I'm someone that's found Hitchens' stuff to have gone steadily downhill over the last 10 years, and this excerpt seems to fit the trend: good premises polished to half-assed conclusions.
Hitchens is completely right that welfare "reform" was evil. He is wrong that he is the only one on the left to have seen it. There is nobody on the left that *didn't* denounce it.
Hitchens is even more wrong to suggest that the right sees clearly that Clinton delivers for them. If they did, they would have been celebrating their victory, rather than apoplectically trying to destroy him for the last 6 years. They are obviously less clear about what Clinton represents than the left is. I'm not arguing with the premise that Clinton says left and does right. I'm arguing that the people that understand that best are on the left and they say it all the time. The right by and large thinks that Clinton is a leftist.
Lastly, Hitchens is right that Congressional bigwigs have lots of reasons to prefer a president of the opposite party to one of their own. In a nutshell, it makes them first string players rather than second string. But this has nothing to do with Clinton or triangulation, as his own examples make clear. Tip O'Neill preferring Reagan and Gingrich preferring Clinton should have told him something else as well, namely that the antagonism goes both ways, and rifts usually originate in the Congress. Before Clinton cut himself free of the Congressional leadership in 1994-96, they had undercut his initiatives throughout 1992-94, piqued at their fall in their status and his unwillingness to suck their boots. The leadership and the president deserved each other, pigs both.
In the end, it seems to comes down to that Dr. Johnson quote about good and original. Although of course this was only an excerpt. Maybe the rest of the book is good.
Michael
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com
some people i told him inhabit a vacuum all their lives and never know it then he said it don t hurt them any no i said it dont but it hurts people who have to associate with them and with these words we parted each feeling superior to the other and is not that feeling after all one of the great desiderata of social intercourse
archy from "The Merry Flea" from _the lives & times of archy and mehitabel_ by don marquis __________________________________________________________________________