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“My frame of reference is what works”

Thank goodness Barack Obama isn’t invested in the 60s like those tiresome boomers.

But he appears to replace their obsessions with his own free-floating grab bag of Time “Man of the Year” cliches. If he doesn’t care for the 60s perhaps he can catch up on the 80s.

Obama’s Reagan Mania recalls the grimly practical Deng Xiaoping, ”It doesn’t matter whether a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice.”

And has Democratic Hall Monitor Paul Krugman points out, the Reagan Era wasn’t such a buoyant time, boyish charm aside.

“… the great failure of the Clinton administration — more important even than its failure to achieve health care reform, though the two failures were closely related — was the fact that it didn’t change the narrative, a fact demonstrated by the way Republicans are still claiming to be the next Ronald Reagan…Now progressives have been granted a second chance to argue that Reaganism is fundamentally wrong: once again, the vast majority of Americans think that the country is on the wrong track. But they won’t be able to make that argument if their political leaders, whatever they meant to convey, seem to be saying that Reagan had it right.”

Blanket Agreement

Yet another thing we can blame on the nation’s most distinguished placeholder, Gerry Ford. After he left office!

Along with doing down Reagan, Nixon, much of the 70s, and the Clintons, Ford in the tell-all “Write It When I’m Gone” lets it be known that he was responsible for the North American Free Trade Agreement.

It happened at a 1993 Clinton sleepover in Colorado.

“Up until that point, President Clinton cared less about NAFTA. He wasn’t interested. I spent most of my time with him promoting NAFTA, urging him to take action, to get going … I honestly can claim full credit for getting him off dead center on NAFTA,” Ford recalled in May 1994. “Now, once he got interested, he did a damn good job. He twisted arms, he browbeat Democrats and he put on a good event in the East Room with Carter, Bush and myself. You know, he’s a helluva salesman.”

And the blessings poured fourth! Ourmostathleticpresident can take the credit and the blame.

For fashion icon Subcomandante Marcos…

…but also for the NAFTA Superhighway maps which infest the web

[choose one!]

The blessings continue today. The new year saw the fall of more barriers to American agriculture crushing Mexican farmers.

“The population working in the primary sector (agriculture, livestock, forestry, hunting, and fishing) fell drastically, from 8.2 million people in 1991 to 6.1 million in 2006… Those working in the primary sector represented 26.8% of the total working population in 1991 but only 14.6% in 2006. According to a study commissioned by the government, the number of agricultural households diminished from 2.3 million in 1992 to 575,000 in 2002.”

Wherever did all those farmers go?

The problem with Gerry’s story is that Clinton endorsed NAFTA before the 1992 election. So never-mind.

Second Time, Farce

Such was Gerry Ford’s fate that even his bumbling would-be assassins were viewed as indicative of the Administration’s general air of haplessness.

Churchill wrote of the thrill of being fired upon without result. Ford was twice lucky. Two would be slay-gals went gunning for him, and only managed to get off one [bad] shot between them.

Errant shooter Sara Jane Moore had the requisite triple name, but lacked the accuracy America had come to expect from lone, crazed assassins.

Like the better class of killer, Moore had an FBI connection, informing the Bureau on the San Francisco Bay area radical milieu in the wake of the psychotic Symbionese Liberation Army actions of the mid 70s .

No patsy claim though – she owned up to it all. And now she is out.

We’ll always have Carter comutee and Clinton pardonee Patty Hearst to kick around though.

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Bullets bounce off, facts won’t deter them. The Clinton Library has become the never ending story for the right and careless reporters, each supposidly new revelation stoking rage and generating acres of blog ink with insightful headlines on the order of “HMMMMM.”

And if possible, a Sandy Berger reference.

Further proof is the silence which has greeted a lengthy interview with the actual person in charge of all the Presidential Library’s archives. Assistant archivist for presidential libraries Sharon Fawcett spoke to The National Journal, and illuminated many of the myths that lay over the Clinton archives.

Result? Zippo in Technorati, until The New York Sun‘s Josh Gertstein wrote a piece claiming facts contradicted her professions of openness.

It’s a classic shape shifting story.

Headline: “2,600 Pages of Clinton Records Withheld”

– What? They are records of Clinton’s Administration, now held by the National Archives and being processed for release or not at the Clinton Library. You could say “Clinton Records” is headline shorthand, but they are not his possession. And it further’s the line that no matter the outrage, the answer is Clinton.

Who done it? Gerstein doesn’t know but chooses to lay it on Clinton’s designated paper flack catcher Bruce Lindsey. Lindsey is the person assigned to review documents for Clinton, as provided for in current law. And archives operates in part under a letter in which Clinton laid out areas he was concerned to review. Read down in the piece to where the Archives spokesperson says “Not all of those pages were closed by Mr. Lindsey, in fact, the National Archives does the first set of processing. … At least some of those materials were closed by our archivists.”

How big is the document universe and how slow is release at the Clinton Library? Fawcett’s numbers show that the Clinton is not out of line from the pattern for Ex Presidents.

In 2009 Archives’ ten people in Little Rock hope to go through a new 200,000 out of 118 million document pages in the Clinton Library. Archives has done 8 of the 43 million pages at the Reagan, 5.5 million of 34 million at the Bush Library.

And Clinton couldn’t put his papers out now if he wanted to.

“The Archives still has to conduct a review for other restrictive categories: for national security, for third-party privacy information. These records will be highly sought after when they come out, so we need to go through and redact phone numbers and Social Security numbers, and other information that could be damaging to a person’s personal privacy, so those are the kinds of things that slow down the process… that’s the kind of information that we go through page by page and look at.”

There is endless detail more in the interview, it isn’t the last word and I’m perfectly prepared to enjoy the Clinton Conspiracy when it’s proven, but until then the Unstoppables could take a rest.

But won’t.

British Conservatives Look Back in Anger

It ain’t just disgruntled Labour supporters in Britain who dislike the current US president.

British Conservative blogger Ian Dale has polled his largely Conservative readership on ranking US Presidents since World War II. It’s not a scientific poll, but even these hardened fans of the smack of firm government view Bush the Younger as a walking disaster.

The rankings:
Franklin D Roosevelt +67
Dwight Eisenhower +59
Harry Truman +53
Ronald Reagan +50
John F Kennedy +40
Bill Clinton + 20
George Bush Snr -4
Lyndon Johnson -19
Gerald Ford -20
Jimmy Carter -40
Richard Nixon -42
George W Bush -48

Proof that Conrad Black is not a crank?