Living History Unknown (best books to read fiction .txt) 📖

distraught that Bill would listen to a political turncoat like Morris and unhappy about having to compete with a rival adviser. Leon Panetta didn’t like Morris’s personality or the way he circumvented the West Wing hierarchy. Every one of their concerns was justified, but Morris’s presence helped in unexpected ways.

After the loss of Congress, many of Bill’s advisers were walking around the West Wing like shell-shocked soldiers. But nothing is more unifying than a common enemy. Not only did they now have the Republican Congress to motivate them, they had Dick Morris.

One of Bill’s greatest strengths is his willingness to invite disparate opinions and then sort them out to reach his own conclusion. He challenged himself and his staff by bringing together people whose experiences were varied and whose perspectives often clashed.

It was a way to keep everyone, especially him, fresh and alert. In a rarefied environment like the White House, I don’t think you can afford to surround yourself with people whose temperaments and views are always in sync. The meetings might run on schedule, but easy consensus can lead over time to poor decisions. Throwing Dick Morris into the mix of egos, attitudes and ambitions in the West Wing ratcheted up everyone’s performance.

For numbers and analysis, Morris depended on Mark Penn, a brilliant and intense pollster hired by the Democratic National Committee. Penn and his business partner, Doug Schoen, another veteran political strategist, provided the research used to help shape White House communications. They along with Morris began attending weekly Wednesday night meetings in the Yellow Oval Room. Bill and I had learned to take Morris’s opinions with a pound of salt and overlook his histrionics and self-aggrandizing. He was a good antidote to conventional wisdom and a spur to Washington bureaucratic inertia.

His influence on the Clinton Administration has frequently been exaggerated, sometimes by liberal critics, most often by Morris himself. But he did help Bill develop a strategy to break through the wall of obstructionist Republicans who were blocking his legislative agenda and promoting their own.

When opposing camps are in two polar positions and neither believes it can afford to be seen as moving toward the other, they can decide to move toward a third position―

like the apex of the triangle―what came to be called “triangulation.” This was essentially a restatement of the philosophy Bill had developed as Governor and as Chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. In the 1992 campaign, he championed moving beyond the “brain-dead” politics of both parties to craft a “dynamic center.” More than old-fashioned political compromise of splitting the difference, triangulation reflected the approach Bill had promised to bring to Washington.

When, for example, the Republicans tried to claim ownership of welfare reform, an issue Bill had been working on since r 98o and one he was committed to act on before his first term was up, Bill would avoid saying no. Instead, he would support the objectives of reform but insist on changes that would improve the legislation and attract enough political support from more moderate Republicans and Democrats to defeat the extreme Republican position. Of course, in politics, as in life, the devil is in the details. The details of welfare reform or budget negotiations were hard fought and difficult and sometimes resembled a Rubik’s Cube more than an isosceles triangle.

Though Morris brought energy and ideas to Bill’s initiatives, he was not responsible for implementing them. That fell to Leon Panetta and the rest of the Administration. Leon had become Chief of Staff in June of 1994, replacing Mack McLarty, who had done an excellent job under very difficult circumstances in the first year and a half. Panetta, a deficit hawk when he served in Congress from California, had been Bill’s choice to head the Office of Management and Budget, and he had played a leading role in devising the deficit reduction plan and then shepherding it through Congress. As Chief of Staff, he ran a tight ship, imposing greater control over the President’s schedule and preventing aides from dropping by the Oval Office whenever they felt like it. His expertise in Congress and with the budget would prove to be of crucial importance in the budget battle ahead.

The new Republican majority was looking for ways to legislate their radical agenda.

They started with the annual budget bill, trying to gut programs by denying funding.

They wanted to dismantle the regulatory functions of government, such as consumer and environmental protections, support for the working poor, tax enforcement and corporate regulations. President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society program―which resulted in Medicare, Medicaid and historic civil rights legislation―was denounced by Newt Gingrich as a “counterculture value system” and “a long experiment in professional government that has failed.”

Bill and I were increasingly disturbed by the fervor with which the GOP leaders spouted rhetoric that attacked government, community and even conventional notions of society. They seemed to believe that old-fashioned rugged individualism was all that mattered in late-twentieth-century America, except when, of course, their supporters wanted special legislative favors. I consider myself very much an individualist and somewhat rugged―perhaps a little ragged as well―but I also believe that as an American citizen I am part of a mutually beneficial network of rights, privileges and responsibilities.

It was in the context of this extreme Republican rhetoric that I pushed forward with my book It Takes a Village. Gingrich’s advocacy of orphanages for poor children born out of wedlock had energized me. After spending years worrying about how to protect and nurture children, now I feared that political extremism could sentence the poor and vulnerable to a Dickensian future. Although it wasn’t political in a partisan sense, I wanted my book to describe a vision different from the uncompassionate, elitist and unrealistic views emanating from Capitol Hill.

Despite the rightwing mantra denouncing “liberal media bias,” the reality was that the loudest and most effective voices in the media were anything but liberal. Instead, public discourse was increasingly dominated by reactionary pundits and TV and radio personalities.

I decided to convey my thoughts and