What’s Rotten in Politics: an Insider’s View

Robert Reich’s account of his days in the Clinton administration is as damning an indictment of the sad state of politics in this republic as can be found anywhere. The more so because it is written without rancor and through the eyes of one who attempted to find the best in the president and the political system he served.

The former secretary of labor has known Bill Clinton since their Oxford years, and his disappointment is not so much with the man as with a wildly irresponsible political process to which his friend, the president, succumbed: a process in which the wealthy purchase the government they want while the needs of the bottom 60% of the population are largely ignored.

The result is an “economic apartheid” that threatens the foundation of representative democracy. “Income and wealth are becoming more concentrated than at any time since the 1920s,” Reich recalls telling Clinton, “. . . the top 5% taking home almost half of the nation’s income, the top 10% owning almost 70% of the value of all the stocks and bonds, including pensions.”

Reich is the innocent abroad in Washington, far removed from the public policy lectures he delivered at Harvard. Real power, he finds, resides with Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, whose power to wreck the economy and a president along with it makes him “the most powerful man in the world.”

Reich offers a devastating description of a dinner party that he attended at the home of then-AFL-CIO chief Lane Kirkland. There is Kirkland in his fancy digs serving foie gras to Greenspan, who consistently undermines American workers by raising interest rates whenever unemployment might go down and wages up.

“That’s exactly what’s so horrifying about Washington,” Reich writes, “stay for more than a few years, rise to a pinnacle of power, and you become morphologically identical to everyone else who has stayed and risen along with you, regardless of which pinnacle they populate: top of the government, top of the media, top of the lobbyists, top of the unions. They’re all friends, colleagues, golfing partners. Many are even spouses or lovers.” Reich wrote those words in his diary long before the recent wedding of Greenspan and NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, his 12-year companion.

Nor does it matter which party is in power. Reich recalls being lectured by Minnesota’s veteran Democratic Rep. Marty Sabo: “ ‘We’re owned by them. Business. That’s where the money comes from now. In the 1980s we gave up on the little guys. We started drinking from the same trough as the Republicans.’ ”

The proof that Sabo was right came when a Democratic Congress gutted Clinton’s ambitious program to retrain American workers. Reich quotes the president fuming: “We’re doing everything Wall Street wants! Everything Wall Street doesn’t want gets slashed! We’re losing our soul! I can’t do what I came here to do.”

The die had been cast during the Reagan/Bush years when the national debt was doubled by tax cuts for the rich and massive defense spending. Reich recounts his losing efforts to divert funding from military “readiness”: “Twenty percent of American citizens remain functionally illiterate. Yet our yearly defense spending still exceeds all the money spent by all levels of government on educating and training our people. Readiness? What about the ‘readiness’ of Americans to be productive members of the world economy?”

Clinton had no stomach for challenging the Gingrichites in Congress on this or most other issues. In one of the book’s most chilling moments, Reich recounts a conversation he had with Bob Michel, the Republican minority leader, who just before retiring in 1994 warned Reich: “There’s a new breed. They don’t care about getting anything done. All they want to do is to tear things down. The right wing is gaining ground. It will be our undoing eventually.” Reich asks him if he is referring to Gingrich? “And his friends,” Michel answered. “They talk as if they’re interested in ideas, in what’s good for America. But don’t be fooled. They’re out to destroy. They’ll try to destroy anything that gets in their way, using whatever tactics are available.”

No wonder Reich campaigned for Clinton’s reelection despite his reservations. But it’s a pyrrhic victory. After four years in office, it remained for Reich to tell the president “It’s still coming apart, you know. The rich are even richer and the poor poorer than when we arrived. People in the middle are still under enormous stress.”

Enough. You get the point. Go out and buy Reich’s book and treat yourself, your kids and your neighbors to a ruthlessly honest civics lesson on how the U.S. government really works, and for whom.