Rules of the Game
Interview By DEBORAH SOLOMON
Published: March 25, 2007
<...Q: You criticize Bill Clinton in your book as an illustration of the painful limitations of charisma.
A: Bill Clinton was the first two-term Democratic president since F.D.R. and was enormously popular — and yet at the end of eight years in office, there were fewer Democratic senators, fewer Democratic congressmen, fewer Democratic governors, fewer state legislators, and the party was in debt. You can be regarded as a charismatic president, and yet it doesn’t translate into structure.
Q: By that measure, you should love Hillary, who is low on charisma and strong on experience at the federal level.
A: I think Joe Biden is more experienced. He has been a senator since 1972. Bill Richardson has seen government and policy in so many different places.
Q: Which Democratic candidate do you find the most impressive?
A: Right now, I suppose Obama is extremely impressive to me. He is in a cultural skyrocket, a vertical ascent.
Q: But doesn’t that contradict your argument? Couldn’t he be seen as coasting on charisma?
A: It’s not just charisma, because he has touched something very deep that had been waiting to be touched for a long time — returning idealism to a central focus of our politics. I tried to touch it in 2000 and didn’t make it.
Q: Right, in a bid for the presidency you took on Vice President Al Gore, who, in the end, also had trouble getting people to feel passionately about him. Have the two of you reconciled since?
A: When he did the movie, I called him and said it was a good movie. I wish Gore had been president. It could have saved us a lot of heartache. Iraq is the worst foreign-policy mistake in my lifetime. It dwarfs Vietnam.>
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/25/magazine/25WWLNQ4.t.html?_r=1&ref=magazine&oref=slogin
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(1000+ posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
