Annals of Sid
Sidney Blumenthal, the Erich von Stroheim of the Clinton administration, has published a memoir of his White House days--to generally poor reviews, most of them from newspapers and magazines ordinarily sympathetic to the author's politics. Of course, no such book should be assumed useless simply because its notices are stinko. Very often, in fact, it's the "worst" first-person accounts of recent political history that provide the best sort of fun: unintentionally embarrassing anecdotes that the clueless writer imagines are worth boasting about. Alas, however, even on these ironic terms, "The Clinton Wars" turns out to be an unusually nutritionless meal. And such large portions! Eight hundred-plus pages of mercilessly patronizing, tutelary prose the likes of which most grownups won't have seen since those lives-of-the-great-inventors library books they made us read in elementary school.
In sum, we can't recommend the thing.
Nevertheless, as a service to those of our readers who remain helplessly curious about Blumenthal's brand of political pathology, The Scrapbook offers the following, handy-dandy condensation of "The Clinton Wars." All quotations guaranteed accurate. No, really.
CHAPTER ONE: Sidney introduces his hero during a visit to FDR's boyhood home in March 1993. "President Clinton brought in with him a stream of cool, brisk air from outside. At six feet, two inches, with a jutting jaw, gray-green eyes, a ruddy complexion, and loose long limbs, Clinton was the most physically imposing person in the room, as he almost always was." Having survived a "vicious" Republican election campaign the previous autumn, Clinton is
now confronting a conservative reaction against the "protean nature" of his personality, symbolized by the president's "eclectic relationship with music," which "the traditionally minded warned was the devil's sign." Clinton is determined to persist. "One evening, without advance notice, Clinton conducted the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center. A member of the orchestra told me he was the only guest conductor they'd ever had who knew what he was doing."
CHAPTER TWO: Given America's "peculiar vulnerability" to "moralistic absolutism, anti-intellectualism, [and] populist demagogy," many people fail to see Clinton as he is: "the poor boy who rises by dint of hard work, merit, superior intelligence, and character." And ignorant suspicion of Clinton, always amplified by processing through "the right-wing gears," breeds a series of empty domestic scandals: "There was never anything to Whitewater," a fantasy concocted by men who "shared an antagonism toward blacks and toward Bill Clinton." Meanwhile, things go wrong overseas, too. Republicans are to blame. "Powell dominated Clinton's foreign policy councils." Ominously, we hear of a man named Kenneth Starr, "the son of a Church of Christ minister, inculcated in biblical literalism and the sinfulness of drink, dancing, and fornicating."
CHAPTER THREE: To conservatives, "[i]f government was the Behemoth from the Book of Revelation, Clinton must be Lucifer." Therefore, the Clinton health care plan fails, and all looks grim until . . . the Oklahoma City bombing, "a turning point against the Republican right."
CHAPTER FOUR: Enter Dick Morris, an "opportunist," sure, but someone who "helped Clinton to be pragmatic for good ends," meaning a reelection victory in 1996. Sidney helps too. First he persuades the president to use the magic words "One America" in his 1996 State of the Union address. Then "I hit upon a phrase: the indispensable nation," that revolutionized American foreign policy. "These phrases were not mere slogans. The words mattered." Republican attacks on Democratic fundraising improprieties sputter when "[a]ll the charges were revealed to be empty," and Clinton wins a second term.
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