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The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton. By Joe Klein. New York: Doubleday, 2002. 230 pp.
The title of Joe Klein's potentially fascinating yet frustrating account of the politics of the 1990s is noteworthy in two respects. Although Klein sketches a portrait of Bill Clinton that encompasses at once the former president's policy successes and personal flaws, the picture displays a presidency that is at odds with a characterization of Clinton as "The Natural" and that is less "misunderstood" than Klein suggests.
Borrowing from the 1984 movie adaptation of Bernard Malamud's baseball novel to describe Bill Clinton as a campaigner, Klein quotes Paul Begala as describing Clinton as "the best there ever was" (p. 42). The author also suggests that Clinton deserves credit for pursuing a coherent agenda with substantive domestic policy results: economic growth, enhanced support for free trade and globalization, welfare reform, and deficit reduction. This "serious, disciplined, responsible presidency," Klein argues, exists simultaneously with "gaudy personal failings" (p. 11) that periodically assert themselves and present what Klein calls "the Clinton conundrum: solid policy and brilliant politics obscured by the consequences of tawdry personal behavior" (p. 21). Partisans and detractors of Bill Clinton...