So an interesting story about Bill's analysis of his wife's loss.

“She will win the general election if you nominate her. They're just trying to make sure you don't," Bill Clinton said at the Fort Thompson event. "It is just frantic the way they are trying to push and pressure and bully all these superdelegates to come out.” He then began impersonating an intimidated superdelegate: “Oh, this is so terrible: The people, they want her. Oh, this is so terrible: She is winning the general election, and he is not. Oh my goodness, we have to cover this up."

Who's they? MoveOn.org apparently.

I’ve not been fond of the Clintons for a long time. It goes back to a few days after the 1992 election when I heard Bill Clinton talking about his ambitious plans for health care and I turned to a friend and said, “I sure hope he knows now to count to sixty.” It took no special prescience to see the disaster of Clinton care coming. The program was formulated in secret with plenty of experts but few congressional allies. Those experts were more intent on creating a document to satisfy their fellow wonks than in developing a plan that might attract a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate. No one was surprised that the Clintons lost both the Congress and the issue. Instead of using the failure of the Congress to address the major issue of the early 1990s and elect more Democrats in the 1992 election, the clumsy dénouement of Clinton care lead to an historic loss of control of the House of Representatives.

I've been all tied in knots about the party I want to see emerge and the DLC-influenced centrist one that I fear is sticking around. It's the "Clinton referendum" question, the worry that Obama's hope-and-unity just means more unproductive compromise. And all this at a time when the Republican discourse is kind of insane (one odd tax proposal after another, somehow following Bin Laden to the gates of Hell and shooting him there) and Paul Krugman has convincingly argued for a new constructive embrace of partisan-ism.

Anyway, this Thursday, Glenn Hurowitz is reading from his just-published book, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party, at Robin's Bookstore.

The canned summary:

Coming just in time for election season, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party chronicles the extraordinary stories of five politicians and activists: three "progressive heroes" who exhibited rare political courage - and through it found unexpected political success, and two "spineless weasels" who embraced The Politics of Fear and rode it to ultimate failure.

The book reveals how Senator Paul Wellstone used his courage to overcome a quirky personality, an occasionally hysterical style and, most of all, an ideology considerably to the left of his constituents, eventually becoming a national hero.

It tells the dramatic story of how the same foundations and corporations that engineered the right-wing takeover of the Republican Party used junk political science to move Democrats to the right as well. Hurowitz shows how the legacy of Bill Clinton, widely proclaimed his generation's greatest political talent, will actually burden the Democratic Party and the progressive movement for decades to come.

A work of astounding insight, Fear and Courage in the Democratic Party promises to transform political discourse in 2008.

Given how some people feel about Paul Wellstone around here, I thought maybe some of you would like to come out.

Robin's Bookstore, 108 S. 13th Street (13th and Sansom)
Thursday, January 17 at 6 pm