hope he's not listening to Krauthammer or Brooks, because despite their translating Cheney's dithering slur into other big words, they'll never applaud decisiveness unless it endorses their war-without-end world view.

I had a nagging question about whether I should write about the book again, though, and it wasn't laziness; it's that most everything I found remarkable in the second half of the book closely matched my first two blog posts. But that's a story in itself. "The Clinton Tapes" makes clear that from start to finish, President Clinton was besieged by a vicious just-say-no GOP abetted by the perversely, inexplicably, cruelly anti-Clinton leaders of the so-called liberal media -- from the New York Times' lame crusades against Whitewater and Chinese donors and Wen Ho Lee, to the integrity-free "opinion" journalism by Maureen Dowd and, sadly, Frank Rich, to a whole host of other liberal media characters who couldn't shake their feeling that Clinton was a fraud, a poseur, a hillbilly, a cynic. Their trashy eight-year oeuvre will likely go down in history as the most spectacularly malevolent and misguided White House coverage ever -- and politically costly, since it also encompassed Vice President Al Gore and probably made George W. Bush president in 2000.

But I did find a nugget from the second half of the book that perfectly captures the whole poisonous, deluded, clubby Beltway mentality of the mainstream media circa 2000. It stars the late Tim Russert.

Branch recounts being the lone Clinton defender on one of the last "Meet the Press" shows of Clinton's term, when all the other guests were still obsessed with the president's sex life. It was bad enough on camera, but during commercial breaks Russert and his friends gossiped about alleged new Clinton girlfriends and sang the 2000 one-hit wonder "Who let the dogs out?" tapping their pencil along to the woof-woof chorus. (I don't believe in hell, but I think Russert spent some time in a way station in Purgatory being grilled on his poor political judgment during the Clinton-Gore years, before being welcomed to heaven by a God more forgiving than the Beltway mediocrities who sat in judgment on Clinton.)

It's always seemed to me no accident that the mainstream media began to lose its market share, its revenues and its respect in those years, when they slighted an embattled president's worthy if controversial initiatives on Middle East peace, Bosnia, welfare reform, making work pay and building a U.S. social democracy, in favor of gossip about his character, his marriage, his taste in women and even the distinguishing characteristics of the presidential penis.

Against this historical backdrop of childish media snickering, the sharp, accomplished Branch comes off as a naif and even a rube in some of his stories, consistently flummoxed by the enmity among Washington media players, some of them his friends, as they savaged Clinton beyond proportion. He writes, bewildered, about a spate of vicious headlines at the end of 1996: The Times' Abe Rosenthal accused the Clintons of "giving militant Islam its first beachhead in Bosnia," while Maureen Dowd dubbed Clinton the trivia-obsessed "President Pothole" and the "Limbo President," sinking ever lower. For good measure she added: "We pretty much know the Clintons did something wrong in Whitewater," when in fact, 12 years later, we know no such thing. Wen Ho Lee at least got an apology from the Times; the Clintons are still waiting. (Clark Hoyt, is it too late to take that factual error up with Dowd?)

But it wasn't just the Times: Branch also lays out Washington Post embarrassments; an Op-Ed by Andrew Sullivan headlined "The Clintons: Not a Flicker of Moral Life"; a declaration by liberal book critic Jonathan Yardley -- a friend and neighbor of Branch's -- that he wouldn't vote for Clinton in 1996 because he was a "buffoon" with a monstrous fault "at the core of his being ... He is a man who does not believe in anything." One of my favorite sections of the book features Hillary Clinton sitting in her kitchen explaining why, no, thank you, she is never going to invite the vicious Sally Quinn into her house -- and why should she, given Quinn's multiple treacherous, class-based takedowns of the Clintons as neighbors, leaders, parents, Americans? (The scenes Branch catches of Hillary in the kitchen -- not baking cookies, but having a glass of wine, helping Chelsea with homework and savaging their enemies with intelligence are among my favorite in this book.) You find yourself wishing and hoping Branch could find some Washington pooh-bahs who'd realize they'd been played by the Republicans. Nope. None at all.

A few other things are painful. The Clinton-Gore fight much referenced in coverage of the book is hard to read; on some level, they were both right. I've had this argument with liberal anti-Clinton friends, reporters and pollsters, who say Gore was perceptibly politically hurt by anti-Clinton animus among independents. On the other hand, my gut always told me he'd lose if he couldn't run on the Clinton-Gore economic resurgence. I still think Gore could have found a lot of ways, humorous or angry, to distance himself from the president's mistakes -- and Clinton expected him to, and didn't care if he did. But choosing Joe Lieberman and running like an anti-Clinton change candidate was a huge error.

Clinton also had George W. Bush's number from the beginning -- that the snarly scion was mean, arrogant, incurious, devoted to budget-busting tax cuts and greater state secrecy. Clinton fumed at the way the GOP, abetted by the media, worked the refs when it came to "dirty politics" all throughout the 2000 campaign. If Gore or his surrogates brought up, say, Dick Cheney's überconservative past, or Bush's inexperience in foreign affairs, they'd be trashed as practicing "old politics" and "politics as usual" and the typical partisan gridlock that Bush was committed (falsely) to transcending. So genuine policy differences and scandalous omissions and commissions in both Republicans' backgrounds went mostly unexamined, because at the Republicans' behest, the media decided that to focus on such issues was just backward-looking and gauche and so … 1998.

It's painful to read those last months in 2000, as the Supreme Court makes Bush president, to Clinton's anger but not surprise, and Clinton cleans out his bookshelves. I do think Branch is a little easy on the self-pitying president when it comes to some of the pardons, including Marc Rich. But he reminds us how many anti-Clinton lies the media swallowed whole, in a great final orgy of anti-Clintonism, especially the vandal scandal that wasn't (Salon debunked it quickly).

I enjoyed the book, even though I think it got bogged down in its commitment to chronology, and depicting what Clinton talked about and thought was important. I'd have loved to read a book Branch organized by the topics he thought were most important, chronologically or not. We dip into too many topics -- Bosnia, Russia, terror, the economy, Clinton's relationships with global leaders, sometimes for no more than a sentence. It captures the sweep of what a president faces, but it was also, sometimes, tedious.

But I appreciated Branch's honestly about his friendship with Clinton, his struggles to balance being an uncritical sounding board with a friend wanting to give advice (and a political junkie wanting to influence history!). I found his explanation of his different roles endearing; others may find it distracting.

I really liked him for staying close to his original point: Clinton was a man Branch was cynical about, an old friend turned politician whom Branch came to like more upon reacquaintance, a political operator who turned out to have more passion and integrity than many journalists or authors or activists or others who believe they've stayed "clean." As someone who's criticized Bill Clinton often but who always comes back to a position of (even grudging) respect, I found integrity in Branch's full-throated defense of Clinton; it's so rare and maybe long overdue. I still think the book will need the next Taylor Branch to pore over it like a historian, not a partisan or a friend, and help us get more clarity on this talented, ambitious, well-meaning, flawed, persecuted, paranoid merely mortal man. The most compelling story Branch captures is the way the media let us down.