Book Review: Citizen

Each end of year holiday season I find a book by or about one of our presidents and read it as a gift to myself. Since that slugabed Barack Obama hasn’t published his second book of presidential memoirs (volume one was published in 2020), I settled for Bill Clinton’s post-presidency memoir Citizen: My Life After the White House published Nov. 19 this year. There are plenty of reasons to read Clinton.

My position about Bill Clinton and this book is that since he survived heart disease and a case of sepsis he ought to write a post-presidency memoir so historians can benefit from the information gathered herein. Indeed, there is granular information about the accomplishments of the Clinton Foundation. The first two parts of the book cover those years in detail lest we forget Bill and Hillary Clinton were do-gooders, all over the world. Let’s face it, though. Bill Clinton is a political animal and the third part of the book, “Politics, Rewriting History, and Reviving the Foundation in a Still Uncertain Future,” in which he discusses politics, is what many were waiting to hear.

Clinton points to Newt Gingrich and his Contract with America as the source of today’s divisiveness in society. When Republicans won the 1994 midterm elections and installed Gingrich as Speaker of the House, it was he who changed our politics to be more confrontational. From shutting down the government twice, to welfare reform, to a capital gains tax cut, to impeaching Bill Clinton as president, Gingrich made it so our politics would never be the same as it was. We are still suffering from the conservative detritus in his wake in national politics. He supported Donald Trump’s claims of a stolen election, and claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.

Important in Citizen is Bill Clinton’s account of Hillary Clinton’s political life through her run for the presidency in 2016. While their story is familiar, he makes a strong case for what happened and why. It is a story infrequently told in major media outlets and worth reading here.

Clinton also reviews some of his major accomplishments, like the Crime Bill and the Family and Medical Leave Act. There is no shortage of moments when he honked his own horn about his many accomplishments as president, including job creation, converting the budget deficit into a budget surplus, and connecting more schools to the internet. Clinton makes a solid case that his administration did many things that benefited middle-income workers.

Beginning around 2016, Clinton received criticism from the left that his signing the 1994 Crime Bill and the 1996 welfare reform bill were actually him (and Congress) caving to the far right. He defends himself rationally as the “explainer in chief” is wont to do. It is important to recall that in the end, Clinton was one of the good guys among politicians and advanced Democratic causes.

I recommend reading Citizen: My Life after the White House by Bill Clinton. It is important to know the history of Democratic politics and Clinton was in the middle of it.