This issue: February 27, 2012 (Vol. 17, No. 23)

‘People, they like the poetry’

BY WILLIAM KRISTOL

Barack Obama is a careful politician and a disciplined man. But when he’s on the West Coast, perhaps a little tired because of the jet lag, at a fancy fundraiser with his most glamorous and credulous supporters, he tends to let his guard down. The mask slips.

Four years ago, speaking to rich San Franciscans, Obama infamously explained why working-class Americans were so mysteriously resistant to his charms: “It’s not surprising, then, they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them, or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment, as a way to explain their frustrations.” Last week, speaking to the glamorati ...

The Real Obama

The budget of a left-wing progressive.

BY FRED BARNES

President Obama’s budget for 2013 is pure Obama. How do we know? Paul Ryan, the House Budget Committee chairman, was once asked how to become a budget expert. “You have to read the budget,” he said. To know Obama, it’s similar. You have to read the speeches and look over the budgets. 

For the past year, they’ve told the same story. No, the real Obama is not a pragmatist or a frustrated moderate or a well-intentioned but weak politician forced by political circumstances to take positions he’d rather not. Only sympathizers, notably media types, believe any of those notions.

The Big Creep

An attempt to rehabilitate Bill Clinton is in full bloom. Unsurprisingly, the would-be hagiographers leave a lot out.

BY ANDREW FERGUSON

The aging fops and dandies who edit Esquire magazine—yes, it still comes out, check a newsstand if you don’t believe me—devoted a chunk of their issue this month to Bill Clinton. It was an unusual move. Typically, under the motto “Man at His Best,” the editors concentrate their attention on those fabulous new chukkas Donna Karan just introduced, or the optimal thread count for Ralph Lauren Egyptian cotton sheets, or the yummy new clover-accented absinthe imported from Azerbaijan at $33 an oz.—or even, when el machismo oversweeps them, a superhot new starlet in slingback spike heels with off-color stitching and a simple but elegant choker. What I mean is, when these gentlemen put a politician, even an ex-president, on the cover and a long interview with him inside, you know something’s up. 

The Great American Novel

Will there ever be another?

BY ROGER KIMBALL

A couple of years ago, I was asked to give a talk about “The American Novel Today.” It wasn’t my first choice of topic, frankly, partly because I read as few contemporary novels as possible, partly (here we get into cause and effect) because most of the novels that get noticed today (like most of the visual art that gets the Establishment’s nod) should be filed under the rubric “ephemera,” and often pretty nasty ephemera at that. I do not, you may be pleased to read, propose to parade before you a list of those exercises in evanescence, self-parody, and general ickiness that constitute so much that congregates under the label of American fiction these days. Instead, I’d like to step back and make some observations on the place of fiction in our culture today, A.D. 2012. It is very different from the place it occupied in the 19th century, or even the place it occupied up through the middle of the last century.

Good Samaritans

Claudia Anderson on Good Samaritans

BY CLAUDIA ANDERSON

Last winter, I was in Paris for a few days and stayed at the epicenter of the old city, right next to Notre Dame, in a place called the Hôtel-Dieu, a large working hospital. Some years back a decision was made to provide rooms on the top floor for patients’ visitors to stay overnight. Then, finding that the rooms were seldom filled to capacity, the hospital opened them to paying guests. It makes for a novel lodging arrangement, and I loved stepping out in the morning into the square in front of the cathedral, nearly empty of tourists in bitter February.

The Hôtel-Dieu was founded in 651 by a bishop of Paris remembered as Saint Landry. The present grand ...

The Clinton Renaissance®

Reading Andrew Ferguson’s splendid essay this week on Bill Clinton (see page 20), The Scrapbook was especially beguiled by his detailed description of the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI), that world-class gathering of seminal minds and can-do spirits, dedicated to generating bold ideas and innovative solutions. Between the gory details of the CGI gabfests, however, and the blasts from the past (Susan McDougal, Sidney Blumenthal, Webster Hubbell) of the Clinton era, The Scrapbook was reminded of the baby boom gabfest that started it all: Renaissance Weekend. 

Whatever happened to Renaissance Weekend? Well, The Scrapbook is pleased to report that, even in the absence of Bill and Hillary Clinton, it still thrives​—​although ...