Joan Walsh: Reading "The Clinton Tapes," thinking about Obama (Very interesting read)

[Pirate Smile]

Reading "The Clinton Tapes," thinking about Obama

I need a break from the rhetorical outrage beat. I was going to write about the Newsmax columnist who all but advocated a military coup to bring down Obama, then I was pondering a post about Rep. Alan Grayson's claim that the GOP health reform plan amounts to if you get sick, "die quickly." But I'm tired of overheated rhetoric right now, (plus the indefatiguable Alex Koppelman got to both stories first!) so I took refuge in Taylor Branch's new book, "The Clinton Years." I had planned to review it, but it's almost 700 pages, and I have a day job. If I took the time to read it and then write about the whole thing, it would be weeks before I'd get it done -- and I think the book has insights that are supremely relevant to today.

So I thought I'd try to blog my review, over several days, and ask for your help, if you're reading the book. Every few days I'll write about what I am learning, and anyone who's reading, or curious, can participate in comments. (We could do the same thing with "Going Rogue" next month, but it would probably take us about an hour.)

-snip-
One hundred pages in, here's what's fascinating. First: Serendipitously, Branch started his private, taped talks with Clinton nine months into the Clinton presidency, in October, roughly where Obama is now, the better to focus you on the parallels and differences in their first year. I am not privy to the secrets of the Obama White House, but Branch brings the reader directly into the rooms where a red-eyed, exhausted Clinton sits talking late into the night about the challenges he faced in Mogadishu, Bosnia, Haiti and Iraq (remember how he bombed a weapons facility to retaliate for an attempt on President Bush's life, so W.wouldn't have to start a war!); the disappointment of "Don't Ask Don't Tell" and the thrill of the short-lived Israeli-Palestinian peace accords, signed just eight months into his presidency; his failure to get a stimulus bill passed (thanks to Democratic turncoats and Republican opponents); the early work on health care reform (and that 1,342 page bill) and the controversial NAFTA.

Reading it all, your head and heart hurt for Obama. We know our presidents have to juggle multiple crises, that's the job, but the way Branch depicts the pace of it, and the toll it took on Clinton (who still found time to help Chelsea with her math homework); well, it made it real. I got tired just thinking about it. I am probably going to be a little easier on Obama in the weeks to come.

There are some wonderful windows on policy triumph and disappointment: He depicts a stormy but funny meeting of Democratic Senators to tell Clinton why they'll block any liberalization of policy on gays in the military. Robert Byrd leads off fulminating about the immorality of homosexuality, and Clinton tries to head him off by noting that adultery is immoral (ahem) but we don't dismiss military folks for cheating on their spouses. Sam Nunn raised the unit cohesion argument (there was a lot of discussion of those close quarters, especially on Navy ships!) Clinton observes Sen. Ted Kennedy on the sidelines, "I couldn't tell if Teddy was going to start giggling or jump out the window" as the talk turned to the bawdy, omnisexual practices of ancient Greek and Roman warriors. But at the end of the day, Clinton said, he was surprised by the fact that he couldn't tell which of the opponents truly believed it was bad to have gays in the military (or anywhere else); all they discussed was the politics of the proposal. That theme would recur. Clinton was the consummate horsetrader, no steely ideologue, but even he was surprised at the extent to which politics trumped politics or even the silly idea of what's right or what's best in ever single debate.

There are also eerie parallels with some of Obama's battles this year. Clinton lost the stimulus battle that Obama /after compromising/ won, doomed by zero Republican support and duplicitous Dems like Oklahoma's Chuck Boren, who kept insisting he needed the bill to be bipartisan /Hello, Max Baucus!/ The utter hypocrisy of the GOP is well traced back to 1993, when they fought an anti-deficit bill that would have cut spending and raised some taxes. They've been the party of "No" for 16 years, but switching sides to say no, cynically, to completely opposite ideas: They were against shrinking the deficit when the Dems were for it; now they're suddenly worried about deficit spending (after 8 years of Bush budget-busting) when Dems are trying to spend money on the economy and health care, and not merely war and bailing out Wall Street and banks.

Branch is mystified by Clinton's strange passivity with the press-he just accepts that they're going to mistreat him, and put none of his considerable charm and charisma behind the task of courting them, unlike the young president he so admired, John Kennedy. The funniest scene in the first four chapters comes during an interview with Rolling Stone editor Jann Wenner and political correspondent William Greider. Greider comes in with a photo of a destitute American /who'd apparenty been in Clinton's "Faces of Hope" campaign materials/, and began guilt-tripping Clinton. Branch paraphrases:

Here is one of the countless poor people who looked to you for leadership; you were their last hope! Now they feel utterly disillusioned and abandoned. Can you look into this face and name one thing that you have done to help? Or one principle you won't compromise? One cause you will uphold? One belief you would die for ? /In fact, the RS interview transcript shows that Greider said the man told him: “Ask him what he’s willing to stand up for and die on.”/

Clinton "kind of went off on him," he told Greider.

He told Greider he had done things already that no other president would do. He had raised taxes on the rich and lowered them for the working poor. He introduced the AmeriCorps service program, which Rolling Stone campaigned for...He was taking on the gun lobby and the tobacco industry. He had proposed fair treatment for gay soldiers. He was fighting for national health care coverage, and more, but liberals paid very little attention to any of these things because they were bitchy and cynical about politics. They resented Clinton for respecting the votes of conservatives and opinions of moderates. They wanted him to behave like a dictator because they didn't really care about results in the world....He said he had pointed at Greider to tell him the problem is you, Bill Greider. You are a faulty citizen. You don't mobilize or persuade, because you only worry about being doctrinaire and proud. You are betraying your own principles with self-righteousness."

Clinton took a breath. "I did everything but take a fart in his face."

In fact, the president was much more eloquent on tape than in his memory /although he might have misremembered what he said directly to Greider, or else Greider cut it./ You can read, and listen to, the actual exchange on the Rolling Stone site. It's fun.

Here's Clinton's retort, verbatim, with some narration from RS:

The president, standing a foot away from Greider, turned and glared at him. Clinton’s face reddened, and his voice rose to a furious pitch as he delivered a scalding rebuke – an angry, emotional presidential encounter, the kind of which few have ever witnessed.

But that is the press’s fault, too, damn it. I have fought more damn battles here for more things than any president has in 20 years, with the possible exception of Reagan’s first budget, and not gotten one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it, and you can put that in the damn article.

I have fought and fought and fought and fought. I get up here every day, and I work till late at night on everything from national service to family leave to the budget to the crime bill and all this stuff, and you guys take it and you say, “Fine, go on to something else, what else can I hit him about?” So if you convince them I don’t have any conviction, that’s fine, but it’s a damn lie. It’s a lie.

Look what I did. I said that the wealthy would have to pay their fair share, and look what we did to the tax system. I said that I’d give working families a break, and I did. People with modest incomes, look what’s going to happen. Did I get any credit for it, from you or anybody else? Do I care if I get credit? No.

But I do care that that man has a false impression of me because of the way this administration has been covered. It is wrong. That’s my answer. It is wrong. I have fought my guts out for that guy, and if he doesn’t know it, it’s not all my fault. And you get no credit around here for fighting and bleeding. And that’s why the know-nothings and the do-nothings and the negative people and the right-wingers always win. Because of the way people like you put questions to people like me. Now, that’s the truth, Bill.

/At this point the president started to walk away but changed his mind and came back, still mad as hell./

That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.

That’s not what I do. I come to work here every day, and I try to help that guy. And I’m sorry if I’m not very good at communicating, but I haven’t gotten a hell of a lot of help since I’ve been here.

Let me make you read one part of that quote again, because you could be talking about the Obama administration's dilemma in 2009:

That’s why they always win. And they’re going to keep winning until somebody tells them the truth, that this administration is killing itself every day to help people like them and making some progress. And if you hold me to an impossible standard and never give us any credit when we’re moving forward, then that’s exactly what will happen, guys like that will think that. But it ain’t all my fault, because we have fought our guts out for ‘em. And the bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. They shift the blame, they never take responsibility. And they play on the cynicism of the media.

The bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win. Sixteen years later, it's just as true. After opposing efforts to censure Rep. Joe "You lie!" Wilson, Republicans are trying to censure Rep. Adam Grayson /whose rant maybe went over the top,/ even though Rachel Maddow assembled a string of video clips showing at least a half-dozen Republicans depicting Democratic health care plans as an effort to get Americans to die, drop dead, be killed, you name it, by any means necessary. A lot of my liberal Twitter friends were over the moon about Grayson's string of bold remarks, and while part of me enjoyed turning the tables on the lying ideologues, part of me thinks Democrats win when they stick to facts and focus. And part of me is laughing at that naive part of me right now.

Wait, I said I was going AWOL on this rhetoric war coverage. I tried. It's going to be a fun book. Stay tuned. Tell me what you think.


-- Joan Walsh

http://www.salon.com/opinion/walsh/politics/2009/10/01/the_clinton_tapes/index.html?source=rss&aim=/opinion/walsh/politics

[PBS Poll-435]

1. Who is "Chuck Boren?"

I know a Dan Boren and a David Lyle Boren from Oklahoma. (And even a Lyle Boren if you want to go back that far...)

[Pirate Smile]

5. I'm not sure. When I google it looks like she may have meant David.

[PBS Poll-435]

6. A little odd. I would have nicknamed him "Duck!"

:P

[DURHAM D]

9. In Oklahoma we just simply called him The Doughboy. nt

[Obamacare]

7. Good read

Sixteen years later and the rethugs are still up to their same old tricks again huh? Albeit, now the partisan attacks on Obama are 10x worse than when Clinton was in office. We need a good 16yrs of democratic rule, we need 2016 Hillary Clinton!!

[PBS Poll-435]

8. Welcome to DU

And excuse me if I am not 100% on your side just yet...

The media is not exactly neutral and they will run, dash, and hurdle for anything that brings them glory.



Again, I don't know any elected Boren in OK that isn't Dan, David, or Lyle. (Could be wrong(It has happened before...))

[DURHAM D]

10. David Boren was a U.S. Senator from Oklahoma during the Clinton years.

David, Sam Nunn and even Ted Kennedy were determined to show the hayseed from Arkansas that they could obstruct his agenda. If I recall correctly David Boren was head of the intelligence committee. He basically forced Clinton to hire the highly unqualified George Tenet at CIA as David was George's mentor. David along with Sam Nunn and Colin Powell backed Clinton down on gays serving openly in the military. DADT was a compromise with those asshats.

A little known fact - on the morning of September 11, 2001, David Boren and George Tenet were having a private breakfast/meeting in a hotel room in either N.Y. or D.C. when the towers were hit. By 2001 Boren was no longer in the senate because he left to become the President of the University of Oklahoma. He still holds that position. His son Dan is a blue dog congressman.

When David Boren ran for Governor of Oklahoma his own former father-in-law asserted that David is gay. David called a press conference, put his hand on the bible and swore on live tv that "He is not and never has been a homosexual." That statement is a lie.

Edit to add - Joan meant David Boren. She has been around long enough that she should not have made that mistake.

[Jennicut]

14. Oh, I detested Nunn and Boren and Shelby back then.

I was only 18 and hated blue dog Dems already.
Boren sounds like a real piece of work and a total jerk.

[bluestateguy]

2. Good thing Ken Starr didn't know about those tapes

That little pissant would have subpoenaed them.

Making those tapes was a very risky, arguably stupid, thing to do.

[Cha]

3. Thanks Pirate Smile..

I've always felt that way about going easy on the new Prez..I just have an idea of what they're gong through and really want to support them when they're making progress.

"The bad guys win because they have no objective other than to win" That's right...no objective and all that money with the corporatemedia helping them every step of the way.

[Pirate Smile]

4. They get little to no credit for what they do accomplish which they have to fight for every step of

the way. I think Clinton explained it well.

It reminds me of how in the Stimulus Bill they expanded who could get unemployment $$, for how long and how much, they also supplemented people's COBRA so they could afford to keep their health insurance. Do they get any credit? No. Who were they looking out for? The little guy who just got screwed. Would Republicans give a damn about them? Nope. But do Dems and Liberals run around saying they are just the same as Republicans? A pretty good chunk do and they do everything they can to tear them down and undermine them to the very little guy they want to help. I can understand Bill Clinton's frustration - and I can certainly see the same thing going on now.

[dreamnightwind]

11. Another similarity...

between Clinton and Obama is their corporate/centrist disdain for the progressive left. William Greider is one of the very best we have, and has been for a long long time. You can feel Clinton's rage against the ungrateful left in his remarks, and I have felt the same when Obama was being interviewed by Rachel Maddow.

Clinton comes across as self-righteous, arrogant, combative and portrays himself as an altruistic victim of darker forces. I certainly agree that he was up against dark forces, but in my opinion his failure was in not clearly separating himself and his policies from the agendas of these forces. Instead he chose compromise.

Reagan and Bush moved this country radically to the right, and we've never recovered. And not only to the right, but to a corporate agenda that used right-wing wedges as ways to get popular support.

Clinton and Obama are serving the same corporate agenda, and doing it from the center, not from the left. Thus the left-right balance that this nation needs is completely abandoned, we get centrist corporatism alternating with right-wing corporatism. Drifting ever rightward, and becoming ever poorer, this nation is spinning out of control.

What is needed is a leader who can communicate simple truths to the American people, such as how this country's distribution of income has changed since 1980 (1978 actually), how free trade agreements without strong protections for labor standards have destroyed the earning prospects of millions of Americans, how abstracted, non-productive, speculative models of profit earning (insurance, leveraged finance, etc) have stolen from the rest of us. Such explanations are simple enough, but the educator must be a believer, not a corporate shill. Once these explanations are put forward, people WILL get behind the policy changes needed to fix things.

Greider was exactly right, presenting the fate of this man to Clinton and asking, from that man's perspective, what his policies accomplish. Not a hell of a lot of good, and actually a hell of a lot of bad (financial deregulation, trade "liberalization", etc).

Neither Clinton nor Obama are up to this task, because they're corporatists. They expect adulation from the left for their little battles with the dark forces, but they miss the big picture, which is that they need to enact change as radical as Reagan did, only in a very different direction. Not for the feint of heart, but that's where we are, and it really has to be done, inconvenient truth though it may be.

[bertman]

18. Excellent commentary, dreamnightwind. "What is needed is a leader who can communicate

simple truths to the American people, . . ."

The sad part is we have just that leader, but he shies away from communicating those truths for just the reason you state: he's a corporatist.

When President Obama addressed the Congress to tout his healthcare "reform" did he bother to mention the BURGEONING PROFITS of the healthcare industry and the giveaway to Big Pharma under the Bush administration? Hell no. Did he tell the American people that the income of the top 10% has risen dramatically over the last 10 years while the income of the middle and lower classes has stagnated? Again, NO.

This is why I cannot be a CHEERLEADER for President Obama no matter how much I like him and how much better he is than the OVERT fascist Bush.

Thank you for explaining it so simply and eloquently, dreamnightwind.

[dreamnightwind]

20. Back at ya!

You're quite welcome, glad to contribute once in awhile. I often enjoy your posts.

And you're right on about Obama not mentioning the profits of the health insurance industry enough. It's possibly the most important part of the whole issue, he should be hammering it every time he speaks about health care, but of course he doesn't want to offend the industry, he and most of the Dems feel they need its support and campaign contributions to return to office.

The irony is, for all the concessions to the right and to the corporations, they're still going to attack him and the Dems, doing everything they can to undermine reform. So in the end, Dems are seen as ineffective, timid, and as sell-outs.

Time to grow a pair and represent the people.

I'm not one of the "stay home and don't vote for them ever again" crowd. When Obama's up against Palin or Romney or God forbid Jeb, I'll be there biting my tongue and voting for Obama. But I'll work against him and his ilk (and against Clinton if she ever runs again) in the primaries, and will do everything I can to elect progressives rather than corporatists. And I'll be encouraging anyone here on DU to do the same.

If things weren't so screwed up we could perhaps be OK with centrist Dems. Unfortunately things are completely hosed, and centrist Dems had a huge part in this country's deterioration.

[bertman]

21. Your comments represent the feelings of many of us who post on DU. Thank you.

[davidpdx]

12. I heard about this book and I am interested in reading it

I read Clinton's biography as well as his wife's. I'm interested to hear more of what went on behind the scenes during the Clinton years.

[Pirate Smile]

13. kick

[rockymountaindem]

15. Wow, that's timely

I've been thinking the same thing. How are we going to win over the long term when we, the progressives, keep giving up and saying "I'll never vote again!" all the time. The right never does that. That's why they keep coming back into power. If Martin Luther King and his crew gave up so easily, they'd have gotten nowhere. Our task is a lot easier but our self-righteousness gets in the way.

If the health care bill is not to our liking, I'll be really disappointed. But I not going to let my behavior afterward hand things back over to the likes of Boehner so we'll be even farther behind when we finally swing back to the other side of the "I'm so angry" scale and start taking action again.

[rvablue]

16. These excerpts prove this is going to be a very insightful and interesting read.

A real inside look into a Presidency. I'm sure the cablecritters will end up focusing on the scandaloud tidbits, so I'm going to read it for myself and shut out the echo chamber. There will be much to learn from these intimate and candid interviews.

[HamdenRice]

17. Post of the Year! I was shocked at how little Clinton knew about detention policies too

I heard Branch interviewed on a radio show, and he mentioned that Clinton was completely unaware of questionable interminable detention of immigrants (?) and as soon as he heard about it he ended it.

Makes you kind of wonder people who assume Obama knows about every obscure brief filed by every US attorney in various terrorism cases.

[Pirate Smile]

19. kick