Project and content management for Contemporary Authors volumes
WORK TITLE: Bill Clinton
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/13/1960
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Tomasky
RESEARCHER NOTES:
LC control no.: n 96007131
Personal name heading:
Tomasky, Michael, 1960-
Found in: Left for dead, 1996: CIP t.p. (Michael Tomasky) data sheet
(b. 10-13-60)
Invalid LCCN: no 96063556
================================================================================
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS AUTHORITIES
Library of Congress
101 Independence Ave., SE
Washington, DC 20540
Questions? Contact: ils@loc.gov
PERSONAL
Born October 13, 1960, in Morgantown, WV; son of Maria and Michael Tomasky; married; wife’s name Sarah; children: Margot.
EDUCATION:West Virginia University, B.A. 1982; graduate study at New York University.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Journalist. New York magazine, columnist, 1995-2002; Guardian, American branch editor, 2007-09, editor-at-large, 2009-11; Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, editor, 2009—; Daily Beast, special correspondent, 2011—.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including the Washington Post, Harper’s Weekly, Nation, Village Voice, New York Review of Books, Dissent, Lingua Franca, George, and GQ.
SIDELIGHTS
Michael Tomasky earned his bachelor’s degree from West Virginia University and then went on to study political science at New York University. He became a columnist at New York magazine in 1995 and later became American branch editor for the Guardian in 2007. Since 2009, Tomasky has served as editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, and he has also worked as a special correspondent for the online Daily Beast since 2011. Tomasky tends to cover liberal politics, and his articles have appeared in such periodicals as the Washington Post, Harper’s Weekly, Nation, Village Voice, New York Review of Books, Dissent, Lingua Franca, George, and GQ. Tomasky’s first book, Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America, was released in 1996, and it was followed twenty years later by Hillary’s Turn: Inside Her Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign. Next, Tomasky wrote Bill Clinton, published in 2017 as part of Times Books’ “American President” series.
Left for Dead
With Left for Dead, Tomasky offers a polemic to explain how, in 1994, Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in forty years. According to the author, this event can be traced to the political left wing’s slide into multicultural politics. This trend left the majority white Americans feeling isolated, especially given that multicultural politics were given priority over economic concerns. Tomasky then traces this trend to the rise of American radicals around 1970. These “radicals” based their agenda on issues of race, gender, and sexual orientation but failed to address issues of class. By doing so, the left abandoned the very base that fueled labor and civil rights. Furthermore, it fractured the remaining base along race and gender lines.
Reviews of Left for Dead were largely critical, and Nation correspondent Martin Duberman asserted: “Tomasky is a trenchant political analyst and a gifted writer. His book … addresses basic issues regarding the history, current agendas and future prospects of the left in the United States. He is earnestly committed to creating a more just society and to figuring out a politics that can get us there. I wanted to grant Tomasky all that up front, because so much in Left for Dead troubles, puzzles, even angers me.” Duberman added: “Tomasky’s often shrewd analysis of the particulars of our deteriorating situation, in which corporate power and greed loom large, does not prepare one for his overarching thesis: that the left itself, and particularly its multicultural vanguard, is the chief villain here. It is a theme he sounds relentlessly, even while acknowledging that the left has faced an uphill battle in this country, fundamentally because it opposes the agenda of corporate America.” The noted sociologist Barbara Ehrenreich advised in her Progressive assessment: “The American left, throughout history, has taken stands that seemed bizarre or extreme to large numbers of their fellow citizens: in favor of abolishing slavery, or giving women the right to vote, or keeping the United States out of various wars. There is no glory, of course, in taking stands just épater le bourgeoisie, or in refusing ever to compromise. But standing on principle, including deeply unpopular principle, is the business of the left. If we have screwed up in any serious way, it is by failing to convey this lonely mission to people like Tomasky.”
Bill Clinton
Bill Clinton fared far better with critics, and the book, as part of the publisher’s “American Presidents” series, offers a slim and comprehensive biography of the forty-second president of the United States. The volume explores Clinton’s childhood and his early political ambitions and continues through his presidency and beyond. The volume covers Clinton’s work in state politics, culminating with his multiple terms as governor of Arkansas, and then comments on Clinton’s 1992 Democratic party nomination as presidential candidate. Tomasky finds that Clinton won the presidential election because he shied away from overly liberal ideologies and appealed to Republicans with conservative stances on crime and economics. The author offers both pros and cons regarding Clinton’s presidency. Tomasky also comments on Clinton’s infamous sex scandal and Congress’s failed attempts to stoke public outrage. Additional commentary addresses the long-term success and failures of Clinton’s legislative work.
According to a Kirkus Reviews contributor, “Tomasky’s slim, journalistic account contains few surprises for older readers familiar with that era.” David Greenberg in the Washington Monthly announced that “Tomasky’s is the best short biography of the forty-second president we have. Clinton’s rich life and momentous presidency would seem to defy encapsulation in 150 pages—the typical length of books in this series—but with his economy of prose, Tomasky manages to hit most of the big moments and air most of the key debates. He moves chronologically through Clinton’s life (the pre-presidential years deftly shoehorned into one chapter, the 1992 campaign into another), covering foreign policy and domestic policy, scandal and pseudo scandal. He does so with a literary style that is fluid, engaging, judicious, often witty, sometimes barbed, and above all deeply informed.” Greenberg also observed: “The only significant objection I have to this book is that it’s too short. … A book this short necessarily requires cursory treatments of some subjects that, given the continuing interest in Clinton, cry out for more depth. On the other hand, I can assign it to my undergraduates—and count on them to read it.” Offering further applause in the Christian Science Monitor, Erik Spanberg declared that Tomasky “offers a balanced portrait of Clinton, praising him for political instinct and a centrist approach that revived Democrats while criticizing a lack of self-control that almost cost Clinton his family and his presidency. Tomasky points out Clinton’s policy missteps, including criminal justice laws and welfare reform programs later condemned within his own party as excessive, along with the mixed bag of the NAFTA trade agreement.” Spanberg concluded: “In general, books in this series aim for an even-handed approach and a thoughtful appraisal of each president’s tenure. Tomasky succeeds on all counts.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, May 1, 1996, Mary Carroll and Gilbert Taylor, review of Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America, p. 1474.
Christian Science Monitor, January 30, 2017, Erik Spanberg, review of Bill Clinton.
Kirkus Reviews, October 15, 2016, review of Bill Clinton.
Nation, July 1, 1996, Martin Duberman, review of Left for Dead, p. 25.
National Review, March 24, 1997, Ramesh Ponnuru, review of Left for Dead, p. 53.
New York Times Book Review, January 22, 2017, Jim Kelly, review of Bill Clinton, p. BR7.
Public Interest, fall, 1996, David Brooks, review of Left for Dead, p. 116.
Progressive, July, 1996, Barbara Ehrenreich, review of Left for Dead, p. 40.
Washington Monthly, June, 1996, Matthew Dallek, review of Left for Dead, p. 53; March-May, 2017, David Greenberg, “A Consequential Presidency,” review of Bill Clinton, p. 58.*
ONLINE
NY Times, https://www.nytimes.com (2017-1-20), review of Bill Clinton
Michael Tomasky is a Special Correspondent for The Daily Beast and the Editor of Democracy: A Journal of Ideas. (April 2017)
About Michael Tomasky
Work
Democracy: A Journal of Ideas
The Daily Beast
Education
West Virginia University
Class of 1982 · Morgantown, West Virginia
Morgantown High School
Class of 1978 · Morgantown, West Virginia
New York University
New York, New York
Current City and Hometown
North Bethesda, Maryland
Current city
Morgantown, West Virginia
Hometown
Favorites
Music
[Joni Mitchell]
Joni Mitchell
Books
[Life as Jamie Knows It]
Life as Jamie Knows It
Movies
[Judge Crater]
Judge Crater
Sports Teams
[WVU Men's Basketball]
WVU Men's Basketball
Other
Jeffrey Toobin, Patricia Finn The Good Health Lawyer, Ezra Klein, Rebecca Mead, Zachary Karabell, Matthew Yglesias, Aspiration, ThinkProgress, Mike Allen, Josh Marshall, Verso London, Podforum.org, Nicholas Thompson, Unofficial: Robert Johnson, Eric Alterman, Leslie Cockburn for Congress, Chakib Ait Benhamou, The Kenyon Collegian, Chittibabu Padavala Page, The Daily Show the Book An Oral History, Michael Sharley for West Virginia Attorney General, Virginia Heffernan, Tim Rowland Books, Amomancies, NATO, Joe Conason, National Committee for an Effective Congress, Marc Ambinder, Transit Strike, Sally Kohn, Democracy: A Journal of Ideas, Muslim Reform Movement, Dana Goldstein, Michelle Goldberg, Columbia Global Reports, Cecelia A. Cancellaro/Word Literary, Ian Bremmer
Michael Tomasky
Trivia: Columnist, "The Daily Beast"
Filmography
Hide Hide Self (9 credits)
2014-2017 Media Buzz (TV Series)
Himself - Panelist
- Episode dated 18 June 2017 (2017) ... Himself - Panelist
- Episode dated 5 March 2017 (2017) ... Himself - Panelist
- Episode dated 25 December 2016 (2016) ... Himself - Panelist
- Episode dated 2 October 2016 (2016) ... Himself - Panelist
- Episode dated 26 June 2016 (2016) ... Himself - Panelist
Show all 12 episodes
2016 All In with Chris Hayes (TV Series)
Himself
- Episode dated 25 January 2016 (2016) ... Himself
2014-2015 NewsNation with Tamron Hall (TV Series)
Guest - Himself / Himself - Guest / Himself
- Episode dated 19 May 2015 (2015) ... Himself - Guest
- Episode dated 8 September 2014 (2014) ... Guest - Himself
- Episode dated 23 June 2014 (2014) ... Guest - Himself
- Episode dated 3 February 2014 (2014) ... Himself
2014 Politics Nation with Al Sharpton (TV Series)
Himself
- Episode dated 28 May 2014 (2014) ... Himself
2013 MSNBC Live (TV Series)
Himself
- Episode dated 10 September 2013 (2013) ... Himself
2013 The War Room with Michael Shure (TV Series)
Himself - Guest
- Series Finale (2013) ... Himself - Guest
- Episode dated 1 August 2013 (2013) ... Himself - Guest
- Episode dated 25 July 2013 (2013) ... Himself - Guest
- Episode dated 18 July 2013 (2013) ... Himself - Guest
- Episode dated 20 June 2013 (2013) ... Himself - Guest
Show all 8 episodes
2013 Now with Alex Wagner (TV Series)
Himself
- Episode dated 25 March 2013 (2013) ... Himself
2012 The Ed Show (TV Series)
Himself
- Episode dated 20 December 2012 (2012) ... Himself
- Episode dated 26 November 2012 (2012) ... Himself
- Episode dated 15 November 2012 (2012) ... Himself
- Episode dated 8 November 2012 (2012) ... Himself
- Episode dated 1 November 2012 (2012) ... Himself
2012 The Agenda with Steve Paikin (TV Series)
Himself
- Should Money Buy Everything? (2012) ... Himself
Michael Tomasky
Born Michael John Tomasky
October 13, 1960 (age 56)
Morgantown, West Virginia
Education West Virginia University,
New York University
Occupation commentator, author, editor
Notable credit(s) Democracy,
The Daily Beast,
Guardian America,
The American Prospect,
The New York Times Book Review,
The New York Review of Books
Michael John Tomasky (born October 13, 1960[1]) is an American columnist, commentator, journalist and author whose work inclines to the left. He is the editor in chief of Democracy, a special correspondent for Newsweek / The Daily Beast, a contributing editor for The American Prospect, and a contributor to The New York Review of Books.
Contents
1 Life and career
2 Political views
3 Books
4 References
5 External links
Life and career
Tomasky was born and raised in Morgantown, West Virginia, the son of Maria (Aluisi) and Michael Tomasky, a trial attorney.[2] He is of Serbian and Italian descent.[3][4] He attended West Virginia University as an undergraduate and then studied political science in graduate school at New York University. His work has also appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, Harper's Weekly, The Nation, The Village Voice, The New York Review of Books, Dissent, Lingua Franca, George, and GQ. He lives with his wife Sarah and daughter (Margot Julianna Kerr Tomasky, born July 6, 2010) in Silver Spring, Maryland.[5][6]
From 1995 to 2002, Tomasky was a columnist at New York magazine, where he wrote the "City Politic" column. He was later executive editor of liberal magazine The American Prospect, and remains a contributing editor.[7] On October 23, 2007, Guardian America was launched with Tomasky as its editor.[8] On March 3, 2009 he replaced Kenneth Baer as editor of U.S. political journal Democracy, at which time his title at The Guardian changed to editor-at-large.[9] In May 2011 Tomasky left The Guardian to join Newsweek / The Daily Beast as a special correspondent.[10]
Tomasky is the author of Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America (1996), and of Hillary's Turn: Inside Her Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign (2001), a chronicle of Hillary Clinton's successful election to the Senate in 2000.
Political views
In an October 2010 essay, "The Elections: How Bad for Democrats?", Tomasky gives his "own answer to the question of how things got this bad", expounding a theme he had been developing for several years in other articles:
Since the Reagan years, Republicans routinely speak in broad themes and tend to blur the details, while Democrats typically ignore broad themes and focus on details. Republicans, for example, speak constantly of "liberty" and "freedom" and couch practically all their initiatives—tax cuts, deregulation, and so forth—within these large categories. Democrats, on the other hand, talk more about specific programs and policies and steer clear of big themes....What Democrats have typically not done well since Reagan's time is connect their policies to their larger beliefs. In fact they have usually tried to hide those beliefs, or change the conversation when the subject arose. The result has been that for many years Republicans have been able to present their philosophy as somehow truly "American", while attacking the Democratic belief system as contrary to American values.[11]
Books
Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America, Michael Tomasky, Free Press, June 10, 1996, ISBN 978-0-684-82750-6
Hillary's Turn: Inside Her Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign, Michael Tomasky, Free Press, February 15, 2001, ISBN 978-0-684-87302-2
References
Tomasky, Michael (October 14, 2012). "Birthday". twitter.com. Retrieved December 28, 2014.
http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/dispatch/obituary.aspx?page=lifestory&pid=122329588
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/2009/jul/10/happy-birthday-tesla
http://www.democracyjournal.org/19/6796.php?page=all
In lieu of the Friday quiz, an introduction, Michael Tomasky, The Guardian, July 9, 2010
Liberals and despair, Michael Tomasky, The Guardian, July 12, 2010
Masthead The American Prospect
Welcome to Guardian America, Michael Tomasky, The Guardian, October 23, 2007
Michael Tomasky joins political journal Democracy, Jemima Kiss, The Guardian, February 18, 2009
Democracy Editor Tomasky Joins Newsweek/Daily Beast, Democracy, April 25, 2011
The Elections: How Bad for Democrats?, Michael Tomasky, The New York Review of Books, October 28, 2010, p. 6
About the author
Michael Tomasky; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Sean Wilentz, General Editors
Michael Tomasky is a special correspondent for The Daily Beast and the editor in chief of Democracy, as well as a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books. He was previously executive editor of The American Prospect and the founding editor of Guardian America. He is the author of Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America and Hillary’s Turn: Inside Her Improbable, Victorious Senate Campaign. He lives outside Washington, D. C.
Bill Clinton
The American Presidents Series: The 42nd President, 1993-2001
The American Presidents
Michael Tomasky; Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., and Sean Wilentz, General Editors
Times Books
Bill Clinton
READ AN EXCERPT →
g
BUY THE BOOK
Hardcover
$25.00
Times Books
Henry Holt and Co.
01/24/2017
ISBN: 9781627796767
208 Pages
Amazon
Barnes & Noble
Books-a-Million
IndieBound
Powells
The president of larger-than-life ambitions and appetites whose term defined America at the close of the twentieth century
Bill Clinton: a president of contradictions. He was a Rhodes Scholar and a Yale Law School graduate, but he was also a fatherless child from rural Arkansas. He was one of the most talented politicians of his age, but he inspired enmity of such intensity that his opponents would stop at nothing to destroy him. He was the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to win two successive presidential elections, but he was also the first president since Andrew Johnson to be impeached.
In this incisive biography of America’s forty-second president, Michael Tomasky examines Clinton’s eight years in office, a time often described as one of peace and prosperity, but in reality a time of social and political upheaval, as the culture wars grew ever more intense amid the rise of the Internet (and with it, online journalism and blogging); military actions in Somalia, Iraq, Bosnia, and Kosovo; standoffs at Waco and Ruby Ridge; domestic terrorism in Oklahoma City; and the rise of al-Qaeda. It was a time when Republicans took control of Congress and a land deal gone bad turned into a constitutional crisis, as lurid details of a sitting president’s sexual activities became the focus of public debate.
Tomasky’s clear-eyed assessment of Clinton’s presidency offers a new perspective on what happened, what it all meant, and what aspects continue to define American politics to this day. In many ways, we are still living in the Age of Clinton.
A consequential presidency
David Greenberg
49.3-5 (March-May 2017): p58.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Washington Monthly Company
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
Bill Clinton: The 42nd President, 1993-2001
American Presidents Series
by Michael Tomasky
Times Books, 208 pp.
Bill Clinton rescued his party from near obscurity a quarter century ago. Democrats would be wise to closely examine the lessons of his tenure as they set out to rebuild after the devastating 2016 elections.
At this moment in early 2017, Bill and Hillary are taking a no doubt much-needed hiatus from the political limelight. But as the 2016 campaign showed, Bill Clinton's legacy as president still shapes our politics. Along with Barack Obama's presidency--which was, in domestic policy, essentially an extension of Clinton's--it will be a reference point in the Democrats' debates about how to regroup and go forward. Michael Tomasky's Bill Clinton, the latest volume in the American Presidents Series of Times Books biographies, deserves to be widely read, for its insights about the recent past--and the near future.
Tomasky's is the best short biography of the forty-second president we have. Clinton's rich life and momentous presidency would seem to defy encapsulation in 150 pages--the typical length of books in this series--but with his economy of prose, Tomasky manages to hit most of the big moments and air most of the key debates. He moves chronologically through Clinton's life (the pre-presidential years deftly shoehorned into one chapter, the 1992 campaign into another), covering foreign policy and domestic policy, scandal and pseudo scandal. He does so with a literary style that is fluid, engaging, judicious, often witty, sometimes barbed, and above all deeply informed.
The only significant objection I have to this book is that it's too short. Like other entries in this series (to which I contributed a biography of Calvin Coolidge), it's a wonderful introduction to a subject with whom you want to familiarize yourself but don't want to read 500 pages about, like Martin Van Buren (or Calvin Coolidge). Yet I'd love to read a Ron Chernow-sized Clinton biography by Tomasky. A book this short necessarily requires cursory treatments of some subjects that, given the continuing interest in Clinton, cry out for more depth. On the other hand, I can assign it to my undergraduates--and count on them to read it.
The prolific Tomasky--who also edits Democracy, writes a column for the Daily Beast, and contributes long essays to the New York Review of Books--has been a reporter and leading journalistic voice of left-liberalism for more than two decades. His own politics probably fall to the left of Clinton's, but he shares with the former president an appreciation of the pragmatism necessary for politicians to succeed, especially in our times. Tomasky isn't the type to prod or provoke liberal orthodoxy from a self-consciously centrist position, but neither does he wax indignant about politicians' betrayals of their principles or carry a torch for a lost '60s liberalism. It's a sensibility well suited for offering clear-eyed evaluations of a figure like Clinton.
In Bill Clinton, Tomasky doesn't advance any penetrating new thesis about his subject. But his clear-headed judgments, his ability to assess Clinton critically, even at times harshly, but always fairly, is itself something of a novelty in a literature dominated by shrill polemics and wagon-circling defensiveness. Tomasky opens and closes with the theme that Bill Clinton was a survivor. He was subjected to a battering that was close to unprecedented in the annals of the American presidency, yet he was reelected handily in 1996 and left office in 2001 with the highest public approval ratings of any departing president since polling began. The survivor theme is basically a framing device for Tomasky's narrative that doesn't entirely do justice to Clinton's historic achievements, even though as a substantive matter, Tomasky doesn't neglect those attainments.
That said, Tomasky salts his book with important and profound insights that can be understood as key themes of the book, even if he doesn't flag them as such. One of them, floated toward the book's end, is that "Bill Clinton rescued the party from permanent minority status." From 1972 to 1988, the Democrats had lost every presidential election--in landslides--save one: the victory eked out in 1976 by Jimmy Carter over Gerald Ford. And that occurred immediately after Watergate, when the Republican Party was at a historic nadir. By the end of Clinton's presidency, on the other hand, the Democrats were, if not the majority party again, at least on parity with the GOP. Issues that had been liabilities--economic management, fiscal responsibility, foreign policy, crime, welfare, cultural issues--Clinton had neutralized or turned into Democratic advantages. In the 2000 campaign, George W. Bush was the first Republican in forty years not to run on a program mainly of scaling back government.
Tomasky explores the rocky road Clinton traveled to implementing a "Third Way" agenda that, though progressive and pragmatic, was also heterodox and on occasion upsetting to traditional liberal groups. Tomasky re-situates some of Clinton's most controversial enterprises in their proper context, reminding readers that the final bills signed weren't pure expressions of Clinton's own philosophy but reflected compromises he was forced to make with a hostile Congress led by Newt Gingrich.
The 1994 crime bill, for instance, was far from an act of capitulation to the right. It was a flawed but effective package of reforms that contributed to a spectacular drop in violent crime. That drop saved tens of thousands of lives, greatly enhanced the quality of life for citizens of all races and backgrounds, and made possible a rejuvenation of American cities that was unimaginable just a decade of earlier. It also continued (but did not create) a trend toward greater incarceration of criminals that is now widely seen as excessive. But at a time when, as Tomasky reminds us, there were 23,000 murders a year, failing to address the issue would have been derelict.
Moreover, the bill, which had broad bipartisan support, included lots of liberal solutions that Clinton pushed. These included an assault weapons ban, support for community policing, and the Violence Against Women Act. The more punitive measures, to which Clinton (and other Democrats, like Bernie Sanders) acquiesced, were insisted upon by Republicans. Ironically, it was Clinton's resolve to include the assault weapons ban--coming as it did after the passage of the Brady Bill--that, among other factors, cost Democrats control of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections.
Tomasky similarly provides needed context to the welfare reform compromise of 1996. He notes that Clinton had already twice vetoed more austere legislation and was hard-pressed to veto a third version in an election year, even though the new bill still fell short of what the president wanted. He also reminds readers that "the direst liberal predictions did not come true." The reforms did help reduce poverty, even though some conservative legislatures took the opportunity to slash benefits in their states. In the end, the booming prosperity over which Clinton presided, combined with his progressive tax and distribution policies, meant that for the first time since the 1960s, the lowest quintile of earners saw their lot improve during his presidency.
Oddly, Tomasky doesn't discuss another highly controversial policy of Clinton's, banking deregulation, except very briefly at the end, when he notes that Bernie Sanders attacked Hillary Clinton over the issue in 2016. Here, the left's criticisms of Clinton (Bill, not Hillary) are partly justified, since the repeal of the 1935 Glass Steagall Act, which separated investment banking from commercial banking, allowed some firms, like Citibank, to metastasize and become "too big to fail" (though in truth they were already). Contrary to popular belief, however, the repeal itself didn't cause the mortgage crisis that sent the economy into free fall in 2008. Most of the institutions that issued or held the toxic mortgages and their derivatives weren't covered by the old law in any case. It was the failure of oversight during the Bush administration, when the crisis was visibly worsening, that allowed the crash to occur.
Tomasky also might have done more to illuminate how annual budget negotiations became the playing field on which Clinton fought--and usually vanquished--his Republican foes. He does, however, show that a key turning point in Clinton's presidency was the prolonged government shutdown in 1995. The president simultaneously began to benefit from the rapidly shrinking budget deficits achieved by the decade's tech boom, productivity gains across the economy, and, not least, his farsighted 1993 budget bill--which passed without a single Republican vote. The robust growth and the public's newfound trust in Clinton as an economic manager allowed him in the ensuing years to bolster all kinds of liberal programs--the very kinds of programs that many of his critics on the left still think he neglected. A fair-minded analysis shows that Clinton's overall record can only be described as consistently advancing the goals that liberals have traditionally cared about, if not always going as far as some would have liked.
Finally, Bill Clinton oversaw the most successful foreign policy since John F. Kennedy (one can argue about Ronald Reagan's, remembered for both the end of the Cold War and the Iran-contra scandal). After a disastrous beginning with the rout of U.S. soldiers in Mogadishu and passivity in the face of mass slaughters in Rwanda and Bosnia, Clinton found his footing late in his first term. By the end of his second, he had achieved major diplomatic achievements--sometimes with the aid of military force--in Bosnia and Kosovo, Northern Ireland, and Israel and the Palestinian territories. For those inclined today to despair about the prospects of a two-state solution in the Middle East, Tomasky's account evokes the hopefulness that reigned under Clinton; we see him traveling to Gaza, even as impeachment proceedings unfolded, "to watch in person as the Palestinians voted to end their formal call for the destruction of Israel"--itself a historic accomplishment. As a result of all this, Democrats by 2000 were every bit as credible on foreign policy and economic policy as Republicans, which could never have been said about the last Democratic president, Jimmy Carter.
The second important insight Tomasky offers, one that could be taken as a core argument of the book, comes during his discussion of the culture wars--the ongoing clashes, flowing from the upheavals of the 1960s, over race, sexuality, campus speech, and dozens of kindred issues. "As the first 'first couple' to come from the Woodstock generation and not the Depression-World War II generation," Tomasky writes, "the Clintons themselves constituted a front in these wars." This formulation perfectly explains the hatred that so many Republican politicians felt toward Clinton and that led them to hound him relentlessly throughout his presidency.
It also explains the Clinton impeachment. Tomasky recounts the sordid episode at considerable length, coming down hard on Clinton's rationalizations for misleading investigators about his affair with Monica Lewinsky--elaborately wrought parsings that "might hold sway in men's locker rooms but wouldn't do for a president." But he's even harsher toward the journalists who relentlessly hyped the story. Susan Schmidt of the Washington Post and Jackie Judd of ABC News will be remembered primarily as mindless "conduits" for the leaks of the independent counsel, Ken Starr; the New York Times s embarrassingly puritanical coverage on its editorial pages, run by the now-discredited Howell Raines, comes under due scrutiny. The media's performance was poor. "Every day brought new revelations," Tomasky writes tersely, "most of them false."
Clinton won the impeachment fight. The Washington press and pundit corps, which had long since lost the confidence of conservative voters, now fell into disrepute among liberals as well--never to fully recover. The GOP was thrown into disarray, and many of Clinton's leading persecutors would become embroiled in their own sex scandals: Newt Gingrich, Henry Hyde, Robert Livingston, Dennis Hastert, and others. To a large degree, Clinton and the Democrats won the culture wars, too. This wasn't evident to many of us at the time, when the Christian right, led by George W. Bush, still seemed ascendant. But the public's willingness to cut Clinton slack--in marked contrast to the media's and the Republicans' misplaced and hypocritical moralism--indicated newly tolerant attitudes about sexuality that would, a decade later, turn an issue like gay marriage from a cudgel for the Republicans into a liability. The forces of cultural reaction remain strong, as Donald Trump's election victory shows, but they are emboldened today precisely because they are losing.
In the end, Clinton did much more than survive. He made the Democratic Party viable again in presidential elections. He reoriented liberalism, retaining its core commitments to a mixed economy, a welfare state, civil rights, civil liberties, and an internationalist foreign policy--while also acknowledging where its past policies on welfare, crime, and other issues had lost the confidence of the American people. He recognized the coming of globalization and sought new policies to deal with its challenges. His programs contributed--how much, exactly, is impossible to say--to peace and shared prosperity, declines in violent crime and out-of-wedlock births, and a liberalizing national temper on culture war issues. Race relations improved steadily, according to both whites and blacks.
To achieve all this, Clinton had to make concessions to conservatives. Sometimes this meant shameful opportunism (calling for public school kids to wear uniforms) or dubious compromises (giving the GOP a capital gains tax cut) or the articulation of traditional moral positions that rankled liberals (support for the death penalty). Yet without these gestures, Clinton would never have gained support from Republicans in government. As important, he wouldn't have gained the immense support from the people, including many conservatives, that he enjoyed.
At the end of 2016, Michael Tomasky wrote an incisive column in the Daily Beast in which he pointed out that to regain power again, Democrats will once more have to attract the votes of those who left their party, in this case for Trump. Once called "Reagan Democrats," these generally white, modestly educated, working-class voters were wooed back to the fold by Bill Clinton's Third Way liberalism. In 2008, after the disastrous Bush presidency, some flocked to Obama's uplifting themes, but over the next eight years they slid steadily back into the GOP column. "I know lots of these people," wrote Tomasky, who grew up in West Virginia--a Democratic stronghold until 2000, and one of the states where Hillary performed the worst in 2016. "My dear mom was one, and virtually all her friends from church. Loads of old high-school classmates. ... Millions are in fact liberals, to some degree or another, and many millions more may not be liberals but sure aren't conservatives.. .. They are, in fact or in potential, part of our team, and we need to treat them that way. The Democratic Party needs to identify leaders who can connect with these folks." Bill Clinton was one such leader, and the Democrats are going to need to find more like him.
David Greenberg, a professor of history at Rutgers University, is the author, most recently, of Republic of Spin: An Inside History of the American Presidency. He is a contributing editor to Politico and tweets at @republicofspin.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Greenberg, David. "A consequential presidency." Washington Monthly, Mar.-May 2017, p. 58+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA491487784&it=r&asid=4f854342a8bee1a15ec5786a9295c612. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491487784
Tomasky, Michael: BILL CLINTON
(Oct. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Tomasky, Michael BILL CLINTON Times/Henry Holt (Adult Nonfiction) $25.00 1, 24 ISBN: 978-1-62779-676-7
The latest in the excellent American Presidents series explores the life and career of Bill Clinton (b. 1946).In this entertaining biography of a virtuoso politician whose administration (1993-2001) revived the fortunes of the Democratic Party without reversing the nation's post-Reagan conservative swing, political journalist Tomasky (Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Beatles and America, Then and Now, 2014, etc.) shows how his brilliant and charismatic subject aimed at a political career from childhood. After a bruising education in state politics and multiple terms as the governor of Arkansas, he outmaneuvered better-known candidates to win the 1992 Democratic nomination. The first baby-boomer president, he was a New Democrat who aimed to "keep his distance from some 'old line' liberal ideas, adapt and modify a few Republican ones, and exist as an independent force separate from both parties." His success was spotty. Major bills such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, Defense of Marriage Act, and welfare reform were more popular with Republicans than Democrats and remain so. Most Republicans hated his national health plan, and they easily defeated it and then won a crushing victory in the 1994 midterm elections. Despite lofty goals in its "contract with America," this aggressive Congressional majority became obsessed with Clinton's spectacularly foolish sexual peccadilloes. Although legislators proclaimed that impure morals rendered a president unfit and the much-denounced "liberal media" shared their outrage, the electorate did not, and Clinton left office more popular than when he entered and remains popular. The author is clearly an admirer but is also painfully aware of Clinton's failures. Tomasky's slim, journalistic account contains few surprises for older readers familiar with that era, but they should wait a generation until the dust settles and scholars determine if Clinton deserves his current respectable rating in the pantheon of presidents.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Tomasky, Michael: BILL CLINTON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466329315&it=r&asid=4e144de70c32a04f003342ed008a8f9f. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466329315
Michael Tomasky: BILL CLINTON
(Oct. 15, 2016):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Michael Tomasky BILL CLINTON Times/Henry Holt (Adult Nonfiction) 25.00 ISBN: 978-1-62779-676-7
The latest in the excellent American Presidents series explores the life and career of Bill Clinton (b. 1946).In this entertaining biography of a virtuoso politician whose administration (1993-2001) revived the fortunes of the Democratic Party without reversing the nation’s post-Reagan conservative swing, political journalist Tomasky (Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!: The Beatles and America, Then and Now, 2014, etc.) shows how his brilliant and charismatic subject aimed at a political career from childhood. After a bruising education in state politics and multiple terms as the governor of Arkansas, he outmaneuvered better-known candidates to win the 1992 Democratic nomination. The first baby-boomer president, he was a New Democrat who aimed to “keep his distance from some ‘old line’ liberal ideas, adapt and modify a few Republican ones, and exist as an independent force separate from both parties.” His success was spotty. Major bills such as the North American Free Trade Agreement, Defense of Marriage Act, and welfare reform were more popular with Republicans than Democrats and remain so. Most Republicans hated his national health plan, and they easily defeated it and then won a crushing victory in the 1994 midterm elections. Despite lofty goals in its “contract with America,” this aggressive Congressional majority became obsessed with Clinton’s spectacularly foolish sexual peccadilloes. Although legislators proclaimed that impure morals rendered a president unfit and the much-denounced “liberal media” shared their outrage, the electorate did not, and Clinton left office more popular than when he entered and remains popular. The author is clearly an admirer but is also painfully aware of Clinton’s failures. Tomasky’s slim, journalistic account contains few surprises for older readers familiar with that era, but they should wait a generation until the dust settles and scholars determine if Clinton deserves his current respectable rating in the pantheon of presidents.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Michael Tomasky: BILL CLINTON." Kirkus Reviews, 15 Oct. 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA466551565&it=r&asid=6003bdda1c5bec7eb9792265e16fdeef. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A466551565
Daily beast
45.7 (Sept. 2012): p84.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2012 The American Spectator
http://spectator.org/
A highly agitated Michael Tomasky, one week before the Supreme Court's decision on Obamacare, proffers his delusions of recent American history before heading off for his weekly meeting with his anger management counselor:
The main thing that changed between then [40 years ago] and now, instead, is that rabidly right-wing billionaires started throwing many millions of dollars into politics, forming and funding groups like the Federalist Society, which have managed to assert their will. They represent about the same 30 percent they represented back when Barry Goldwater won the GOP nomination. It's just that now they're organized and lavishly backed, whereas before they weren't. In the 1960s, Nino Scalia would've ended up teaching at Notre Dame law school (where he belonged)--a crackpot speaker on a marginal rubber-chicken circuit that mainstream America could have blissfully ignored, instead of sitting on the highest court in the land imposing his 16th-century will on the rest of us.
And so: If we get a 5-4 ruling against the Affordable Health Care act or any part of it, this is the context to keep in mind. It will be another in a series of ferociously ideological one-vote-margin decisions from the court that we do not need history's perspective to decide is far and away America's most ideological.
(June 21, 2012)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Daily beast." The American Spectator, Sept. 2012, p. 84. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA302116039&it=r&asid=5b14f75fdae067060aab8813af6568a5. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A302116039
Michael Tomasky Named Editor of 'Guardian America' Web Site
E&P Staff
(May 3, 2007):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2007 Duncan McIntosh Company, Inc.
http://www.editorandpublisher.com/
Guardian America, the U.S. Web site of the British newspaper the Guardian, has named Michael Tomasky, a Washington-based journalist and political commentator, the site's editor. He will help develop the site's presence in the U.S.
"We already have a substantial and growing US audience and Michael's skills and experience will enable us to build on this success," Alan Rusbridger, Editor of the Guardian said in a written statement.
Tomasky's mission will be to enhance the site's coverage of U.S. news and develop a greater focus on international stories that would be of interest to U.S. readers. He was the editor of The American Prospect from 2003-2006, and before that he was the chief political correspondent for New York magazine. He has also bee a columnist at The Village Voice and The New York Observer. He's written two books and his work frequently appears in The New York Review of Books, and has written for the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times Book Review, Harper's, and The Nation.
"I'm thrilled to be joining The Guardian," Tomasky said in a statement. "It has a great tradition, one of the greatest in English-language journalism. And Alan's vision of its future is very exciting. I'm honoured to be given the opportunity to play a role in it."
E&P Staff
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Staff, E&P. "Michael Tomasky Named Editor of 'Guardian America' Web Site." Editor & Publisher, 3 May 2007. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA166488582&it=r&asid=a597be366a0857f03cc6c99ae872fb76. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A166488582
Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics
Ramesh Ponnuru
49.6 (Mar. 24, 1997): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1997 National Review, Inc.
http://www.nationalreview.com/
RUMORS of the Democratic Party's resurrection are greatly exaggerated. Two presidential victories in a row cannot begin to compensate for the continued erosion of the party at every other level of office. For three election cycles now, Democrats have lost or barely held onto state house majorities, state senate majorities, governorships, and U.S. Senate seats. After the 1992 election, there were only 2 states where Republicans controlled both the executive and the legislative branch, compared to 17 for the Democrats. Now the Republicans control 12 states to the Democrats' 6. Losing the U.S. House, of course, has been the unkindest cut of all.
Figuring out what went wrong has become something of a cottage industry for academics and journalists. Ronald Radosh -- not "Cardosh," as Bob Dole identified him during a presidential debate -- offers a neoconservative explanation: the Democrats veered too far left in the late Sixties and early Seventies, particularly on social issues, thereby alienating large parts of the New Deal coalition. A distinguished historian, Radosh has done an impressive amount of digging through correspondence and diaries. He sheds new light on the 1964 Democratic Convention in Atlantic City. The New Left regarded the seating of the segregationist Mississippi delegation as evidence of white liberal perfidy. But Radosh persuasively argues that the compromise offered was reasonable and in good faith. Radosh is also illuminating on the New Politics Convention of 1967, the impact of the Vietnam War on the liberal -labor coalition, the Left's deliberate provocation of violence at the Chicago convention of 1968, and George McGovern's disastrous party rules changes.
Divided They Fell is not, however, well written. About McGovern, Radosh writes, "Thus, in speech after speech, he pledged to grant amnesty for Vietnam War resisters, a measure that at the time was more than unpopular, and let college students know he understood their desire to experiment with drugs like marijuana and to favor abortion rights for women." He refers at one point to Ronald Reagan's "deft conviction." When Radosh tries to show that his hero, Sen. Henry "Scoop" Jackson, was not a warmonger, he writes, "Jackson, in fact, voted for the Cooper - Church Amendment, because he opposed widening of the Vietnam conflict." And what was that amendment? Don't look for an answer in this book.
Radosh's analysis has its weaknesses too. The notion that centrist Republicans and Democrats passed NAFTA over the objections of "the left and right extremes of their own parties" is simplistic. Liberals weren't "aghast" at Governor Clinton just because he allowed the execution of "a convicted cop-killer" during the 1992 primaries; the convict was severely brain-damaged and didn't even realize he was to be executed. A larger lapse is the absence from Radosh's narrative of the effects that changing social and economic conditions had on the New Deal coalition. In his introduction Radosh writes, "It is time . . . for a political history of the Democratic Party's fall from grace; one that reveals and explains the reasons for its slow decline." His book isn't it.
PERHAPS because they're both writing from within the Left, Jeff Faux and Michael Tomasky -- the former the head of a labor - Left think tank, the latter a left-wing journalist -- have written more interesting books. Both recognize the importance of the 1994 elections. Both urge Democrats to return to the class struggle --advice Tomasky peppers with disparaging references to "the people who own this country" and "the ruling class." Both consider it politically essential that government programs cover not just the downtrodden but also the middle class, as in single-payer health care. And both seek immigration curbs, not only for the standard left-wing economic reasons but also to preserve what Faux calls America's "common, if evolving, culture." Both are liberal nationalists. They differ, however, in their analyses of liberal decline.
Faux has written a polemic against neoliberals and New Democrats who have abandoned the party's old verities: "Government, which stood proudly at center stage" of "the Democratic story," is now "something to be apologized for, reinvented, or denied." Faux unapologetically advocates wage and price controls, easy money, renewable energy, defense cuts, and even bracket creep: in other words, the Greatest Hits of the 1970s. And oh yes, a transaction tax on the "global casino" of financial markets. The only bad idea missing is pension-fund socialism, which is probably an oversight.
Faux's attachment to statism is not just programmatic: he regards the Federal Government as the instrument and expression of "national community," even chastising environmentalists for their decentralizing rhetoric. Faux reveals a basic disdain for the private sector, in contrast, when he posits a trade-off between public-sector "investments" in education and private-sector investment in "chewing-gum machines."
Faux wants to revive liberal interest in macroeconomics. While conservatives tend to think of the economy in organic terms, for him the economy is "a powerful engine" that needs "brakes, thermostats, steering wheels, and so on." Liberals are no longer in the driver's seat because they fell for a Reaganite "trap." Like Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Faux regards the expansion of the federal deficit in the Eighties as a deliberate ploy to shrink government. When in mid 1995 Clinton endorsed balancing the budget by a time certain, Faux writes, "The trap snapped shut on sixty years of liberal progress." He should relax. A balanced budget is compatible with any level of federal spending, and liberals can always use regulations and mandates to build their coalitions. Faux is on firmer ground when worrying that unregulated international trade threatens social-democratic aspirations.
Tomasky addresses himself more narrowly to the Left, which he faults for its focus on "identity politics" and neglect of the "collective good." On the political consequences of separatism, for instance, he writes, "No matter which side builds the wall, it ends up in the same place." (If Faux's book has more hard-headed political analysis, Tomasky's has more zip.) Given this stance, it's not surprising that Tomasky would question Left orthodoxy on racial preferences. Like Alexander Cockburn and Michael Lind, he suspects the policy is a corporate plot to split the working class on racial lines. All his hand-wringing, however, leads to the tepid suggestion that class be added to "a formula that continues to rely on race, gender, and ethnicity to some extent."
Tomasky's thoughts are nonetheless sufficiently heretical that he must defend his left flank a lot. So liberal anti-Communism was "madness," Henry Wallace was misunderstood, and "The 1950s, of course, were a dark hole." He scolds his allies for automatically imputing racism to conservative critics of affirmative action or welfare -- one of the contemporary Left's most irritating features -- and then does it himself. The worst thing Tomasky can say about Louis Farrakhan is that his "elevation . . . is the best present the Christian Coalition and the Liberty Lobby could ever hope to receive" (whatever that means). This tactic reaches its comic apogee when Tomasky advises the Left to support gun rights "and watch, incidentally, as the National Rifle Association's position diminishes."
Tomasky's economic agenda for the Left is slightly less ambitious than Faux's. Although he sees "a corporate world ruled by dishonesty and cupidity, whose aims are fundamentally at odds with the needs of most working people," he has no plan to overthrow it. He wants mandatory on-site day care at large workplaces, subsidized day care everywhere else, a crackdown on discrimination in lending and housing, and a shorter work week (in effect "solving" unemployment by socializing it). "Trade agreements like NAFTA are probably inevitable," he writes, but the Left should insist on "provisions like an equalization tax on certain imports, so that goods made cheaply in the Third World cannot be imported to undersell the same goods that are made here more expensively" -- a demand that suggests that Tomasky is a little unclear on the concept of trade liberalization.
Faux and Tomasky may well be correct to suggest that class warfare can still yield political benefits for liberal Democrats. Conservatives like to say that everyone in America considers himself middle class, but Faux observes that that's the case only when "working class" isn't an option. One flaw of the Left's agenda, at least as presented by Faux, is that it's premised on a lot of gloom and doom about the economy. If conditions aren't as bad as he says -- and they're not -- they won't generate the political reactions for which he hopes.
More importantly, neither writer examines Democratic weaknesses on social/moral issues. Tomasky makes a stab at it, criticizing the Left's denigration of menial jobs and attempt to expand the welfare rolls as a political tactic. Faux seems to view social liberalism as a political liability that has created an image of the Democrats as "an alliance between the destitute and the fashionable"; hence his desire to keep middle-class voters thinking about their entitlements. But social issues aren't going to disappear, and people, like Faux and Tomasky, who can't refer to values without quotation marks are unlikely to address them successfully.
So if Faux and Tomasky have each found a piece of the puzzle --Democrats and liberalism would be better off abandoning "identity politics," and left-populist economics probably still has potential mass appeal -- other pieces are beyond their grasp. But Democrats need not join Radosh in despair for the future of their party. Bill Clinton seems to be guiding the Democrats toward social centrism coupled with a defense of government programs that benefit working people. It's not a perfect formula, but the evidence to date suggests that Mr. Clinton is more politically astute than any of these authors.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ponnuru, Ramesh. "Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics." National Review, 24 Mar. 1997, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA19254712&it=r&asid=10fc65445c294a819856981de3c70913. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A19254712
Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America
Martin Duberman
263.1 (July 1, 1996): p25.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 The Nation Company L.P.
http://www.thenation.com/about-and-contact
By Michael Tomasky. Free Press. 226 pp. $23.
Michael Tomasky is a trenchant political analyst and a gifted writer. His book, Left for Dead, addresses basic issues regarding the history, current agendas and future prospects of the left in the United States. He is earnestly committed to creating a more just society and to figuring out a politics that can get us there. I wanted to grant Tomasky all that up front, because so much in Left for Dead troubles, puzzles, even angers me. Richly combative, his basic argument runs like this: No substantial or unified left exists today. Instead there are disconnected shards. (No quarrel yet. Among these fragments, he believes the vanguard consists of ideologically riven identity movements based on race, ethnicity, gender and sexual orientation. It is a vanguard he greatly deplores.
I agree with much in his overview. The left has paid insufficient attention in recent years to class-based oppression and the mounting insecurities (and resentments) of blue-collar life. Meanwhile, the overclass--Michael Lind's now popular term--has succeeded in siphoning off more and more wealth; the white and nonwhite working classes fight each other for the crumbs, and the jobless underclass sinks deeper into immiseration. The status of most women and homosexuals remains second class and racism is endemic.
And matters may get worse. Tomasky predicts that welfare will be substantially scaled back, immigration curtailed, benefits to undocumented (and possibly even documented) people sharply reduced, affirmative action further assailed and health care left in limbo. In addition, he predicts and deplores the likelihood that as many federal programs devolve to the states (where business elites have even more control than in Washington), social services for the poor will be further reduced.
But Tomasky's often shrewd analysis of the particulars of our deteriorating situation, in which corporate power and greed loom large, does not prepare one for his overarching thesis: that the left itself, and particularly its multicultural vanguard, is the chief villain here. It is a theme he sounds relentlessly, even while acknowledging that the left has faced an uphill battle in this country, fundamentally because it opposes the agenda of corporate America," which has the influence and money to safeguard its domination. Having made that crucial point, he blandly declares it too obvious to dwell on: "Moaning about the fact is roughly as useful as complaining about the weather."
And so--as if power confers immunity--Tomasky turns his attention to itemizing the sins and failures of the left. He excoriates us for a host of particular policy "missteps," like the "disastrously wrong-headed" attempt at court-mandated busing ("disastrous" because it "put workingclass whites and poor blacks at was' and the "misguided" attempt to introduce "rainbow curricula" into the schools. He sees in these efforts a mistaken overall reliance by the left on "litigating social change." But hasn't the working class always been racially riven--that is, when blacks were allowed to join it? And haven't federal legislation and judicial opinions been essential tools in past struggles for social justice--like school integration and the right to form unions? If these victories" have not been permanent solutions, they have surely been worth having.
What of Tomasky's accusation that the left has abandoned class politics in favor of organizing around issues of cultural identity? He does not doubt that identity politics has had "a salutary effect on the broader culture"--has, for example, opened up opportunities for women and for racial, ethnic and sexual minorities. But these partial gains have, in his view, come at a gigantic cost. The emphasis on helping minorities has pushed the white working class to the right, and in the process has destroyed "civic community." Surely the conservative cultural views of portions of the working class that either can't find work or, when it can, must take jobs with low wages and no benefits have made a contribution to that rightward turn. Tomasky emphasizes the need to get people off welfare and into salaried work, and he quotes Marx (no less) on "productive activity [being] 'the life of the species.'" But productive for whom?
Flipping hamburgers and cleaning toilets full time and forever (not as temporary ways of piecing out college tuition) isn't the equivalent of "real jobs at good wages"--which Tomasky himself calls the ultimate answer." Forcing people into tedious, humiliating jobs reinscribes rather than resolves the essential problems of corporate callousness and cupidity.
But it is the left he blames for failing to come up with substantive programs to solve the country's ills, indicting it for having "no analysis of what unites people." Tomasky thinks he knows what does: "Enlightenment universalism...the philosophical bedrock ... of advanced Western society as a whole." It is urgent, he insists, that people on the left "stretch beyond" their cultures and identities, beyond a "shriveling coalition of out-groups," beyond demands that have nothing to do with a larger concern for our common humanity and everything to do with a narrow concern for fragmented and supposedly oppositional cultures."
Note the "supposedly." Elsewhere Tomasky refers to the "superficially radical and transgressive" ideas of multiculturalism. But declaring certain ideas superficial does not make them so--specially since it is not clear that Tomasky has absorbed them. It seems to me he has to draw his chair in closer and listen harder to the conversations taking place on the multicultural left. The radical redefinitions of gender and sexuality that are under discussion in feminist and queer circles contain a potentially transformative challenge to all "regimes of the normal."
The work of theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jeffrey Weeks, Mafiorie Garber and Judith Butler represents a deliberate, systematic affront to fixed modes of being and patterns of power. They offer brilliant (if not incontrovertible) postulates about such universal matters as the historicity and fluidity of sexual desire, the performative nature of gender, and the multiplicity of impulses, narratives and loyalties that lie within us all. This is no ersatz sideshow; these are not mere rhetorical fillips" or pious afterthoughts." If only people on the nonfeminist, nonqueer left would care to listen, they would hear a set of propositions that could dynamite entrenched hierarchies of superior/inferior-that have everything to do, in short, with "a larger concern for our common humanity." (I hasten to add that such ideas discomfort many within the feminist and gay movements as well.)
Tomasky seems unaware, as well, of the longstanding debate that has been going on among multiculturalists themselves about the adequacy of identity labels like "black" or "gay" or "Latino." Many minority intellectuals are aware that in order to join with others in fighting for a common cause, they must surrender the expectation that that cause will represent and express all aspects of their own special, wonderful selves. It is the bargain one makes, and the price one pays for becoming political.
Still, many remain troubled about the inability of overarching categories ("black," gay," etc.) to speak to the complex, overlapping identities of individual lives; uncomfortable about referring to "communities" as if they were homogenous units rather than hothouses of contradiction; concerned about the inadequacy of efforts to create bridges between marginalized people and then outward to broader constituencies. Yet one holds on to a group identity, despite its insufficiencies, because it's the closest most non-mainstream people have ever gotten to having a political home. Yes, identity politics reduces and simplifies; it is a kind of prison. But it is also, paradoxically, a haven. It is at once confining and empowering. And in the absence of alternative havens, group identity will for many continue to be the appropriate site of resistance and the main source of comfort.
Tomasky wants us to transcend these allegiances and unite under the higher values of Enlightenment rationalism--to become "universal human beings with universal rights." But it is difficult to march as a "civic community" with a "common culture" when the legitimacy of our differences as minorities has not yet been more than superficially acknowledged--let alone safeguarded. You cannot link arms under a universalist banner when you can't find your own name on it. Cultural unity cannot be purchased at the cost of cultural erasure.
Tomasky's appeal "to connect with those unlike oneself" is unimpeachable--but he's addressed it to the wrong crowd. Many of us involved in identity politics have been trying to connect, have been looking for venues in Khich to "reason" with opponents over issues relating to race, gender and sexuality. Tomasky claims we have "simply written off" "many potential allies." Well, our efforts at dialogue could certainly improve, but they have not been as nothing. Yet we've met mostly with patronization and hostility--that is, when we really try to talk about our lives, rather than pretend that we are "just folks" who want to join up. It is not our interest-group politics that turn off Tomasky's purported legions of allies--it is our lives.
Such support as has been forthcoming has been precisely of the kind Tomasky himself offers: Sounding like Bruce Bawer or Andrew Sullivan, he applauds that strain of gay activism "that has been able to show straight America that 'we're just like you.'" He rails against a less assimilationist, more militant gay activism, writing angrily of ACT UP's "deeply misguided" demonstration inside St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York in the early nineties. Forgetting that real injustice fuels real outrage, he never mentions the historic violence the church has long visited on homosexuals.
Reading Tomasky's denunciation of the left as "intolerant, unreasonable" and "against the spirit of critical inquiry," one wonders why the right-wing bigots who embody those attitudes come off relatively unscathed. Surely it is not multicultural leftists but the Jerry Falwells of the world, with their blithe ignorance of biblical scholarship and their hate-filled sermons on "woman's place" and the abomination of homosexuality," who more typically treat "critical inquiry" as a joke.
Similarly, one wonders about Tomasky's emphasis when, on the subject of race, he asserts that most people, confronted with hard evidence and compelling moral arguments, could overcome racism and think and act in a better way." But haven't "most people" already heard a mountain of "compelling moral arguments" and converted them into proof that blacks are congenitally lazy, stupid and ungrateful? Tomasky accuses the left of lacking faith in the mass of people to be fair," with the result that people have no faith in us." Is that why the left is unpopular-people are angry with us for not properly crediting their high moral purpose? Give us a break!
Another peculiar emphasis: Tomasky characterizes the corporate world as ruled by dishonesty and cupidity" and having aims "fundamentally at odds with the needs of most working people," yet directs most of his fire at the left's abandonment of the working class. But the business, social and religious elites that rule this country are neither heeding working-class grievances nor leading the nation toward his goal of a polities that transcends fixed group interests." The ideal of "civic empathy" that Tomasky posits is surely desirable. What we need to figure out is how to get the country's ruling elites to pay more than lip service to it.
Remember that good old sixties term, "the patriarchy"? It should be resurrected, this time with the proper prefixes attached: white and heterosexist. And--against Tomasky's advice--we need to start talking seriously again about ways to dismantle capitalism. Another great new idea courtesy of the left.
Martin Duberman, Distinguished Professor of History at CUNY's Lehman College and the Graduate School, is the author, most recently, Of Midlife Queer (Scribner).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Duberman, Martin. "Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America." The Nation, 1 July 1996, p. 25+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18433325&it=r&asid=1205fe069b1fba60c77bebfe10656fc2. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18433325
Left for Dead
Barbara Ehrenreich
60.7 (July 1996): p40.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 The Progressive, Inc.
http://www.progressive.org/
by Michael Tomasky Free Press. 240 pages. $23.00.
There are books that a reviewer feels condemned, rather than assigned, to read, books so intensely irritating that the reviewer has to wonder what she has done to earn the pitiless enmity of the editors who assigned it. "Where did I go wrong?" is of course the question the book itself wants me to dwell on, because Michael Tomasky's thesis is that the left has willfully screwed up, and it has screwed up largely because of people like me.
At least I think "like me." Tomasky's left--the bad, screw-up left--will not be immediately recognizable to anyone who has ever joined a union picket line, or sat at a sidewalk table to register voters, or campaigned against the local toxic waste dump.
His thesis is that, sometime in the last twenty years, "the left" abandoned the straightforward issues of economics and democratic rights that appeal to the white middle class in order to concentrate, perversely, on a sterile PC-ness that is offensive to white people generally and probably also to the black middle class. While the American majority longed for someone to speak forthrightly about issues like failing wages and campaign reform, we were indulging ourselves in an orgy of identity-based self-righteousness and craven pandering to same.
Now obviously the truth of this depends on how you define "the left," and I should admit right off to defining it in a way that automatically fends off much of Tomasky's criticism. As he quotes me (approvingly) from an essay on the limits of multiculturalism, "the left isn't multi-anything ... [It] has to be an attempt to find, in the rich diversity of the human world, some point of moral unity that brings us all together."
From my point of view, the type of person who, for example, disrupts a progressive conference because of some microscopic slight to women, or gay people, or people of color--and I have seen this happen all too often--is not "left": maybe a potential constituent for the left, if that hyper-refined sensitivity to injustice could be directed toward an actual real-world problem, but, for now, a PC brat.
But if my definition is overly selective, so, in the opposite way, is Tomasky's. You will not find, in Left for Dead, such groups Citizens for Tax Justice, Teamsters for a Democratic Union, Wider Opportunities for Women, the New Party, Acorn, Democratic Socialists of America, or a host of other organizations focused, for the most part, on the kind of issues that Tomasky approves of. Instead, he goes after a straw man stuffed with bits and pieces of post-modernism, black nationalism, and militant identity politics. This is a "left," previously unknown to me, that made a cause" out of defending Ben Chavis from sexual-harassment charges, that militantly opposes transracial adoptions, and to which "quality of life" is a "dirty phrase."
It takes a certain level of malice to construct a target that so neatly fits the missiles pitched at it. Take Tomasky's handling of feminism. A book about the failings of the left should, one would think, go after the feminist left, but Tomasky blows off the possibility that such a thing could even exist, observing that "divided as feminists may have been, one basic belief united them: that the old, class-based politics wasn't relevant anymore." So what about the host of feminists, myself included, who are always railing about issues like low wages, child care, health care, and welfare? Are we not feminists, or are these not "class" issues, too?
Sometimes it takes duplicity to make the target fit the attack. "It's the fashion within today's left," Tomasky says, "to scorn democracy and reason and progress as `big, shaggy ideas,' in the phrase of writer Katha Pollitt, that have run their course and been exposed for the hoaxes they are. Criticisms like Pollitt's amount to an attack on the Enlightenment, the movement that advanced the notions of rights and reason and secular anti-authoritarianism."
Now anyone who has read Pollitt knows that she is one of the nation's most fearless promoters of democracy, reason, progress, rights, and secular anti-authoritarianism, so upon hitting this paragraph I called her up and asked in what context she had ever referred to democracy, etc., as "big, shaggy ideas." She explained the context, which involved the degradation of these ideals into manipulative rhetoric during the immediate postwar years. "And the Enlightenment," I asked her, "did you ever say a mean thing about that?" Of course not, she said. "In fact, I think we ought to try it."
Tomasky also misrepresents the views of another left feminist, Ellen Willis. He quotes her definition of identity politics: "that membership in an oppressed group ... determines my legitimacy as a political person, the validity of my political ideas, and indeed, my moral right to express them." This, mind you, was from an essay in which Willis was highly critical of identity politics. She was trying to make a distinction between "identity politics" and identity-based political movements like feminism. But Tomasky doesn't get the distinction, and proceeds to lump all movements based on gender or ethnicity into the pernicious "identity" camp. Worse, he makes it sound, a few pages later, as if Willis were endorsing what she was in fact critiquing.
Why not acknowledge, straight out, that Willis was ahead of him on this one, and that the critique of the crasser manifestations of identity politics was well advanced--by a feminist--before he ever got to it?
Of course, Tomasky is hardly alone in any of his criticisms of the left, but the last thing he seems to want is company. Left for Dead doesn't even wave to Todd Gitlin, with his book-long critique of identity politics, or Ralph Nader, who rejects as distracting "gonadal politics," those gay and feminist issues that get in the way of his economic agenda, or Michael Lerner, who is forever trying to get the left to take up the kind of "family values" that presumably appeal to the white working class.
I happen to disagree with these guys in fundamental ways, but they are as much "the left" as I am or Tomasky is. The left, as always, fairly seethes with self-criticism, factionalism, and inwardly directed rage. You can't make it into something it isn't (monolithically, self-righteously, and in the worst sense PC), and then go after it for not being what you wish it would be.
Tomasky's description of the left and all that is wrong with it has the virtue of consistency, but it is the dreary consistency of a tautology: The left is a bunch of losers. That's what they are, and that's what's wrong with them. And to establish this, he ticks off a number of issues on which, he says, the left finds itself on the losing side: immigration, welfare, affirmative action, and health care. Each of these gets chapter-length treatment, including less-than-entirely-relevant historical overviews, but let me focus on the two I know most about--welfare and health care.
The left's embrace of welfare is a screw-up, according to Tomasky, because: 1) it puts us on the wrong side of the American majority; and 2) we have "no solutions"--just "dewy-eyed" demands for higher benefits. Now there are a couple of problems with this. First, "the left" was never exactly eager to embrace welfare as a legitimate economic-justice issue. Left welfare advocates Frances Fox Piven and Richard Cloward have led a long, uphill, and not entirely successful struggle to get welfare a place on the progressive agenda. Second, higher benefits are a "solution"--if, that is, the problem you are trying to solve is poverty. Not that those of us fighting welfare reform from the left have ever slighted other elements of a "solution"--like child care and higher wages.
Tomasky seems to have swallowed the conservative critique of welfare--that it engenders "miserable dependence in those stuck in its maw." Now here's where a little "identity politics" might come in handy. Nowhere in his discussion of welfare does Tomasky show signs of noticing that adult welfare recipients are not just any old grifters and scammers. They are women with small children. They are not "not working," as Tomasky asserts, they are raising children, and doing so under the most difficult conditions imaginable--as single parents, living in poverty and in what are often dangerous neighborhoods.
Furthermore, Piven and Cloward and their claque (in which I am proud to claim membership) have consistently framed their argument for higher benefits in the kind of class terms Tomasky ought to admire. Welfare benefits, like the minimum wage, set a kind of maximum misery level against which all wages can be judged. Raise the benefits and it gets easier for working people--starting with the single mothers among them--to press for higher wages, hence increasing the upward pressure on wages throughout the work force.
On the health-care issue, you'd think the left might win a moment of grudging admiration from Tomasky. At least for a while there, we were on the majority side, the side of a single-payer system (if the polls taken in the early 1990s are to be believed). Tomasky recounts the tragic dissipation of this majority in the face of Harry-and-Louise ads and a pusillanimous White House, but then whips around and blames the left again--for putting "too much emphasis on the uninsured" rather than emphasizing "uninsured and underinsured alike" (the latter group, of course, containing the great white middle class).
But is this true? Tomasky offers no evidence of this single-minded concern with the "37 million" (the number is now over 40 million) uninsured. Single-payer advocates I know, myself included, pitched their appeals to the underinsured and the spottily insured as well as to those completely left out. Besides, middle-class people themselves move in and out of coverage--as they lose jobs, or spouses, or decide to go freelance. And even if that weren't so, isn't 37 million a pretty big number anyway? Or do we need a full 51 percent of the population before an issue merits attention?
Not that Left for Dead is utterly without merit. Maybe there's something salubrious, after all, about being slapped around for 200 pages by a cranky fellow yelling "Screw-up!" He's right that the left doesn't have, as far as I know, a clear stand on immigration, and we certainly haven't done all we could to answer the hypocritical "color-blind" arguments against affirmative action. Yes, leftists have pandered at times to black nationalists (Jesse Jackson and Cornel West's participation in the Million Man March being a regrettable example, as Tomasky says). And we have, in too many instances, mistaken politically correct language purifications for genuine political change.
So OK, hit me again. These are failings that call for fearless self-criticism and analysis.
I would like to read a serious analytical account of how it was that postmodernism came to be mistaken for leftism on so many campuses, and of how, in all too many cases, a sour identity politics replaced a self-confident feminism and black pride. Not to mention a thorough history of the class war initiated by the corporate elite in the 1970s, with its pro-capitalist propaganda juggernaut and lavish funding for the institutional infrastructure of the new right.
But Tomasky is not likely to be the source of the criticisms we need to hear. After all, his biggest beef with the left is not that we take the wrong positions, but that we too often end up with a minority position--advocating against welfare "reform," for example, when huge majorities seem to favor it. Now, to excoriate the left for not being on the winning side, as determined by Harris and Gallup, is to seriously misapprehend what a "left" can be.
Democrats and Republicans base their platforms on the latest poll and, by so doing, they do indeed win elections. But, ipso facto, they also engender the withering contempt for politics that corrodes the entire polity.
What is different about a left, a genuine left, is we represent a politics driven by principle, not by polls. Tomasky notes approvingly that the left's pro-choice stance is shared by a majority of the public. But we were pro-choice before the majority was: Was that a screw-up? And if public opinion should revert to the anti-womanism of the Christian right, would Tomasky have us abandon our pro-choice position?
The left is doomed--quixotically, from Tomasky's perspective--to take up one unpopular issue after another. We opposed the Gulf War, and most of us opposed it no less when the polls shot from 50 to 90 percent approval of the war. Or, to give an example closer to Tomasky's heart: Leftists have been advocating the kind of populist economic politics that he espouses for nearly twenty years, and for many of those years, the American majority did not seem to agree with us at all. In fact, they kept voting for guys like Reagan, Gingrich, and Bush, who were cheerfully redistributing the wealth to the wealthy. Surely Tomasky doesn't think we should have abandoned our populist economics in, say, 1984, in order to ingratiate ourselves with the majority du jour.
The American left, throughout history, has taken stands that seemed bizarre or extreme to large numbers of their fellow citizens: in favor of abolishing slavery, or giving women the right to vote, or keeping the United States out of various wars. There is no glory, of course, in taking stands just epater le bourgeoisie, or in refusing ever to compromise. But standing on principle, including deeply unpopular principle, is the business of the left. If we have screwed up in any serious way, it is by failing to convey this lonely mission to people like Tomasky.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Ehrenreich, Barbara. "Left for Dead." The Progressive, July 1996, p. 40+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18410235&it=r&asid=e3a1ae6b7158db26d5ff07e987eea114. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18410235
Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America
Matthew Dallek
28.6 (June 1996): p53.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 Washington Monthly Company
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/
In October 1992 Michael Tomasky, then a "card-carrying representative of the Village Voice," interviewed Newt Gingrich about the Georgia representative's political future. I'd like to be Speaker of the House, Gingrich told his interviewer, and I think I can do it within six years. Fat chance, Tomasky thought.
Just over two years later, the unthinkable occurred: Republicans won control of Congress for the first time in four decades and Gingrich, the firebreathing conservative, became Speaker of the House of Representatives. "Where have we gone wrong?" Tomasky, now a columnist at New York magazine, wondered. Why has the left "completely lost touch with the regular needs of regular Americans?" The answers, Tomasky writes in Left for Dead, lie largely in the multicultural politics, that dominate the current left-wing agenda. Around 1970 American radicals began to forge new political alliances based on race, ethnicity, gender, and sexual orientation. Abandoning the more traditional, classbased politics of the union movement and the universalist ethos of the civil rights struggle, the left splintered into a wide array of racial and gender groups that seemed more interested in railing against "racist power structures" than in developing serious solutions to national economic and social ills.
The results, Tomasky argues, have been disastrous. Today radical feminists lead crusades against pornography, black activists inveigh against white racists, student radicals write rules banning hate speech on campus, and some gay and lesbian groups have asserted their equal rights by storming St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York and exposing themselves on Fifth Avenue. The agendas, Tomasky argues, are narrow-minded, divisive, and irrelevant to the bulk of the American public. Relatively small in number, today's multiculturalists are so enfeebled that they have to rely on the courts to "impose solutions that lack broad public support." And if you don't support the official party line? You're "branded," Tomasky writes like someone who knows, "as an enemy of progress."
So how can the left resurrect itself? To answer that question, Tomasky examines four issues--welfare, immigration, affirmative action, and health care--on which the left is particularly weak. In each case, he makes clear that the left is bereft of ideas--interested primarily in expanding current programs while rejecting most attempts at reform. Instead of conceding, for example, that illegal immigration is a legitimate problem requiring humane solutions, many progressives simply denounce proposals to stem the tide of illegal immigration as xenophobic and racist.
Tomasky identifies a number of reforms that the left can, and should, support: increased border patrols, classbased affirmative action, a single-payer health care system. But he recognizes that it will take more than just a few policy modifications to revive his moribund cohort. It will require a new vision of left-wing politics. First, the cultural agendas that are so popular must give way to a more universalist orientation that emphasizes "our common humanity." It's okay, Tomasky explains, to acknowledge group differences based on race, gender, and sexual orientation. But to become an influential political force, the left needs to "accept definitions of people ... that stretch beyond" the categories of race and gender. Second, progressives need to address the needs of American workers. A program based on shared economic grievances that protects U.S. labor from foreign competition, abolishes corporate welfare, and "put[s] people's livelihoods first" might appeal to a broader cross-section of working-and middle-class Americans.
There is little that's surprising in the 200-some pages of this book. Tomasky's vision of a class-based radicalism is at least a century old. In the 1890s Southern populists tried to unite black and white sharecroppers behind a program of sweeping economic reform; during the Great Depression, Communists and union organizers mobilized industrial workers of different races and ethnicities; and in the 1960s the Civil Rights movement attracted significant support from white unions.
Still, this is a compelling book. Tomasky's main argument--the left is unpopular, has no overarching vision that might attract large numbers of Americans, and has contributed, unwittingly, to the rise of the right--seems difficult to dispute. He offers a rarity in American political letters: a thoughtful, pragmatic critique of contemporary American radicalism. Eloquent, forceful, and above all compassionate, Left for Dead recognizes much that is noble about the current left, including concern for the downtrodden and vocal opposition to discrimination.
Tomasky, like so many other critics, recognizes that the left has "lost the ability to talk to Americans collectively about the things that concern them most: their jobs, wages, and standard of living; their quality of life (a dirty phrase to progressives); what they're getting from the government in return for their tax dollars; the life of their communities and the safety of their neighborhoods...." But his call for a new left focused on economic issues, although no panacea, is reminiscent of the best in the American radical tradition.
Resurrecting the left is a tall order, and I wouldn't place any money on an imminent radical revival. But you never know. Remember the American right of the early 1960s? Ridiculed and reviled by virtually every mainstream journalist, politician, and scholar, conservatives in those years began to distance themselves from extremists, campaign for like-minded political candidates, and develop positive programs that could appeal to disaffected Americans.
"They were smart," Tomasky writes. "They had new ideas and pushed them with vigor, and they took every opening their limping opposition gave them. They adapted." Like the '60s conservatives, today's progressives face a choice: they can continue the internecine struggles over narrow cultural and symbolic issues; or they can begin, as Tomasky suggests, to develop a more universalist, practical, and appealing approach to the nation's social and economic woes.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Dallek, Matthew. "Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America." Washington Monthly, June 1996, p. 53+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18383058&it=r&asid=485469f032e2d5ee19669b4e4d8b96bf. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18383058
Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America
Mary Carroll and Gilbert Taylor
92.17 (May 1, 1996): p1474.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/ala/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist_publications/booklist/booklist.cfm
Tomasky, Michael. Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America June 1996. 240p. Free Press, $23 (0-684-8270-6). DDC: 973.329.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Carroll, Mary, and Gilbert Taylor. "Left for Dead: The Life, Death, and Possible Resurrection of Progressive Politics in America." Booklist, 1 May 1996, p. 1474+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18294013&it=r&asid=75fc01b86baa77e2066a31ecc4de466d. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18294013
Left For Dead
David Brooks
.125 (Fall 1996): p116.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 1996 The National Affairs, Inc.
Recently, I took part in a series of auditions for a television talk show. I'm a conservative white male so I was put on a panel with a black male liberal and a white Jewish feminist. On the next panel, there was a blond feminist, a white male centrist, and a liberal Catholic priest. Another panel had a conservative thrown in with a gay male and a black woman cartoonist. Filing in for subsequent auditions, I saw a rabbi and a Hispanic man, and, if you had hung around for the whole series, no doubt you would have seen a pro-life Eskimo, a Perot-minded Asian American, and probably a lesbian with an interest in financial-services reform.
The experience was just another reminder of how influential the diversity movement has become, how much a part of our daily lives. Corporations, presidential administrations, even conservative think tanks, now assume that a dominant feature of a person's identity is to be found in race, gender, and sexual orientation. Most people, fierce right wingers included, feel that there is something wrong if an office is comprised mostly of white males. Biology is destiny.
Even without policy manifestations such as affirmative action, the Left has scored a dramatic victory on this point. For it was the left-wing identity movements that instigated this incredible emphasis on race, gender, and sexual orientation. And now in the full flower of this success comes a series of books and articles saying that it has all been a dreadful mistake. These liberal and left-wing writers argue that identity politics is a cul-de-sac, which has ghettoized left-wing ideas and allowed the white middle class to drift to the right. It's time to reduce the importance of identity politics, they say, and go back to the class war.
Now they tell us.
This critique comes from two directions. First from those on the Marxist left, who don't like the way class is now added as an afterthought in the gender, race, and class troika. Then there are the Democratic politicos who don't think it's possible to build a majority solely on the backs of aggrieved out-groups.
This is an argument the class-not-race crowd is going to lose. It's not going to be possible to go back to an economics-based leftism. In the intellectual sphere, the race and gender postmodernists have simply smashed the rationalist assumptions that are the building blocks of intellectual liberalism at mid century. Once you've given up on the idea of fixed meanings and normal categories (like male and female), you can't suddenly turn back and embrace Thomas Paine. In the political sphere, those pining for the old days of class warfare are longing for a set of working, class-based political alliances that can never be re-created. The class-not-race crew hasn't even managed to propose radical solutions or to demonstrate that they can generate mass support. It could be that they are the new neoliberals - able to write superb op-eds, able to imagine winning coalitions, but unable to energize a mass movement or a governing majority. It's likely, in sum, that for all its flaws, identity politics is the only liberal and left-wing option.
One can now find class-not-race arguments in Mother Jones, the Progressive, the Washington Post, and even Ms., but the most intelligent and sustained version of this thesis can be found in Michael Tomasky's new book, Left For Dead.(*) Tomasky nearly matches David Frum's book Dead Right for sustained intelligence, critical thinking, and clear argumentation.
Tomasky's first point is that the Left has to rediscover a language that will allow it to talk to Americans collectively, as a common people. He reports that there is open contempt among his fellow leftists for words that might transcend ethnic boundaries, words like citizen, American, even worker. "To use the word citizens is to exclude illegal aliens, and is thus xenophobic and probably racist," he reports. To use the word American is simply to adopt a code word in leftist circles for straight white men. And the Left even shies away from the hoary old word, workers, Tomasky writes, because that is to discriminate against people on welfare.
He traces the rise of identity politics back to the anti-colonialism movement of the 1950s and 1960s. During this period, the universalistic ethos that had previously dominated left-wing thinking became associated with imperialism and oppression. While Europeans claimed universal human rights by discarding vestiges of national culture and history (the ancien regime), the anti-colonialist forces believed they could only throw off Western imperialism by reasserting their particular national culture and tradition. Frantz Fanon in Algeria championed his own form of nationalism, and so there was less emphasis on the common brotherhood of man.
Tomasky describes the leaders of the American New Left not as precursors to the broader left-wing movements of the late 1960s and 1970s but as, at best, a transition movement - a bridge between the universalistic Old Left and the new identity politics. The New Leftists were white men who preached universal values. By 1968, Tomasky says, the counterculture was in fact several tangentially related countercultures - black, gay, feminist, etc. - their differences being temporarily masked by their common opposition to the Vietnam war.
These successor movements, he continues, have taken quite easily to postmodernism, a spirit that, quoting David Harvey, "swims, even wallows, in the fragmentary and the chaotic currents of change as if that is all there is." The postmodernists don't believe in "meta-narratives," universal explanations of human nature; instead, they look to the particular or accidental explanation, or sometimes to no explanation at all. Tomasky writes:
We can see now why the right has full purchase on words like "citizen," or on notions like "standards," in school curricula, in art, or whatever. Equality of opportunity? For whom? What's equality? What's "opportunity?" (Some even ask, What's "of?") We can now understand why the left makes no strenuous effort to organize beyond narrowly defined groups, and why attempts to connect the particular concerns of groups to the broader collective good are halfhearted at best: the notion that there even is a collective good is regarded with deep suspicion. And if that's your view, why do mass politics? If society is incorrigibly racist, sexist and homophobic, if extant power structures cannot be changed because they'll simply recreate themselves, what's the point of doing anything, of leaving one's room?
Tomasky's criticism of the Left is broad and deep. He points out that, for most of the century, the Left reinvented itself every 15 years. But now it has been 25 years since the identity movements came to dominate. What, Tomasky asks, has followed it? "We've got no cohesive movement, nothing that we can really call new - just worn out simulacra of the New Left movements." He sums it up: "The particularism and intolerance, the miserly spirit, the self-righteousness and sniping, the plain lack of great and unifying ideas - and ideals - have brought a once great movement to its knees."
He then goes on to show, in more concrete terms, how identity politics has strangled left-wing responses to complex policy problems. For example, the Left treated California's Proposition 187 as a racist assault on minorities. But Tomasky reminds us that 40 percent to 50 percent of blacks supported the proposition, as did nearly half the Asian voters and nearly a quarter of Hispanic voters. Clearly, something more complicated was at stake than simple white racism. On welfare, Tomasky criticizes his fellow leftists for lumping Charles Murray and Daniel Patrick Moynihan together as members of a reactionary and racist assault on blacks. On issue after issue, Tomasky argues that the Left has opted for multicultural sainthood over practical political influence.
For those of us who are not political allies of the Left, much of Tomasky's indictment will be familiar, though it's fun to read these self-flagellatory exercises anyway. The more interesting issue is whether Tomasky has a program to get out of the abyss. To his credit, he tries. He offers both a theoretical framework for a new leftism and a set of policy ideas.
Actually, the theoretical framework is anything but new. He wants his comrades to reject postmodernism and return to enlightenment universalism. Tomasky pays homage to Locke, Hume, Voltaire, Jefferson, and Paine, as proponents of a conception of universal rights and bonds that bind people together:
We were taught as schoolchildren that all people are "created equal" and are endowed with certain "unalienable rights," as Thomas Jefferson's Declaration of Independence put it. This is our ideal and our one true national religion, an ideal by which America, in Ralph Waldo Emerson's words, stands as an "asylum of all nations" in which "the energy of Irish, Germans, Swedes, Poles and Cossacks, and all the European tribes - of the Africans, and the Polynesians, will construct a new race ... as vigorous as the new Europe which came out of the smelting pot of the Dark Ages."
This is all sensible and familiar. But if you walk among, say, the groves of academe and watch professors toting journals like Social Text and volumes by Richard Rorty, does it really seem plausible to imagine that they can be persuaded to give that all up in favor of David Hume and Thomas Jefferson? There are some disadvantages to a life on the left, but surely one of the advantages is that you get to thrill to the radically new, you get to smash conventions and to dismiss old categories. Conservatives have a disposition, not always a cheery one, which allows them to pay reverence to the past. The academic left these days is so in love with undermining the fundamentals of all past understandings that it is impossible to imagine them going back and championing any sort of historical revival, especially one that celebrates Enlightenment rationalism.
Besides, they've already cut that branch off. The novelist and critic David Lodge once wrote that much of current literary theory involves cutting off the branch you are sitting on - making the judgment that it is impossible to make judgments, declaring that it is impossible to make a coherent declaration. As Tomasky recognizes, the identity politics of "out-groups" is infused with what Michael Walzer calls a sort of "anarchism/nihilism" that challenges accepted notions like rationality and morality. If you think that rationality and morality are problematic notions, it's pretty hard to go back, to look at La Madelaine in Paris and to decide that the French philosophes really were on to something. That is, you're not only disagreeing with Enlightenment thinking, you're undermining its most basic assumptions.
Reviewing Left For Dead in the Nation, Martin Duberman illustrates how far the multicultural left has gone:
The radical redefinitions of gender and sexuality that are under discussion in feminist and queer circles contain a potentially transformative challenge to all "regimes of the normal." The work of theorists like Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Jeffrey Weeks, Marjorie Garber and Judith Butler represents a deliberate systemic affront to fixed modes of being and patterns of power. They offer brilliant (if not incontrovertible) postulates about such universal matters as the historicity and fluidity of sexual desire, the performative nature of gender, and the multiplicity of impulses, narratives and loyalties that lie within us all. This is no ersatz sideshow; these are not "rhetorical fillips," or "pious afterthoughts." If only people on the nonfeminist, nonqueer left would care to listen, they would hear a set of propositions that could dynamite entrenched hierarchies of superior/inferior - that have everything to do, in short, with "a larger concern for our common humanity."
So it is hard to imagine that the highbrow left can, in the near term, forsake the current excitement of that kind of radical smashing of categories and return to the theoretical framework that was the basis for the left-wing coalitions of the mid twentieth century.
What about the more practical left? If the intellectual left is going to remain estranged from a class-based political style, maybe it is nonetheless possible to fashion a set of wonkish policies that unite the middle and lower economic strata. That is to say, maybe Washington liberals can forge a successful coalition without feminist writers, black intellectuals, and the rest of the campus coterie.
One of Bill Clinton's clear successes in the 1992 campaign was in demonstrating that he was not a captive of identity politics. He did it by fatuously attacking Sister Souljah, and also by placing the economy and the middle class at the center of his rhetoric in a way that few Democratic candidates had done since Lyndon Johnson. But Clinton had trouble governing in a way that showed he was no tool of identity politics. The gays in the military and a woman as Attorney General were only the first of a series of identity-politics gestures undertaken by the Clinton administration. The failure of the Clinton stimulus package in 1993 revealed how difficult it was for a Democrat to pursue economic activism, to construct a coalition on economic and class lines.
The class-not-race types believe that, if Clinton had read his 1992 mandate more accurately, he would not have turned the first few months of his administration into a payoff for identity groups. That would have made it easier to pass healthcare reform. One of the strategies behind health-care reform, after all, was to create a huge middle-class entitlement in order to create an entitlement majority, a middle- and lower-class core that could be counted upon to look gratefully at big government. In fact, it's doubtful that the middle class would have stuck with the health-care reform plan even if the Clintons had not messed with gays in the military and such. It's doubtful that any dramatic expansion of government power could sustain support these days.
That's because Americans no longer feel that they are all in the same boat, that they will rise and fall together. Recent evidence comes from Stanley Greenberg, the president's former pollster. He asked groups of voters to rank themselves on a scale of zero to 10 on how they thought they were doing financially compared to the rest of the country. Both men and women thought they were doing slightly better than the average American, though, in fact, Greenberg was polling voters with incomes below the national norm. These voters tended to think that America was headed in the wrong direction, but that they, by virtue of their hard work, would do O.K. As journalist John Judis remarked, "An American worker of the 1950s would never have distinguished his fate from that of the 'average American.'" But today, nobody claims proudly that he is representative of the "common man." Perhaps a veteran of World War II felt that his fate would be determined by the success or failure of a grand universal economic enterprise, but workers today are less likely to think in collective terms.
The voters Greenberg spoke to had no expectation that government or some collective program could do anything about their incomes. They felt, rather, that only by getting second jobs or higher paying jobs could they raise their income levels. Moreover, they divided society into those who were productive and those deemed unproductive. Many felt that the welfare system and the Democratic party had become engines for transferring money from productive to unproductive workers. Lower-middle-class voters felt the transfer most acutely. The Democratic vote among those with college degrees held steady between 1992 and 1994. But, among high-school dropouts, high-school graduates, and those who had only completed some college, the Democratic share of the vote fell 10, 11, and 12 percentage points respectively.
It's hard to revive liberalism on class lines when Democratic and former Democratic voters themselves feel so little class solidarity. They may be anxious about wage stagnation, but that doesn't mean they look to collective and institutional solutions to solve their problems. And, in truth, if you look at the policy ideas of the elites who are trying to address the wage-stagnation issue, you notice a crisis of confidence. Their proposed solutions are much smaller than the problems they describe. They don't have any more faith in massive government interventions than do the lower-middle-class voters.
The statistics surrounding wage stagnation, growing inequality, and job insecurity are, of course, subject to hot debate. But, if you read the liberal version of the situation, in places like the New York Times, and in the writings of people like E.J. Dionne and Tomasky, you see depicted a crisis that is broad and deep. Inequality is said to be rising around the globe (though most quickly in the United States) and across political eras (inequality increased at least as fast during the Clinton years as during the Reagan years). The problem, in these accounts is nothing less than the globalization of the economy. And Dionne says that most of our political disputes these days come down to the question of whether you are happy or unhappy with the globalization of the economy.
That's a big problem, but the solutions are small. Nobody this side of Jean Marie Le Pen has ideas that would actually reverse the globalization of the economy. Tomasky can't even bring himself to oppose future trade deals. He just calls for stronger environmental and workplace riders.
One of the key explanations for this failure of nerve is the rise of libertarianism among left-wing circles. It started with social libertarianism, the idea that government shouldn't interfere with the abortion decisions, drug-use decisions, free-speech decisions of private citizens. And it turns out that once you start thinking in libertarian terms on social matters, it's very hard then to think in huge collectivist terms on economic matters (the Republican party faces a similar libertarian creep from the opposite direction). Or, to put it another way, if you think government bears no responsibility for a person's character, it's then hard to argue that government can assume large responsibility for a person's pocketbook. "Because their self-confidence was utterly destroyed in the Reagan period," Dionne writes in They Only Look Dead, "Democrats have repeatedly put themselves in the untenable position of being for and against big government at the same time."
Like so many in the class-not-race crowd, Tomasky is vague and tepid when he tries to propose programmatic ideas that will rally working-class and middle-class voters. But his book does get interesting again when he calls for a leftist-libertarian alliance.
So let's allow for a quasi-libertarian perspective that banishes both liberal and conservative forms of intrusion and gives people the right to live their lives however they see fit, up to the point where their actions affect the well-being of others.... The state cannot tell a woman when to bear a child, and it can't peep in a gay person's bedroom or a hunter's gun closet. More than that, the government cannot be some big national nanny (the coinage is the journalist Nicholas von Hoffman's in another context) minding the children.
Actually, the coinage is Margaret Thatcher's, in exactly the same context. Once you start thinking in a libertarian fashion, you can't go back to the class-consciousness-solidarity talk that was the underpinning of so much of the collective thinking of liberalism's heyday.
In sum, there has emerged on the left a group of writers and politicians who are devastating critics of identity politics. But it's unlikely that they will ever be able to replace identity politics with a style of politics based on economic and class issues. That's because in the end Marx has been trumped by Nietzsche, and John Stuart Mill, and nationalism. Among the intellectuals, Nietzchean nihilism has proven more long lasting, more interesting, and more revolutionary than Marxist materialism. Among the general public, individual liberty has proven to be a more attractive and valued goal than equality and class solidarity. And for many people in both groups, tribal links are stronger than economic links.
So, for better or worse, the Left is stuck with identity politics. They should brighten up. When you can influence the culture with identity politics, why worry about a political strategy that will enable you to seize control of the Federal Trade Commission?
* The Free Press. 214 pp. $ 23.00.
DAVID BROOKS is senior editor of the Weekly Standard and editor of Backward and Upward: The New Conservative Writing (Vintage).
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Brooks, David. "Left For Dead." Public Interest, no. 125, 1996, p. 116+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA18798602&it=r&asid=01c4f21d5ffc395227aae2faa83bd3e5. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A18798602
'Bill Clinton' is a balanced assessment of the 42nd president's tenure
Erik Spanberg
(Jan. 30, 2017): Arts and Entertainment:
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The Christian Science Publishing Society
http://www.csmonitor.com/About/The-Monitor-difference
Byline: Erik Spanberg
Remember way back in November when many pundits and plenty of Democrats and Republicans alike expected this month to mark the start of a second Clinton presidency? The publishers of "The American Presidents" series probably did, too, since the latest entry, on Bill Clinton, arrived just after Inauguration Day.
But instead of former First Lady Hillary Clinton breaking the glass ceiling on her way to the White House, she and Bill are instead at home in Chappaqua, N.Y., trying to figure out how Donald Trump won the election and the presidency.
Michael Tomasky's biography, Bill Clinton, like the rest of this long-running series, is a brisk life story mostly concerned with a quick sketch of early life and career followed by a concise overview and assessment of the 42nd president's time in office.
Tomasky is a columnist at The Daily Beast and a longtime contributor to various publications who is known for his liberal bent. Even so, he offers a balanced portrait of Clinton, praising him for political instinct and a centrist approach that revived Democrats while criticizing a lack of self-control that almost cost Clinton his family and his presidency. Tomasky points out Clinton's policy missteps, including criminal justice laws and welfare reform programs later condemned within his own party as excessive, along with the mixed bag of the NAFTA trade agreement. Of the latter, Tomasky writes that the agreement "opened up an intraparty debate that continues to raise blood pressures on both sides of the argument."
In general, books in this series aim for an even-handed approach and a thoughtful appraisal of each president's tenure. Tomasky succeeds on all counts, touching on Clinton's rough-and-tumble childhood and personal character shaped as much by "the saucier town of Hot Springs" as the campaign gloss of "a place called Hope" in his native Arkansas.
For the many who remember Clinton's terms spanning 1993 to 2001 as a yin-yang of booming prosperity and personal scandal, Tomasky's biography serves, in part, as a reminder of just how improbable his election was.
In 1991, as the 1992 campaign got going, incumbent Republican George H.W. Bush enjoyed an approval rating of 64%. The GOP had won three straight presidential elections, prompting some experts to wonder whether a Democrat could win the presidency again any time soon. Bush, to many, looked like a shoo-in for a second term.
Voters viewed Democrats as soft on crime and defense, far too liberal on social issues, and less capable of managing the economy than Republicans, Tomasky writes.
Then, too, for Clinton, the odds were made even longer by his lack of national recognition beyond a disastrous, snore-inducing speech at the 1988 Democratic National Convention.
New York Gov. Mario Cuomo and a cast of better-known former and current senators and governors looked like much stronger candidates than an anonymous Arkansas governor.
But as everyone soon found out, Clinton proved to be an especially gifted politician, intellectual and public speaker, though he constantly repeated a pattern of digging himself holes before climbing out bloodied but mostly intact. Thus "The Comeback Kid" of the 1992 New Hampshire primary, who overcame the first but hardly the last of his infamous marital scandals to remain alive and relevant in a Democratic nomination race he ultimately won.
Clinton defeated Bush and independent Ross Perot in the general election -- and, as Tomasky chronicles - went on to preside over a roaring economy while learning foreign policy on the job and battling an endless but often vastly overblown tide of scandal allegations.
First-term blunders such as Hillary Clinton's attempt to overhaul health care (sound familiar?) and the crushing "Contract with America" midterm elections commingle with Tomasky's mention of a decision by Clinton in 1994 to sign a new independent counsel law despite deep misgivings.
Former Clinton aide Vince Foster's suicide and the obsession over an obscure, failed land deal called Whitewater from the Clintons' Arkansas years soon morphed into what became a cottage industry of scandalmongering among conservative personalities and commentators such as Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter. In other instances, financiers such as the late Richard Mellon Scaife paid for relentless investigations by various groups and outlets to keep digging for evidence of misdeeds, no matter how obscure.
Tomasky presents the dreadful, hurtful affair between Clinton and a young White House staffer named Monica Lewinsky with a proper mix of disdain for the blatant stupidity of liaisons in the Oval Office -- and even greater dismay over the independent counsel's five-year slog to compile an at times lewd 450-page report on an affair that had nothing to do with land deals, constitutional threats, or an impeachable offense.
The first independent counsel, Robert Fiske, was nearing the end of his investigation when a judicial panel replaced him with Ken Starr, a far more partisan choice. Starr's zealous, failed pursuit of the Whitewater scandal or Clinton influence in Foster's suicide devolved into months of federal inquiries into Clinton's alleged sexual assault against Paula Jones when he was governor and the Lewinsky revelations.
(Clinton paid Jones $850,000 to settle out of court. Starr, who went on to run Baylor University, was demoted in May 2016 following a sexual assault scandal that engulfed the school's football team and led to the end of Starr's tenure as university president and later his resignation of his teaching position at the school.)
Tomasky points to Starr's dubious tactics and the dumb-luck twist of the screwball characters, including Linda Tripp, a former Bush White House aide shunted off to the Pentagon when Clinton took office, and literary agent Lucianne Goldberg, haphazardly hatching plans to bring down Clinton after Lewinsky confided in Tripp when they became co-workers.
Clinton survived the storm, salvaged his marriage, and left office a popular president, albeit one still dogged by self-inflicted wounds, such as pardoning the tax fugitive Marc Rich as he left office and later forming chummy international ties between the Clinton Foundation and foreign governments of questionable character.
As Tomasky makes clear, Clinton's presidency succeeded in many respects. He balanced the budget thanks to a 1993 tax bill (and the elder Bush's self-defeating but courageous earlier shift on taxes), outwitted House Speaker Newt Gingrich by calling his bluff on government shutdowns, and finally managed to bring peace to the Balkans thanks to diplomat Richard Holbrooke. He learned painful lessons with the deaths of 18 American soldiers in Somalia in 1993 (as part of a relief and nation-building mission started by Bush) as well as the steep costs of ignoring crises, as the genocide of 800,000 people in Rwanda proved in 1994.
Clinton's near misses on an Israeli-Palestinian peace agreement late in his second term and his eloquence after the 1995 Oklahoma City bombings show the 42nd president at his shrewdest and most empathetic.
Speaking to mourners in Oklahoma, the president said, "You have lost too much, but you have not lost everything. And you have certainly not lost America, for we will stand with you for as many tomorrows as it takes."
As for his New York years and a new round of analysis of his wife taking center stage as Secretary of State and, last year, the Democratic nominee, well, those are different books altogether. Here, Tomasky has done his narrowly focused job and done it well.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Spanberg, Erik. "'Bill Clinton' is a balanced assessment of the 42nd president's tenure." Christian Science Monitor, 30 Jan. 2017. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA479383660&it=r&asid=f6cb2fd317e493849e282a58ef544f2d. Accessed 13 Aug. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A479383660
That Other Clinton: A Brief Biography of Bill
By JIM KELLYJAN. 20, 2017
Continue reading the main story
Share This Page
Photo
President Bill Clinton in October 1995. Credit Paul Hosefros/The New York Times
BILL CLINTON
By Michael Tomasky
184 pp. Times Books/Henry Holt & Company. $25.
What biographer could possibly envy Michael Tomasky? As part of the American Presidents series edited by Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., who died in 2007, and Sean Wilentz, Tomasky drew the assignment of squeezing the life and times of William Jefferson Clinton into a volume “compact enough for the busy reader,” as Schlesinger put it. This is an easy enough task, say, in the case of William Henry Harrison, who served for just one month before dying of pneumonia, considerately allowing his biographer in this series, Gail Collins, to focus on his far more eventful and boisterous campaign.
Clinton did not perish during his presidency, but as Tomasky aptly observes in “Bill Clinton,” “his most notable accomplishment was simply surviving.” Nothing underscores that feat better than the fact that Clinton was one of only two presidents to be impeached (he, like Andrew Johnson, was acquitted by the Senate).
Tomasky’s invaluable contribution is to remind us just how much Clinton did accomplish during his presidency — and how much achievements like Nafta and welfare reform depended on him slicing deals to attract enough Republican votes to offset Democratic opponents in Congress. Tomasky is especially strong on the economic anxieties of the Democratic voter that propelled Clinton to victory and remained a priority for him during his presidency, which, as Tomasky points out in his epilogue, makes it even more mystifying that Hillary Clinton failed to capitalize on those same anxieties in the 2016 presidential campaign, as Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump did.
If Tomasky has a blind spot, it is his handling of Clinton’s relationship with Monica Lewinsky. He calls Clinton’s behavior “unfathomably irresponsible,” and details how the conservative media stoked the news. Yet in his argument that the furor was largely disproportionate to the relationship, Tomasky blames the “rages” of Howell Raines, then the Times editorial page editor, and several of the paper’s columnists for adding to the bonfire, neglecting to mention that The Times rejected impeachment as the punishment. As for Lewinsky, he never touches on how unfairly the press trashed her or on the alleged campaign by the Clinton aide Sidney Blumenthal to besmirch her.
To be fair, Tomasky is not only trying to cram into 150 pages what dozens of other writers have covered in thousands, but he is also writing about a president of recent vintage who remains a polarizing figure and who has led a post-White House life filled with deeds both good and suspect (see the dealings of the Clinton Foundation). His legacy, unavoidably, was a subcurrent of his wife’s presidential campaign, starting with the reasonable assumption that Hillary Clinton would never have been the Democratic nominee in 2016 (or the close runner-up in 2008) if her husband had not been a popular 42nd president of the United States.
Tomasky makes no attempt to hide his 2016 presidential preference by noting that Trump’s victory brought the Clinton era to a “horrifying close.” He declines to expound on why Trump won, but that is only fair since the 45th president’s story awaits its own volume in this series. And if Tomasky’s task of compression was unenviable. . . .
Correction: January 23, 2017
An earlier version of this review misstated the year that Hillary Clinton was the Democratic presidential nominee. It was 2016, not 2012.
Jim Kelly, is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. He was the managing editor of Time magazine from 2001 to 2006.
A version of this review appears in print on January 22, 2017, on Page BR7 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: That Other Clinto