But your book does make clear that despite his self-inflicted wounds, Clinton was never given credit for what he accomplished, and that's the fault of the right and the media.

Look, there's a kind of fashionable talking-head center that responds to my book by saying, "Well, Klein is trying to defend Clinton, but you really can't, because he offended all of us with Monica Lewinsky." But he didn't. They seem to forget that the guy had a 70 percent approval rating when he left office. The highest sustained approval ratings of any president since Kennedy. I'm gonna rant a little bit here. Jonathan Yardley reviewed my book in the Washington Post, and said Clinton had an empty presidency. Well it wasn't so empty if you're one of the 10 million Americans taking advantage of Hope scholarships to go to college last year.

I talked to James Carville recently and he brought up that Yardley review. He talked about how certain liberal pundits are so "disappointed" by Clinton, but they ignore what he did for the working poor. That quiet transfer of money to the working poor has never been appreciated.

And there was a serious philosophical basis for that. He went through this process that a lot of us went through in the '80s, which was to really think about the information revolution, and how you dealt with government services as a result. People were going to have a lot more information, and that should be acknowledged: They should be allowed to make choices about where their kids go to school, where they get their health coverage, what to do with their own money. The model was the G.I. Bill of Rights, which was a voucher program, and that was a far better way to go about government activism -- dare I call it liberalism? -- in the information age than merely providing the same old bureaucracies filled with public employee union members who are more concerned with how much overtime they're going to get than whether they're helping poor people. That was a huge thing that he did, he really acted on it.

And he upset a lot of liberals. I was at the Rockefeller Foundation with Marian Wright Edelman the day he signed the welfare reform bill, and she was so furious, and honestly so was I. But I've come around to think he basically did the right thing. The system was so broken ...

I was on the same side as Marian at that point. I wrote a column at the time ... something we still don't know is how many people are incapable of working, for whatever reason, lack of intelligence, emotional stability. They set the figure at 20 percent, but that's an arbitrary figure. Might be 18 percent; might be 23 percent. We're going to find out. But yes, he had courage. One problem he had, though, was on foreign policy, and it was partly because of the baggage of avoiding the draft and Vietnam. Now, I happen to think that was a moral position. The way he went about it was a little scoundrelly -- but that war was wrong. Yet you never heard him say that.

Well, I think that's the problem a lot of people have with so-called New Democrats: There is often a failure to take bold and maybe even unpopular stands, to say something like, "The Vietnam war was wrong, and we're not going to be revisionist about that," if it would cost them politically.

I think the Democratic Leadership Council is doing the same thing now on gun control. On the war, major DLC people -- the smart ones like Bill Galston and Elaine Kamarck and Bruce Reed, maybe not Will Marshall -- I'm sure would all say if you asked them, the war was wrong. They all believe it. I think the way the DLC really pulled the Democrats out of the wilderness was on the question of how do you deliver government service to the poor. I think what's going on right now is far less honorable. The tendency since the 2000 election to backslide on gun control is reprehensible, and the DLC is doing that.

I feel the same way about the death penalty, and people like Clinton changed their position on that because the New Democrat way was to say, You'll never get elected opposing the death penalty, so I'm going to support it.

Well, I oppose the death penalty too. But then I'm also against late-term abortion.

But don't you think that's a problem, that you have all these Democrats running for office now, rejecting principled positions because they think they can't get elected?

Well, that really wasn't as important as the rethinking of government activism, though, and that's what the DLC did. I mean, the left was totally brain-dead on these issues, and it still is. There wasn't an interesting idea that came out of the left in the last 30 years.

Your book is extremely negative about Ralph Nader, and his role in the liberal politics of personal destruction that we saw in the '80s, starting with the Robert Bork Supreme Court confirmation. You quote him salivating over Bork as an opportunity for "constituency building," and quote an ally saying Nader taught him how to demonize the opposition. I watched the way he demonized Clinton and Gore when he ran for president, insisting they were no better for poor people than Bush, which clearly isn't true.

Ralph brought a really important thing to the table, and that was the questioning of corporate products and corporate power. That was real important. But he went way overboard with it. Had he ever been elected president, you'd have seen the billion people in the world living better because of the global economy slide right back into poverty. How many villages in the Third World has he been to? The ones I've been to you've seen a major improvement in the lives of people. For the first time children can go to school, instead of work in the fields. I think you start off with sweatshops and you move up the food chain. This dilettante notion that the global economy is evil because big corporate leaders make too much money ... they do make too much money, but the only way we've figured out how to generate wealth in this world is through the market economy.

There are important social values that you have to adhere to. You have to provide education, and you have to provide healthcare. You've got to provide a safety net, and you've got to provide opportunity. But for the rest of it, the market economy isn't a bad tool for moving people up.

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