Did you get a chance to read my book review in the current issue of the Washington Monthly?
No?
That’s okay.
I’ll wait.
About The Author
BooMan
Martin Longman a contributing editor at the Washington Monthly. He is also the founder of Booman Tribune and Progress Pond. He has a degree in philosophy from Western Michigan University.
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Yes.
Me too.
I’m glad you got paid for it.
Tarheel got paid to read it?
How do I get that gig?
Haven’t seen a check, so guess not. Commented in the earlier post for free. Keep up the good work.
Smart ass — I will not be reading your next review of a GWB bio, that’s for damn sure!
Huh. Who edited it, then? No, don’t answer. But there was one comical dangler
(the bill went on a multistate trip?) that I bet you would never have let another writer get away with.
Possibly the only flaw in the whole piece, though.
Kukula Glastris edits the book reviews.
Not sure if this will play here but, if not, go to YouTube directly.
That’s some scary stuff. Would fit right in as the B-side to Boris Karloff’s Monster Mash.
Also wondering if LN covered Lucy in the Sky like his shipmate Cap’n Kirk did so marvelously.
Excellent review. Accept your opinion that it’s a reasonably fair biography, but doesn’t increase my interest in reading it.
This is an important observation: In his chapter dedicated to Iraq, Mann notes the faulty assumptions and poor planning that led to this epic blunder, but he doesn’t give full treatment to the magnitude of the deception. However, I’d go further. Two Years Before 9/11, Candidate Bush was Already Talking Privately About Attacking Iraq, According to His Former Ghost Writer. Except he also talked publicly:
More than once because one of my major arguments against GWB in the run up to the 2000 election is that if he won, he’d start another war with Iraq. An argument that Republican and Independent friends and colleagues scoffed at as if I’d fantasized that possibility.
Feel the same way. Great review; not gonna read the book. It will be another 30 or 40 years before anything truly objective can be written against such a polarizing president (though ultimately he alienated even his own base). Nevertheless, I’m confident he’ll go down as one of our worst presidents ever. Unlike a Nixon, or even a Reagan, where one can point to some substantial accomplishments, with W the cupboard is pretty much bare.
The positive accomplishments under Nixon were mostly the result of the Democratic Congress. Not inclined to give him any credit for demonizing China for a few decades to further his political aspirations and then getting credit for sort of ending the sector of the Cold War. Same with Reagan engaging in dialogue with the USSR which is the only positive I can recall from the Reagan years.
There wasn’t a single increase to the minimum wage passed during Reagan’s tenure — and looks as if Obama’s going to match that record.
Reagan had the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Missile Treaty with the USSR. I don’t give him credit for the end of the Cold War, but he does get credit for cutting some reasonable deals when Gorbachev came along. Tax reform was both good and bad. Cut the rates way down on the wealthy but they hadn’t really been paying those rates. For the most part, with many loopholes gone, it was a fairer and more sensible tax code. That’s why both GHWB and GWB were so eager to make cuts to capital gains. He also saved Social Security, which required really turning his back on his own base of lunatics. Of course he had to because Social Security was truly the 3rd Rail of Politics back then.
Nixon signed the laws creating the EPA, OSHA, and the Clean Air Act. He also signed Title IX, added COLAs to Social Security, expanded food stamps and welfare. Heck, he even supported the ERA. He would have cut a deal on universal health care if Kennedy hadn’t held out for a better deal. By any contemporary standard, there was much about Nixon that was liberal.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a fan of either. Nixon was largely responding to the Zeitgeist. To a lesser degree, Reagan was too. However, neither was incompetent on the level of GWB (or could get away with the kinds of stuff GWB got away with).
Yes, but I wouldn’t go so far as to say that record indicates Nixon was a liberal. As suggested above, it had more to do with the steady pressure brought to bear by a heavily Dem Congress, one which, on many domestic issues, had a liberal working majority.
I’d say Nixon was pragmatic. He did what he had to do domestically, in large part to keep things tamped down enough in Congress to give himself a freer hand in FP — the area he really cared about, not DP.
As for universal health care, iirc that one came along at a time when it might have occurred to Nixon to try to play nice with the Dems in Congress, perhaps even cut a deal, as Watergate loomed over his presidency.
Ahem:
About Richard Nixon…
GHWB failed to get a capital gains tax cut. Clinton got that done for him.
BS. Senator Moynihan, the architect of the 1983 SS reform, deeply regretted having done it. It collected surplus SS taxes on all workers (further hurting minimum wage workers) and that surplus cash funded GOP income tax cuts on corporations and wealthy individuals. There were two viable solutions for what was billed as the looming SS problem of the “boomers.” Retain the “paygo” model and raise the cap as needed. Or raise the rate (preferably along with raising or eliminating the cap) and moving the surplus off-budget and investing the cash in mortgage and/or education loans at a reasonable premium above the prime rate for modest housing and attendance at public colleges and universities. Today, the first of those 30 year mortgages would have been paid off and we have still yet to reach to point where annual SS payments exceed annual receipts. Could have avoided the whole mortgage meltdown mess as well. A more sophisticated approach would have been first to deal with the existing mortgage crisis for S&Ls (that would have saved the Fed a couple hundred billion). Leveled out the boom and bust cycles in home construction. Etc.
Not sure what Clinton was supposed to do about this even if he was a friend of the wealthy. Veto it? 90-10? I mean maybe he whips Dems to oppose it and can potentially have enough to retain his veto. I doubt it. In that environment? Especially when it included tax increases on income.
And if that failed and Clinton’s veto was sustained, why not do what Bush did and pursue it with reconciliation?
Welcome to correct if you’d like. I was in middle school at this time after all.
What you said about Social Security is correct, though.
Link messed up (on phone)
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxpayer_Relief_Act_of_1997
Why would Clinton have vetoed legislation he supported? He may not have like all the details of the final legislation — but he had his teams working on all that deregulation and neo-liberal econ crap that he signed and other destructive policies. Now — approximately two decades after the fact he says “oops” about his war on drugs and Haiti because it worked out exactly how the critics that had vision or could analyze that garbage before the fact were right. Brian Dorgan — who was barely even a liberal — nailed Gramm-Leach-Bliley in real time. Holding fingers up to check where the wind is blowing isn’t a substitute for wisdom or vision.
My point was he might not have wanted the capital gains tax cut. That bill had a tax increase on higher incomes and a child care tax credit. I wouldn’t have vetoed it. Not with those voting numbers with the GOP in charge. In fact they could have played hard ball and said, “fine, you won’t accept our agreement to higher tax increases on income in exchange? We’ll pass the capital gains tax cut by itself through reconciliation.”
Dumb thing to hold his feet to the fire imo. Plenty of other shit to hit him on.
One reason GHWB went down is that public support for a capital gains tax cut didn’t exist. Of course that lack of public support had something to do with Democratic members of Congress dumping on him for his obsession with cutting taxes on the wealthy. Why was that a hard case for Clinton to make?
Technically — cutting capital gains wiped out the pluses of the 1993 tax increase that had been helpful in reducing the deficit and improving the economy. The deficit reductions in his remaining years in office was nothing but smoke and mirrors as the wealthy cashed out and paid the reduced capital gains taxes just in case the big brains in DC quickly figured out that the low rate was fiscally irresponsible. Had they but known that GWB would get selected and further cut those taxes, they would have waited to cash out — and the so-called miracle Clinton surplus would never have materialized. (Wasn’t even real as it was because the National Debt continued to increase every year under his budgets.)
However, I think that’s incorrect and I DO think he supported the cut in principle because it was all teh rage then. Same reason Mandela turned neoliberal (but he has far more excuses than clinton and wasnt supportive of it).
Anyway, point is the results between seabe POTUS and Clinton are nill: the bill would have passed as is.
Will have to re-read Klein’s chapter S. Africa chapter in “The Shock Doctrine” because I may be misremembering that Mandela had no choice or options other than the status quo or neoliberalism without Apartheid.
Short hand
That’s how I recall it. Bad non-option, but the ANC demonstrated how bad can be made dreadful. The HIV handling alone was criminal (compare to Brazil’s handling which all things considered was excellent IMHO).
Marie2, you chiefly credit the Democratic Congress for positive Federal accomplishments during the Nixon Administration. In the same post you appear to hold President Obama entirely responsible for the failure to raise the minimum wage during his term so far. Given everything our President has faced during his term, and given your ability to understand that both circumstances and Congress hold much control over a President’s record, your last claim is a remarkably unfair one.
So, a POTUS is a non-factor over which political party controls Congress? As someone above pointed out, Nixon wasn’t all that interested in domestic policy and as the GOP had yet to consolidate its pro-corporate, anti-worker, racist policies, he was stuck with a bunch of New Deal southern Democrats. Doubt on his own with a GOP congress he would have pushed for a minimum wage increase, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility. Reagan — doubt that he wouldn’t have vetoed such legislation. GHWB signed an increase. And Clinton was handed an increase from a Republican controlled congress. GWB appeared to want to match Reagan’s record, but he screwed up and got stuck with a Democratic Congress in his last two years and a minimum wage increase and approval ratings so low he didn’t dare veto it.
Last year there were a few state initiatives for increasing the minimum wage and iirc they all passed. Passed easily in gd Arkansas. How many congressional Democrats ran on a minimum wage increase proposed by Obama? Think hard now — I don’t want to be unfair.
“How many congressional Democrats ran on a minimum wage increase proposed by Obama?”
Jesus, really?
http://www.whitehouse.gov/raise-the-wage
“In the 2014 State of the Union address, President Obama called on Congress to raise the national minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 an hour, and soon after signed an Executive Order to raise the minimum wage to $10.10 for the individuals working on new federal service contracts….Since President Obama called for a minimum wage increase in his 2013 State of the Union address, 13 states and Washington, D.C. have passed laws to raise their minimum wage.”
The President also supported the minimum wage Bill which had the most prominent roll-out during that Congress:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/11/07/obama-minimum-wage_n_4235965.html
I don’t know how many Congressional Democrats ran on the President’s proposals for raising the minimum wage, or how many foolishly decided not to run on his proposal or the Harkin/Miller Bill. Are you operating on such bad faith that you’re about to tell us that it’s Obama’s fault if some Congressional Dems didn’t accept the leadership he had exhibited on this issue for years?
And then you may choose to extend your bad faith by asking why, if it was so important to Obama, it didn’t get done? The last two Congresses were the worst in our lifetimes, that’s why.
And we can see that you ignore the filibuster-crazy Senate and the insane House during these Congresses and the incredibly gerrymandered Congressional Districts and the destructive effects of the Citizens United SC decision on both Congressional elections AND the decisions members of Congress have to make when they’re about to consider taking a vote which will piss off the Big Money Boyz and get them to spend millions to take them out in low-turnout midterms made even lower turnout by Voter ID laws and the Supreme’s evisceration of the Voters Rights Act, and the long, long history of Presidents’ political parties suffering large Congressional losses in their last midterms, and you actually have the incredible hubris to blame Obama for both the poor performance and the subsequent loss of Congress? Yes, you appear to do so.
Extraordinarily bad faith arguments.
More bad faith: “And Clinton was handed an increase from a Republican controlled congress.”
http://articles.latimes.com/1996-08-21/news/mn-36246_1_minimum-wage
From the reporting: “Congress passed the minimum wage measure on Aug. 2 after a ferocious months-long partisan battle that saw Democrats pushing hard for a vote on the issue and GOP leaders ultimately changing position to support the bill. Their switch allowed Republicans to avoid voter wrath on an issue that polls show has the support of more than 80% of the public…
The campaign of GOP presidential nominee Bob Dole, who long resisted its passage, praised the legislation Tuesday but suggested that the initiative would do less for workers than Dole’s proposed 15% across-the-board cut in tax rates.”
You know, there’s plenty of legitimate complaints which can be honestly leveled at both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama’s actions and rhetoric as Presidents. It undermines legitimate critiquing when people level factually incorrect complaints about their records, or grant them (or others) malevolent intent when there is no evidence of such intent.
Should have phrased that better. Meant to say that Clinton pushed and got a Republican controlled Congress to increase the minimum wage. So, not only was I not criticizing but was applauding his effort on this issue.
However, even with my poor phrasing, when read in the context of the conversation, it shouldn’t have been as unclear as you make it out to be. Then again you don’t seem to get how fair I am in my critiques. If I dump on any Republican for X, I dump on any Democrat for the same X. I don’t let my liberal bias color my assessment of X based on whether it’s promulgated by a Democrat or a Republican. Nor do I cut Democrats any slack for promoting conservative or Republican initiatives. Thus, I will never forget, overlook, or excuse any Democrat that voted for the IWR.
That’s fine. I either add my support or leave unchallenged your complaints about President Obama which are factually accurate. You’re often on point.
Associating Obama with Reagan on the minimum wage, and claiming that Obama has not pushed for the wage to be increased, is so in opposition with the real record that it’s hard to believe that it’s a misrememberance. Obama came out in support for minimum wage increases in both his 2013 and 2014 SOTU’s and caught a big ration of shit over it. A mixed report from the CBO really piled the GOP critiques on him. He spent some political capital on the issue, as was justified.
You really don’t remember any of this?
As uncomfortable as it appears to make you, it’s likely that Obama will join Reagan as the only Presidents that didn’t preside over a minimum wage increase while in office for eight years. That will be a fact. Won’t matter that he supported such an increase any more than it matters that Reagan didn’t support an increase. Several GOP Presidents didn’t support an increase but didn’t veto the bill when it landed on their desk. I suppose one could make the claim that Newt’s Republican Revolution was warm and fuzzy compared to GOP creatures now in office and that’s why Clinton got a minimum wage increase and Obama hasn’t. I wouldn’t agree with that as the stripes of lameass regressives seems not to have change much in like forever. (But when I was young half of those were Democrats, mostly southern Democrats, and today almost all are Republicans.)
I don’t award points to Presidents based on whatever they include or exclude from their SOTU laundry lists. If I did, it would only be fair to recognize that these sound like the words of an environmentalist:
His isn’t. He just read some words someone had written for him. And took a couple of field trips with MSM cameras rolling to a hydrogen fuel cell and alt-energy car plants.
This has been getting inserted as a cut and paste SOTU item since 1982:
“Won’t matter that he supported such an increase any more than it matters that Reagan didn’t support an increase.”
This is quite wrong. It matters when a President puts an issue in front of the public for years. Fighting for an issue allows you to change public opinion on that issue. We can see that even citizens in Republican-dominated States were able to collect signatures and overwhelmingly pass minimum wage increases. President Obama’s many statements, not just at back-to-back SOTU’s, joined the messaging from the Labor movement, the Dem Party and other allies to make these outcomes happen.
Two things are extraordinarily irritating about this discussion. First, the goalposts keep moving. Your initial implication was Obama didn’t put forward proposals to increase the minimum wage. In the face of explicit refutations of that, you’re deciding that it’s his fault that a minimum wage increase won’t pass at the Federal level during his term.
Second, there is a continuing argument that goes so far past implication here that you are now registering it as a claim: President Obama and his Administration DOESN’T CARE to raise the wages of working Americans. This is, again, infuriatingly wrong:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/01/28/obama-minimum-wage_n_4677355.html
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/120766/labor-dept-rule-would-give-home-care-workers-minimum-wage
http://thehill.com/homenews/administration/225266-obama-immigration-action-will-boost-wages-increase
-tax-revenue
There’s also the many actions taken place by the NLRB under the new majority for its top ruling body installed by President Obama’s nominees, rulings which are increasing leverage for lower-wage workers in ways that no NLRB Board has done since the 1970’s:
http://thehill.com/regulation/business/227705-mcdonalds-retaliated-aginst-workers-labor-board-allege
s
http://www.peoplesworld.org/ruling-by-labor-board-is-most-damning-ever-against-walmart/
Finally, you are also quite wrong to claim that Republican Congressional opposition to President Obama’s agenda is no greater than their opposition to Clinton’s agenda. Neither GOP Caucus was warm and fuzzy, but the differences are identifiable by both extraordinary anecdote…
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/25/robert-draper-anti-obama-campaign_n_1452899.html
“The dinner lasted nearly four hours. They parted company almost giddily. The Republicans had agreed on a way forward…Show united and unyielding opposition to the president’s economic policies. (Eight days later, Minority Whip Cantor would hold the House Republicans to a unanimous No against Obama’s economic stimulus plan.)”
…and by subsequent data measures:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/05/15/how-we-count-senate-filibusters-and-wh
y-it-matters/
“On balance, these data suggest a Senate increasingly bound up in parliamentary knots. Republicans pursue all avenues for slowing down the majority. Democrats counter by exploiting whatever limited means Senate rules afford them. Not surprisingly, we are left with a Senate unable to deliberate over the big issues of the day, let alone the small ones.”
http://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/231638-house-votes-to-repeal-obamacare
“Tuesday’s vote is nearly the 60th in the last four years in the House to undermine or repeal the law, since Republicans took over the chamber in 2011.”
Will there be a quiz? Will it be on the final? 🙂
OK, BooMan, I accepted your invitation as a friendly one…
Thanks for it; it’s good writing. Interesting that even a non-polemical summary of W.’s Presidency deals with not just the “controversies,” but defines many of his actions as searing, damaging failures. I’d have to read it a time or two more to separate out which of the qualitative judgments of W.’s policies are yours and which are from the book you’re reviewing, but it’s good to hear that the book doesn’t try to do the preposterous and shrug its shoulders at Iraq and Katrina and Social Security and Scooter Libby and Abu Ghraib and….
I’ll conclude now by stating my appreciation for the elegance and accuracy of this statement: “When the country and the courts cannot even agree on what constitutes a vote or who actually won an election, it doesn’t augur well for a dispassionate interpretation of a presidency.”
Nice glossy cover though. Much better graphic design than the Nation😃
Enjoyed your review. Terrific writing. What strikes me is that there is so much bad that occurred during the Bush Presidency that Mann wrote over 200 pages and still had leave out some of the most significant, egregious and long lasting offenses that occurred during those horrific eight years.
History certainly will not be kind to Bush or his fellow players in the morass that was his Presidency. We will suffer for generations from their criminality and warmongering. A horrible stain in the national fabric.
“I’m going to put people in my place, so when the history of this administration is written at least there’s an authoritarian voice saying exactly what happened.” –George W. Bush, on what he hopes to accomplish with his memoir, as reported by the Associated Press, Calgary, Canada, March 17, 2009
I have no doubt that W is completely oblivious to the irony in his statement.
Your review is of course a fine piece of work, but it contains one line — really, one word — that is not acceptable.
“Mann breaks down Bush’s first term in office, unsurprisingly, before and after 9/11.”
The word is “unsurprisingly”. This is because nothing changed on or after 11 Sep. 2001. Do you need to be reminded of the Qwest discovery?
Writing book reviews is an art form. You, sir, are a master. It’s very hard to write one well, and you not only did that, but I actually enjoyed reading it. Your own grasp of history helped keep it in context. Bravo!!!
Though I’m pretty sure the writing of that review was as nothing compared to having to carve out even just a few hours to revisit Junior. Even if paid a princely sum for the chore — unlikely here — it still would have been a difficult reading slog for most sane people of a left-of-center bent.
Excellent review – very clear, very fair, tells what’s in the book, useful assessment of its limitations and you set up very well the constraints of the book. Personally, the review is like a toe in the water to revisiting those awful yearsI almost feel I could read the book now;
One style point, iirc is in Strunk and White, Brownie’s experience would be pertinent not relevant: [i.e. his lack of pertinent experience]. Rove may have used relevant Since you’re not quoting there).
I actually think its got a bit too much ‘but bush was worse because…’ for a book review. Might be a tone thing.
Very interesting review. I was really struck by this:
I remember that time and remember this being a bit of a meme in 2007 or 2008, but my dog, what a damning and pathetic statement! SIX m-f*cking YEARS into his miserable Presidency, this joke decided to take off the training wheels and try to do some of his own Presidenting? There just aren’t words to describe the disgust that this statement inspires in me. And that Abu Ghraib supposedly shook the administration so profoundly that all of these jackasses offered their resignation, from Rumsfeld to the Dark Lord himself, and NONE of them were actually kicked to the curb? I just can’t… Did they have him hooked up to a morphine drip?
The fact that this nonsense wasn’t front page news every day in 2004 (at least) is an indictment of the media (which we already knew). Instead we talked about how much John Kerry was inarticulate that one time when trying to explain basic procedures in Congress. Ugh.
Good god, Booman, how did you survive reliving this crap? I think I’ll need at least two more decades between me and this sordid period before I could consider reading a book like this.