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State of the Union
A Report on President Clinton's First Four Years in Office
by Thomas Blood and Bruce Henderson


(Click for Amazon book review)

BOOK REVIEW by OnTheIssues.org:

This book is a "report card" on Clinton's first term. Its stated intent is to establish a "universal standard by which citizens can go down a checklist to judge a President's performance" (p. 9) The authors use the standard of fulfilling Constitutional duties and then fulfilling campaign promises. They conclude that Clinton has fulfilled 136 out of 157 campaign promises, or 87%, and that he tried but failed to achieve results on an additional 14, for a total of 96% on that scale (p. 154).

The "report card" is a cute metaphor but the authors' analysis is just not plausible. They claim to judge Clinton by a "universal standard"--pshaw! Whether Clinton has fulfilled campaign promises is interpretative--there is no "universal standard" like the authors pretend. Therefore, this is a campaign booklet much more than a "report card"--and the authors should not pretend otherwise!

For example, the authors score Clinton as having fulfilled 9 out of 9 promises on health care (pp. 136-8), and having achieved results on 5 out of 9 promises on health care, scoring him at 100% on "action taken" and 55% on "achieved results." The authors mask the truth about Clinton's first term--that his health care initiative, known as "HillaryCare" because his wife ran the commission that wrote the policy report, was widely considered the greatest failure of his presidency--if not one of the greatest political and policy failures of American history. The authors claim "promises kept" on health care--but every one of those got killed in Congress when they killed HillaryCare. Only to warped inside-the-Beltway pundits does that count as "Promises kept"--to the rest of us, Clinton promised to reform healthcare and failed.

The campaign promise analysis is "Part 2"; unfortunately, "Part 1" is even worse. "Part 1" scores whether Clinton fulfilled his basic Constitutional duties, such as "Establish Justice" (pp. 15-26, a phrase from the preamble to the Constitution). The authors score Clinton with a resounding "Yes," based on his having succeeded in pushing the Brady Bill through Congress (pp. 15-17) which limits handgun access. Any non-partisan analyst would score Clinton just as resoundingly "No," based perhaps on the Waco killings (pp. 36-38, not in the "Establish Justice" section). Even Clinton supporters might agree that Clinton oversaw a great injustice by using tanks and teargas against unarmed children--but the authors interpret the actions they like in the sections they like.

To think that one can score a president on a "Report Card" in any unbiased manner is just plain silly. This book reeks of bias--we don't MIND bias, but we DO mind when bias hides behind a "fair report card." This book is a pro-Clinton hagiography. Read it as such--not as a "report card."

-- Jesse Gordon, OnTheIssues editor-in-chief, April 2012