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

your best. And you will miss your child when you leave here tonight. And, they will miss you also in about a month and for about fifteen minutes.

Take my parents, for example. My mom cried when I went to visit colleges. When we arrived … my mom was just dying to get in that last little bit of mothering. She decided it was absolutely crucial that she line my dresser drawers with contact paper. And I let her.

I just didn’t have the heart to tell her that if my clothes were ever clean, it was unlikely they would ever find their way into a drawer.” Chelsea and I looked at each other and doubled over with laughter. At least, I felt like I wasn’t alone.

By late afternoon it was time for all the parents to leave, freeing the students to arrange and rearrange their possessions without parental interference. Most of the other mothers and I gathered up our belongings, including unused contact paper, and began to make our way to the exits. After weeks of planning, shopping, packing, unpacking and organizing, we had steeled ourselves for this moment. At some level, we were actually ready to say goodbye and let our children begin their new lives.

Watching the fathers, however, I realized that they had no such preparation. Just as it was time to leave, they seemed to awaken from their collective fog, suddenly anxious over the prospect of parting from their offspring.

“What do you mean, it’s time to leave?” Bill said. “Do we really have to go now?” He looked bereft. “Can’t we come back after dinner?”

THIRD WAY

I visited Chequers, the official country residence of Britain’s Prime Minister, in late 1997, invited by Prime Minister and Mrs. Blair to a small meeting of American and British political thinkers. Our hosts gave me a marvelous tour. Queen Elizabeth I’s ring. The table Napoleon used at St. Helena. Cromwell’s secret passage. The prison room, so called because Lady Mary Grey spent two years locked up there in the mid-1500s for marrying without permission from the throne. These were among the relics of history that a British Prime Minister lived with amidst the narrow hallways, spiral staircases and nooks and crannies of the stately sixteenth-century estate.

Tony Blair had been elected six months earlier on a platform of progressive ideas that refashioned traditional Labour Party thinking about social and economic issues. In the aftermath of his election, he had credited Bill for inspiring him and his party to chart a different direction as the United Kingdom and Europe confronted the challenges of globalization and economic and political security.

Tony and Cherie Blair had been focusing on many of the same issues that Bill and I had been thinking about for years. I first discovered this political symbiosis when Tony was still the Labour Party leader. Our mutual friend, Sid Blumenthal, an American journalist and author who had written extensively about American and British politics, insisted that we get together. Sid had been a good friend of Bill’s and mine for years, and I valued his political analysis and sharp wit. He began working at the White House in 1997, and his wife, Jackie, an experienced organizer and advocate, joined the Administration in 1996.

“You and the Blairs are political soul mates,” Sid told me. “You have to meet each other.”

When Sid and Jackie hosted a reception for Tony at their home in 1996, they invited me to come. I found Blair at the hors d’oeuvres table, where for thirty minutes we remained locked in conversation about politics and public policy in our respective countries.

I instantly felt a connection. He, too, was trying to devise alternatives to traditional liberal rhetoric, assumptions and positions in the hope of finding ways to advance economic growth, individual empowerment and social justice in the global information age.

Whether you call it New Democrats, New Labour, the Third Way or the Vital Center, Tony Blair and Bill Clinton clearly shared a political vision. But the question confronting each of them was how to invigorate a progressive movement that had lost steam through much of the 1970s and 1980s, giving rise to Reaganism in the United States and Thatcherism in Britain.

The Republican Party in the United States had been masterful at creating a groundswell for conservative ideas after Senator Barry Goldwater’s resounding defeat by Lyndon B. Johnson in the 1964 Presidential election. Shocked by the margin of their party’s losses, several Republican multimillionaires embarked on a strategy to seed conservative, even rightwing political philosophy, and to develop and advance specific policies to further it. They funded think tanks, endowed professorships and seminars and developed media channels for communicating ideas and opinions. By 1980, they had also begun financing political advertising campaigns through the National Conservative Political Action Committee, one of the first political organizations to use the mass media as a vehicle for negative campaigning. Through direct mail and television ads, NCPAC broke an accepted taboo in national and local elections, attacking opponents’ records and positions more harshly and going after Democratic candidates personally and relentlessly. This was the dark underbelly of the Republican Right, which rose to power with a very different public face: sunny, self-confident Ronald Reagan. Reagan won the Presidency twice in the 1980s, and the Republicans made significant gains in Congress.

I was skeptical about the effectiveness of negative advertising when I first saw it up close during Bill’s 1980 gubernatorial reelection campaign. But I was wrong. Negative campaigning, which everyone professes to abhor, has proven to be so effective that both parties have adopted it, though Republicans and their allied interest groups use it more effectively than Democrats. Most candidates believe they have no choice but to respond and counterpunch, but the distortions and falsehoods created by negative ads have undermined faith not only in candidates but in the political system.

We and the British have different political systems and methods of campaigning, but Bill and I shared with the Blairs the same struggle to advance more progressive ideas in the