Hurray For Billarywood

Frank Bruni gives thanks for the Clintons:

Without Bill and Hill, where would we be? Bored even sillier than we are. Bereft of genuinely juicy players. Consigned to the snooze button that is Mitt and the cold touch of no-drama Obama. That’s why we keep letting Billary back on center stage. Or, rather, yanking them there, by turning each of his demi-gaffes into a meta-story, by weaving fantasies in which she takes over for Joe Biden and he takes a train back to Delaware. They hold the spotlight. They add a dollop of mystery, a dose of madness and a crucial heartbeat to a strangely bloodless, mirthless presidential contest.

Presidents Are Acting Not Illegally More And More

When Richard Nixon told David Frost in April 1977, "When the president does it, that means it is not illegal," he was talking not about political burglaries and campaign dirty tricks (though his operatives did all that, too) but a leader's sovereign powers during wartime. That Ron Howard and his screenwriter, Peter Morgan, suggested otherwise in "Frost/Nixon" was one of the few disappointments in an otherwise fine movie. Continuing his argument, Nixon said:

[I]t has been...argued that as far as a president is concerned, that in war time, a president does have certain extraordinary powers which would make acts that would otherwise be unlawful, lawful if undertaken for the purpose of preserving the nation and the Constitution, which is essential for the rights we’re all talking about.

Tom Campbell, Chapman University's law school dean, battled President Clinton over Kosovo when he was serving in Congress. He argues that when presidents grasp for broader foreign policy and war-making prerogatives, judges and Congress wax timid, and especially so since Sept. 11. On the 40th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, John Dean, who turned on Nixon during the the Watergate investigations of 1973-74, says recent presidents have widened the realm of "not illegal" far more than 37. The Los Angeles Times reports:

Executive orders issued by President George W. Bush in the aftermath of Sept. 11 claimed power for the Oval Office to ignore U.S. laws and international treaties.

President Obama has retained some of those extraordinary wartime powers, and his use of drones to attack terrorist suspects has drawn accusations of international law violations.

"I don't think Richard Nixon, in his darkest hour, would have authorized torture," said Dean...

The Clintons Got Tired Of Him, Too

War Powers And The Problem With Presidents

Tom Campbell, who served five terms in Congress from a district in northern California, has been dean of the Chapman University law school since February 2011. "It's a pleasure to have another moderate Republican in Orange County," I told him last night at the Pacific Club in Newport Beach, where Kathy and I were guests of our St. John's friends Bob (serving again as a peerless MC) and Ann Mosier. "On behalf of the other four, welcome."

"Richard Nixon?" he said with a bemused look. Dead these 17 years, I replied, as he knew. "Of course," he said with a smile. "Chuck Percy? George Romney?" Alas, also gone are the great Illinois senator and Michigan governor, beacons of the great American center. Campbell was suggesting that pragmatic conservatism had died along with its lions. Then he perked up and said, "Olympia Snowe! Ah, but then she's retiring."

We agreed that Nixon -- promoting detente with communists, the EPA, and near-universal health insurance, not to mention wage and price controls -- wouldn't be welcome in today's GOP. Indeed in most portraits of the modern conservative movement, Nixon's corner of the Etch A Sketch screen has been rendered inoperative. And yet a prominent local jurist standing nearby said that he too would join a party for the socially tolerant and fiscally prudent. One does meet such people in Orange County, even while clinking glasses in its premier social and business club. Perhaps Mitt Romney, if nominated, will be able to erase the hard-right positions he took to get onto the ticket, having spent years trying to do so with his centrist positions as Massachusetts governor. If not, in November we may learn that the lions' passing presaged a diminishment of the GOP's ability to contend for the White House.

During his lecture on war powers and the U.S. Constitution, Campbell demonstrated the capacity for nuance that makes pragmatists so infuriating. Bolstering his analysis with quotations from the Founders, he argued that only Congress may conduct an aggressive war, though the commander-in-chief has broad authority to act defensively. That being said, the War Powers Act (which Congress passed over Nixon's veto in 1973) lets a president wage war without permission from Congress for up to 90 days, meaning that any president can start World War III by himself so long as he sends Congress a memo within 48 hours of firing the first shot and then wins (or loses) inside of three months.

From Nixon on, presidents have resented this limitation on what some construe as their sovereign right to protect and defend the country. During a congressional hearing after Bill Clinton went to war in Yugoslavia in 1999, Campbell pressed Secretary of State Madeleine Albright to explain the difference between war or hostilities, which would have triggered the War Powers Act, and her description of the massive bombing campaign, armed conflict. She responded, "You're the law professor. You figure it out."

That's the war-making executive's usual high-handedness toward Congress for you. Then there's the judiciary's timidity. When Campbell and 15 Republican and Democratic colleagues sued Clinton for violating the War Powers Act, a federal judge dismissed the lawsuit on the grounds that Congress, though it had refused to declare war, had tacitly authorized it by appropriating funds to pay for it. "But the [current] appropriation isn't for the cruise missiles that are being used in the war," Campbell said. "They've already been paid for. The appropriation is to rebuild the stock that will be needed for the next war." By Campbell's lights, the judge was saying that Congress could only stop an illegal war by reducing the nation's overall preparedness.

Campbell advised judges who may fear being ignored by a willful president to remember July 1974's Nixon vs. United States, when the Supreme Court, by an 8-0 vote, ordered the president to turn over tapes to the Watergate special prosecutor. Nixon complied and then resigned on Aug. 9 in the firestorm over one transcript's contents.

Since Campbell had mentioned Kathy's and my ex-boss, I asked during the Q&A about Nixon's own constitutional scholarship. Campbell had already argued that that Congress had authorized the Vietnam war with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964. Fast forward to the 1977 Nixon-Frost interviews, when the ex-president was asked about an operative's scheme to expand the president's power to monitor and harass anti-war activists, 1970's Huston Plan. It was never implemented. But when David Frost wondered why he'd even considered such an appalling abuse of power, Nixon replied that if the president does it, it's "not illegal."

My question last night: Since the U.S. was at war, was Nixon's formulation (widely misunderstood as an excuse for Watergate crimes) actually a defensible assertion of a president's sovereign right to protect the country? Campbell replied that Nixon would have been better off saying that Congress, by authorizing the war, had already permitted security measures at home. It was an overreach for Nixon to arrogate the power to the executive, which, as it turns out, seems to be a persistent problem with presidents.

Lonely Palestine

As Israel vs. Iran crowds Israel and Palestine off the top of the Middle East agenda, Palestinian leaders are sounding wistful:

“The biggest challenge we face — apart from occupation — is marginalization,” Salam Fayyad, prime minister of the Palestinian Authority (below), said in an interview. “This is a direct consequence of the Arab Spring where people are preoccupied with their own domestic affairs. The United States is in an election year and has economic problems, Europe has its worries. We’re in a corner.”

A year ago, some predicted that Israel, feeling encircled by hostility as a result of the Arab spring, would be more eager to establish a Palestinian state. Perhaps the Palestinians thought so, too. If so, they were wrong. It's not the first time they've either put too much faith in the leverage applied by regional and global friends or walked away from the table believing that they could get a better deal next time. In late 2001, Yasser Arafat told former President Bill Clinton that he should've taken the deal the U.S. brokered in 2000. The Palestinians balked again in 2008, when the Bush administration did the honors. They squandered the 2009 Obama initiative by insisting that Israel suspend its West Bank settlements before even coming to the table.

It's actually astonishing to hear Fayyad say Palestinians feel marginalized, since they've been an A-list international cause for a generation. Three U.S. presidents have committed substantial effort and capital to a Palestinian state. They've been the toast of their Arab brethren throughout the region, though it's usually been all gas and no champagne. In her memoir, No Higher Honor, Condi Rice writes that when she was George W. Bush's national security adviser she told a group of representatives of Arab nations, "If you care so much about the Palestinians, why have each and every one of you expelled them from your country at some point in time?" Rice adds, "I can't count the number of phone calls I made to the rich Arabs, begging them to give just a little bit of their excess oil revenue to Mahmoud Abbas and the Palestinian Authority."

Now the world is otherwise occupied. Arabs are dealing with their revolutions, the Obama administration and Israel are dealing with Iran, and the Palestinians say they're in a corner. Indeed they are, and it's a corner of their own painting. They've been so fixated on what they believe Israel and the U.S. should do that they've failed to appreciate the basic truth of their situation, which is that Israel will do for them what it wishes, what it determines to be in its long-term interests, and no more. In the end, there are two negotiating partners, and no amount of external pressure can change the fact that Israel is in the stronger position, perhaps more isolated since the Arab spring but still indomitable.

Until now, it's been hard to avoid the impression that Palestinians' understandable feelings of resentment and entitlement have contributed to their failure to make the most of their opportunities with friendlier Israeli regimes. Here's hoping that their new feeling of isolation will help Palestinians understand that, if the two-state solution is to be salvaged, they should make the best territorial settlement they can as soon as possible. Israel has exploited over a decade of Palestinian hesitation and vacillation by building and expanding more and more settlements in the West Bank. Israel won't stop, and the U.S. can't make her stop. Only the Palestinians can, by finally saying yes.

Yale Locks

Yale law school students Bill and Hillary in New Haven, 1972. Hat tip to BuzzFeed.

Five Presidents and Henry

In his next book, Bob Woodward will probably tell us everything we need to know about the deliberations leading to the U.S. intervention in Libya that President Obama announced this morning. I have no insider sources. I do get the feeling that he's been dancing in the corner since the Arab revolution became a global story in January and that he decided this week that Muammar Qaddafi had finally rung the bell.

I'm sure it's not that he's been itching to go to war. No president in his right mind has such impulses. But unlike the risings in Tunisia and Egypt, Libya offers the opportunity for what may seem to Obama to be a relatively low-risk move in a region where the U.S. has profound interests and therefore historic obligations.

I actually heard five presidents during his forceful if awkwardly written statement this morning. George H.W. Bush must admire Obama's stress on acting as the leading member of a broad coalition and on the basis of the UN Security Council's authorization. One can imagine the intense diplomacy -- conducted while Sean Hannity joked that Obama was wasting his time playing golf and filling out his brackets -- by which Russia and China were persuaded to abstain rather than exercise their vetoes.

Obama echoed Bush 43's freedom agenda when he said he feared "the democratic values we stand for would be overrun" unless Qaddafi was stopped. Where and when our values have ever stood tall in Libya, Obama didn't say.

His stress on protecting civilians, which defined the limited scope of intervention, also made me think of Bill Clinton's regret that he didn't try to stop the Rwandan genocide.

Then there was Obama's own doctrine, putting his action in the larger context of the year's unprecedented uprisings against authoritarian Arab regimes. After two months in which the U.S. stood by while historic events unfolded, we've finally got a chance to throw our weight behind the good guys (whoever they are). As for outcomes, Obama said, they're "the right and responsibility" of Arabs, not us.

The weakest part of Obama's statement was its claim that Qaddafi threatens "global peace and security." He doesn't. Some talking heads said they heard no reference from Obama to U.S.-driven regime change, but I did, when he spoke of holding Qaddafi's regime "accountable" for its brutality.

That's the kind of language Henry Kissinger (and maybe Richard Nixon) might've suggested leaving out. In a phoner with Fox News' Megyn Kelly a half-hour before Obama spoke, Kissinger warned against trying to bring down Qaddafi. "If you engage in regime change," Kissinger said, "you then assume some responsibility for the successor regime and how to bring it about." Obama promised to keep U.S. troops out. But one thing that doesn't change, no matter the president, is the law of unintended consequences during military interventions, especially when the dynamics and personalities are as murky as in tribal Libya. Good first round for Obama against the ruthless and wily veteran of the north African desert. Eleven to go.

You Broke Some Laws, But That's Not The Point

"West Wing" 3:7, entitled "Gone Quiet," contains an Aaron Sorkin teaching about the politics of presidential investigations that was probably inspired by the Clinton impeachment and trial (though not, one assumes, the Nixon near-impeachment and resignation).

White House counsel Oliver Babish (Oliver Platt) is questioning First Lady Abbey Bartlet (Stockard Channing) about her participation in the cover-up of her husband's MS. When she offers to make a deal with congressional investigators, but takes a surprising line:

You broke some laws, Abbey, and quite frankly you should be ashamed of yourself, but this investigation isn't about that. It's about the criminalization of politics, an attempt to do in the hearing room what they couldn't do at the ballot box.

Nixon Library, Momentarily Redeemed

Take this, Stanley Kutler! In his critique of Bill Clinton's library, columnist Dave Gibson holds up Richard Nixon's as the gold standard of historical objectivity:

One of the exhibits deals with Clinton’s impeachment, which the library claims was purely political. Part of the permanent display claims: "The impeachment battle was not about the Constitution or the rule of law, but was instead a quest for power that the president's opponents could not win at the ballot box."

The truth is, Bill Clinton lied under oath to protect himself from a woman accusing him of sexual harassment. The investigation ended with his impeachment and the surrender of his law license… Period.

Historians have ranked Bill Clinton last, behind President Nixon on "moral-authority."

Nixon resigned in disgrace and later opened a library which presents a candid look at the facts about the Watergate scandal. Nothing is hidden, nothing is spun. Visitors to the Nixon Presidential Library are given the opportunity to draw their own conclusions.

The canny Nixonian blogger would just let that pleasing assertion lie (so to speak). But as Nixon's ex-chief of staff, having overseen and edited all the exhibits at the Nixon library when they were being written, designed, and constructed by contractors and assistants during 1988-90, I can tell you that we spun Watergate harder than a Whirpool on steroids. Our talking points were exactly the same as the Clinton library's: The president's opponents used the scandal for political payback.

As with all good spin, ours embodied some truth. Impeachment is always a political act. Just ask Andrew Johnson. While our Watergate gallery was never popular with journalists and historians, critics such as David Greenberg tried and failed to identify errors.

The problems were matters of thoroughness as well as tone. After Nixon died in 1994 and we decided that his privately operated library should be part of the National Archives, it was obvious to the feds and me (I was then running the library) that the exhibit had to go, if for reasons of common sense alone. In museum exhibits, polemics work just like in newspaper columns like Gibson's and blogs like mine. If you agree, you're satisfied; if you disagree, you're offended; and if you're open-minded, you're inclined to be suspicious that you're not getting the whole story.

That why in 2006, at my suggestion National Archives official Sharon Fawcett assigned the Nixon library's first federal director, historian Tim Naftali, to create a new Watergate exhibit that would (using Dave Gibson's words, ironically enough) give visitors the opportunity to draw their own conclusions about modern political history's worst scandal. Nixon's White House aides, some of them personally involved, resisted it, just as Clinton spurned a neutral narrative about his troubles.

It took the Reagan library until this year to uncover the Iran-contra scandal, which occurred 24 years ago. Thirty-eight years after Nixon's resignation, Naftali's Watergate installation is now underway. Perhaps he should invite Gibson to the ribbon cutting -- along with his NARA colleagues in Little Rock and elsewhere who might learn from his experience, warts, scars, and all. Deficit permitting, hazardous duty pay may even be in order.

Center Right, Not Wrong

While she thinks President Obama's in a pretty good position to be renominated in 2012 by virtue of the Democrats having no one substantial enough to challenge him, Reagan-Bush speechwriter Peggy Noonan also thinks he has a long way to go before he's standing astride the great American center as Bill Clinton was:

The president must have thought that distancing himself from left and right would make him more attractive to the center. But you get credit for going to the center only if you say the centrist position you've just embraced is right. If you suggest, as the president did, that the seemingly moderate plan you agreed to is awful and you'll try to rescind it in two years, you won't leave the center thinking, "He's our guy!" You'll leave them thinking, "Note to self: Remove Obama in two years."

A Bush, Not A Clinton

It's fashionable to say that President Obama has borrowed Bill Clinton's post-1994 playbook. Jon Meacham says Obama's playing a much riskier, gutsier game:

It was in 1990 that Mr. Bush broke one of the most celebrated promises in modern American politics —“Read my lips: no new taxes,” as he put it in 1988 — in order to control federal spending. In the same way that Mr. Obama struck his deal to secure lower tax rates for the middle-class and win an extension of unemployment benefits, Mr. Bush gave on tax rates to get “pay as you go” rules — meaning that no further spending could be approved without compensating budget cuts or revenue increases. It was the beginning of the fiscal discipline that helped create the budget surpluses of the 1990s.

While Mr. Obama’s immediate concern is stimulus and Mr. Bush’s was deficit-reduction, both gave way on issues critical to the true believers within their parties. For Mr. Bush, it was political death. He had never been fully trusted by a Reaganite Republican base. Like Mr. Obama — who is unhappy with his “sanctimonious” left wing — Mr. Bush was no ideologue.

Beer Summits Take Two

Ask most Washington observers who the obstructionists will be over the next two years, and they're likely to say congressional Republicans. But in a Nov. 3 interview with Terry Gross on "Fresh Air," veteran political writer Todd Purdum tells a somewhat different story. He describes the incoming GOP speaker, John Boehner, as likable and willing to work with Democrats, the kind of guy you'd like to have a beer with. His relationship with the tea party crowd is, in Purdum's word, correct. He's not interested in radically reforming government. He is interested in creating jobs and getting spending under control.

The problem, Purdum said, may end up being the president's worldview:

Certainly John Boehner and Barack Obama do not have the kind of personal reality and experience in common that you could say Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton had [after Republicans took control of Congress in 1995]. There was a level at which Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich were able to take the measure of each other as wonky, super-political Southern guys of a comparable generation, and I think they each felt they had the other's number and could somehow understand each other. I don't think there's much in Barack Obama's life experience or worldview that would make him a natural, give him natural affinities with John Boehner. So it'll be really interesting to see how they are able to work together.

Centering Prayer

Can Obama be the new Clinton? The Lexington blog at "The Economist" isn't sure:

As to whether President Obama can pull off the same trick, there is as yet simply no way of knowing. But just note the differences. The Republican speaker this time is going to be the cautious and experienced John Boehner, not the fiery and impetuous Newt. That could make compromise easier, but it will also be harder for the Obama White House to out-manouevre the other side. Second, the Republicans in 1994 had a worked-out strategy, the Contract with America, from which Clinton could cherry-pick; this time they have only the broad slogan of spending cuts. Third, in 1994 the Clintons had watched their health reform go down in flames; this time the president has enacted his big reform already and will certainly do his utmost to defend it from repeal.

Last is the question of presidential beliefs and temper. As the proud author of health reform, what Joe Biden memorably called that "big...deal", it is going to very much harder for Mr Obama to rebrand himself as a plausible centrist, even if he would like to. And moving to the centre has dangers: it could further alienate his disappointed base and perhaps prompt a presidential challenge from the Democrats' left.

I think the only impediments are the president's inexperience and his inflexible temperament. So I don't buy the plausibility argument, especially because Clinton came off as more of a leftist in 1993-94 than did Obama in his first two years. (I'm talking, of course, about the real Obama, not the fictional one portrayed on Fox News.)

Obama Agonistes

Democrats and journalists are talking hopefully about the ultimately happy outcome in 1994, when that year's disastrous midterm election -- the GOP won both houses of Congress -- spurred Bill Clinton toward the center and a six-year second presidency now considered one of the most successful in recent memory. There's also 1936, when FDR was reelected in spite of the ravages of the Great Depression.

It's a long way to 2012, when we assume Barack Obama will seek reelection. Perhaps by then he'll have transformed himself into the new Roosevelt or Clinton. But I fear not -- and I mean fear, because I don't crave Republican rule. For months, he's evinced no joy about the job he won so effortlessly. Instead, he seems impatient and restive, as he has his whole adult life. He seems like a leading candidate to be the new old Bush.

Obama's proud of what he takes to be world-changing initiatives such as health care reform, perhaps even a little smug about having had the vision to force them through. He still blames his predecessor for the lagging economy. And yet I wonder how different the world would be if he'd decided to spend his first two years on nothing but jobs and GDP growth. Instead of turning the architecture of the 2009 stimulus bill over to congressional leaders who cobbled it together out of every ward-heeling pet project members had been saving up for years, what if he he'd spent the same near-trillion on a coherent jobs, investment, and infrastructure package designed by the best and the brightest among a range of economic experts? Instead of spending a year on health care, what if he'd used every public appearance to promise his worried people that he wouldn't rest until every American who wanted to work was doing so?

Assuming today's obstructionist Republicans would even work with him on those kinds of policies, does he have the talent and heart for a log-rolling, back-scratching, Ronnie-loves-Tip presidency? That would take passion he hasn't demonstrated yet. The patrician Roosevelt learned to love his suffering people. After his '94 drubbing, Clinton learned to master and love the presidency. Remember when George H.W. Bush looked at his watch during one of the 1992 debates, a few months before Clinton beat him? I'm wondering if Obama isn't looking at his and saying to himself: I've got two more years of this?

Obama Is The Old Bush

Cut the president some slack, says Nicholas Kristof:

[M]aybe the best comparison is with President George H. W. Bush, a solid president and admirable man who had stratospheric approval ratings in 1991 at the end of the Persian Gulf war and then was fired by the public a year later when he sought re-election — because of a much milder recession than today’s. Bill Clinton, who was as good a president as we’ve had in modern times, captured Mr. Obama’s challenge: “I’d like to see any of you get behind a locomotive going straight downhill at 200 miles an hour and stop it in 10 seconds,” Mr. Clinton [said.]

The Arkansas Shuttler?

When the campaign's over, my former colleague at the Nixon Center, Steve Clemons, thinks the Obama administration should redeploy Bubba:

"Bill Clinton is the only guy I can think of who is trusted and liked by all sides," Clemons told POLITICO. "He is the only guy I know who successfully wrestled and pushed Netanyahu to do what he wants to do. And Clinton has spectacular popularity in Israel and Obama doesn't."

The former president "has granular understanding of every deal and piece of the deal - behind the scenes stuff that has been distorted and reframed," Clemons continued. "No one has a better grasp, ... sees the opportunity and has the global stature to both cajole, seduce and embarrass" the parties towards an agreement.

And under that scenario, which Clemons concedes is a float though one influenced by some kibitzing on the peace process with Bill Clinton at an event last week, how would Obama control the force that is Bill Clinton?

"Why would you want to control him," Clemons responded. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict "has become a global fault line in the eyes of the world, and a manifestation of America's weakness today. It has far greater significance" strategically "than northern Ireland. My bet is this is one of several defining issues" for the U.S. and the Obama administration, Clemons continued.

Doubted Thomas

I'm ambivalent about the new round of publicity about associate justice Clarence Thomas's sex life. As the Washington Post is reporting, a former girlfriend, Lillian McEwen, is speaking openly about his anatomical preferences and taste for pornography. I regret that he's being humiliated again. And yet it's possible to see how, by reopening the question of whether he lied to the Senate Judiciary Committee during his 1991 confirmation hearings, McEwen's claims could compromise his effectiveness in office, or worse.

It was during his hearings that Thomas's former staffer, Anita Hill (below), accused him of sexually-charged workplace discourse. He denied it. People's judgments about whether she was telling the truth tended to break along partisan lines. I always wondered why she'd lie and also expose herself to predictably vicious attacks from Thomas's supporters.

The Thomas-Hill controversy helped us better understand and combat sexual harassment. Thomas himself learned different lessons. His writings and statements, and now his wife's reckless heroics in calling Hill to demand an apology, demonstrate that he remains bitter. I can understand why. Of the countless men who've behaved as he allegedly did in the workplace, why did the first one pilloried before a Senate committee happen to be African-American? As pornography goes mainstream -- 25% of search engine requests are porn-related -- why does what a certain inflexibly conservative justice allegedly watched in private in the 1980s remain news?

Still, one aspect of McEwen's story does seem to be the public's business, even at this late date. She says Thomas told her he'd asked coworkers about their anatomy. It sounds like the comments Hill claimed he made. Confirmation that he behaved like a slob a quarter-century ago wouldn't be the problem. It would be the suggestion that Thomas hadn't told the truth under oath about a private matter. That's exactly what got Bill Clinton impeached and disbarred.

I've heard a couple of times lately that in politics, nothing happens by accident. And yet so far, the Thomas story is playing out like Greek tragedy rather than political conspiracy. Imagine for a moment that Hill was telling the truth. How would it feel all these years to be a fundamentally honorable person sitting on the Supreme Court by virtue of having committed perjury to save your nomination? Perhaps his unsettled feelings contributed to his wife's decision to call Hill, resulting in McEwen's decision to come forward now with her charges, which tend to corroborate Hill's, thus raising the specter of Thomas possibly having lied to the Senate.

However the sorry episode began (and it's important to remember that McEwen was shopping a manuscript about her relationship with Thomas before anyone knew about the Virginia Thomas call to Hill), it's undoubtedly occurred to somebody that the chances have increased, no matter how incrementally so far, for breaking the 5-4 moderate-conservative SCOTUS bloc that might otherwise persist for another decade. Any political machinations that may now occur wouldn't be about sex or anyone's righteous outrage about perjury. Just like the Clinton impeachment, they'd be about sheer power.

Cool Runnin' Loretta

Bill Clinton's coming back to Orange County.

Iran To The Brink

Bill Clinton on the U.S. and Iran:

I think it’s always best to have diplomatic relations with countries with whom we have differences of opinion. America, more than any other country, doesn’t do that. If we have a falling out with a particular faction that’s in authority, we sever all relations with them. I think to constantly threaten Iran with atomic attack is one of the incentives that might lead them to move toward a nuclear arsenal, even if they weren’t otherwise inclined to do so.

Jerry Rigged

Bill Clinton was famous for helping solidify his centrist bona fides by taking what some called the "double death" position -- aggressively pro-abortion and pro-death penalty. A majority of Americans agreed, and Clinton was right there with them. It appears Jerry Brown is serving up the same cocktail in his bid to be elected governor of California:

Brown was a vocal opponent of the death penalty when he served as governor in the 1970s and '80s, once suggesting that banning capital punishment would elevate society to a "higher state of consciousness."

He vetoed the death penalty in 1977, and his chief justice appointee was removed from the bench in the 1980s for her constant overturning of death penalty convictions.

Brown has taken more moderate stances since he ran for attorney general in 2006 and vowed to carry out the laws of the state. His office has been fighting for the resumption of capital punishment and defends death penalty convictions before the state Supreme Court.

Brown remains reliably pro-choice. Clinton's already shown that double-death works politically. What would be interesting if someone, whether Democrat or Republican, ever tried double life: Anti-death penalty and in favor of an aggressive campaign to reduce the number of abortions (without taking away the legal right to choose). It's something you'd expect a principled Jesuit-trained candidate to try -- someone, for instance, like Jerry Brown.