Tag: Bill Clinton

From the Desk of Bill Clinton

Back to Work is a hard book to excerpt, in the same way an informational but stylistically unexciting textbook might be. But there were a few passages that caught my eye. And since this is the season of giving, here they are! (with my de-politicianizing translations.)

“Our constitution was designed by people who were idealistic but not ideological.  There’s a big difference.  You can have a philosophy that tends to be liberal or conservative but still be open to evidence, experience, and argument.  That enables people with honest differences to find practical, principled compromise. On the other hand, fervent insistence on ideology makes evidence, experience, and argument irrelevant: If you possess the absolute truth, those who disagree are by definition wrong, and evidence of success or failure is irrelevant.  There is nothing to learn from the experience of other countries. Respectful arguments are a waste of time. Compromise is weakness. And if your policies fail, you don’t abandon them; instead you double down, asserting that they would have worked if only they had been carried to their logical extreme.”

Translation: Remember what it was like when Republicans knew words other than ‘no’? Hahahah me neither. Continue reading “From the Desk of Bill Clinton”

Bubba’s words of wisdom

Although I’ve written on this blog of my appreciation for book recommendations, I can say that I’ve never actually immediately read and reviewed something simply because someone told me to—until now.

In the interest of savoring Steve Jobs (which is still so very very good), I took a little break from Walter Isaacson’s opus this week for a 200-page detour with Bill Clinton. Yes, gigantic nerd that I am, I actually read Clinton’s oh-so-enticingly-titled Back to Work. (You’re welcome, Aunt Mary.)

Although I suspected this book would be far from riveting, I’d be lying if I said I didn’t go into it intrigued. After all, imagine being Bill Clinton these days. Not recovered-from-heart-surgery Bill Clinton, or my-wife-is-the-secretary-of-state Bill Clinton, or OK-maybe-I-did-have-sexual-relations-with-that-woman Bill Clinton. I mean imagine being the Bill Clinton who left the economy in relatively good shape, with a surplus no less, only to watch it slowly—and then rapidly—deteriorate in the decade after you leave office. Imagine spending eight years building an amazing sand castle, only to have a linguistically challenged Texan come along and stomp on it, send a bunch of sand to Iraq and Afghanistan and then remain notably silent as his cohorts tell everyone that the government sucks at building sand castles anyway, that the entire sand business should be left to the free market, which would never—never—be unfairly advantageous to sand purveyors at the top, at the expense of those at the bottom.

(That analogy didn’t really work but I was committed to it.)

Continue reading “Bubba’s words of wisdom”