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All Too Human Abridged

All Too Human Abridged

List Price: $17.98
Your Price: $17.98
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Great Book
Review: I enjoyed this book a lot. This really showed a more personal, human side of the White House. The part at the end about passing Medicare was terribly boring, but the rest was a+ quality. I was surprised to hear such a less partisan tone coming from such hardcore Democrat. This book is excellent for anyone interested in politics but needs it watered-down with a little bit of a personal touch.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Great book!
Review: Whether you love Clinton or hate him, this book is a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at campaigning, the Presidency, and The White House. I found this book so intriguing I could reread it right now, and I just finished it a few minutes ago. Stephanopoulos has told his story honestly and admits his own fears and doubts without apology. Glad he got out of The White House before Monica.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Very readable
Review: I first came to know of George Stephanopoulos when I watched The War Room in my Economics class three years ago. I was very pleased by this book. Stephanopoulos did not try to glorify himself in my opinion, as he admitted to his own downfalls and shortcomings. I fully agree with his political philosophies and portrayal of Bill Clinton, a great president who could have been a better man. Though a lot of political memoirs are rather dry, I laughed a lot when reading this book. It's easy to relate to and overall very "human."

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: All too Human
Review: In the beginning I was fascinated, and then the more I read the madder I got. The only thing larger than Geoge Stephanopolous' ego is is EGO. In the end I was glad that I took it out of the local library, thus depriving him of any royalties.

At times I felt he was redeeming himself only always to have him be Clinton's apologist. Mr. Stephanopolous is a Socialist who will go to any length to get his views to the highest places.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Candid memoirs from one of Clinton's top operative!
Review: A memoir from one of Clinton's top political operatives. Very interesting, well-written, and candid.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: All too candid?
Review: George Stephanopoulous' notched up for me when he admitted that his anxiety and depression in the latter phase of his association with the Clinton administration was such that he resorted to using Zoloft to control it. This is a great book for arm chair pundits who are fascinated by the drama of politics. What is it like to be asked for advice by a President? Stephanopoulous does a good job humanizing the White House. I'd recommend this book to political junkies and "Slate" readers who cannot help but clicking through to learn the latest Washington gossip.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: Educational
Review: Want to know what its like to be president of the US? Read this book. Very insightful and readable. An excellent companion book is "Uncovering Clinton", these two books cover the same time period and will give you a more complete understanding of President Clinton, the good and the bad.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Honest and Appealing
Review: This book was particularly appealing to me because I'd found Stephanopoulos a refreshing figure in the '92 campaign, and had seen "The War Room". When he resigned from the Clinton White House I was one of those eagerly awaiting his book. I wasn't disappointed. Certainly some of my impressions of the Clinton style of governing were verified. I'd always felt that this was an administration that governed through reaction rather than an organized agenda. This appeared to be a function of not only Bill Clinton's personality but also of Hillary's. There was no doubt that Pres. Clinton used (and uses) an unusual personal magnetism to substitute for a coherent set of objectives.

I found this book refreshing because Stephanopoulos refrains from being overly self-serving. So many of these tell-all White House memoirs have appeared to serve as an ego-booster for the author. I don't sense this slant at all. Mr. Stephanopoulos has been honest about his own ambitions, lending a qualifying air to his writing.

This book further illustrates that taking a White House job of significance can consume a worker's entire lifestyle. One expects the President to live his job, but what of the inner circle staffers who are quickly forgotten to history, and to us? As with other books, this volume once again testifies to the seductiveness of power, and access to that power.

In the end, it remains a very enjoyable and readable book, being sufficiently gossipy without being bitchy. It will make good reading regardless of the reader's political persuasion.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: morally blind
Review: In a psychomachia (as I learned from reading Flannery O'Connor's The Violent Bear it Away--see review) Good and Evil wage a war for a man's soul. This memoir, believe it or not, depicts two separate psychomachias, with poor George Stephanopoulos stuck in the middle. First there is the struggle between his "good" liberal leanings and the "evil" pragmatism of Bill Clinton's politics. Second, there is the struggle between the George who was raised a good Orthodox Christian and the "bad" George who is called upon to do Clinton's dirty work. The tragedy of the story is that "bad" George surfaces time and again in order to serve "evil." He loses his soul twice, by committing morally dubious acts to further an agenda that he does not even believe in. It's really quite painful to watch.

Stephanopoulos is the real deal, an unreconstructed bleeding heart liberal. In 1992 he hoped to work for Mario Cuomo, someone who would proudly carry the liberal banner in to battle. But the notorious Hamlet of the Hudson vacillated for so long that Stephanopoulos started to look around at other campaigns. In an especially devastating sequence, he discusses meeting with Bob Kerrey and his staff, and deciding that their campaign was not worth taking seriously, that it was too messianic, too dependent on the personality of the candidate. Then he meets with Bill Clinton and is genuinely impressed. Though he does not feel that Clinton shares his ideology, Stephanopoulos decides:

Maybe Clinton's more conservative side would make him more appealing. Maybe it was time for the party to sacrifice ideological purity for electoral potential.

In their first meeting, Clinton asks what he should do about a pledge declining PAC contributions. Stephanopoulos advises:

PAC money isn't morally worse than other contributions. But attacking PACs is an easy sound bite right now, so unless you can raise a ton, it's probably not worth ceding the high ground. Besides, Harkin's (Tom Harkin, IA) sucking up all of the labor money anyway. You're not giving up as much as you'd gain with the editorial boards. I'd take the pledge.

It's worth pausing here, because this is before his association with the Clintons had completely corrupted Stephanopoulos, and look at that bit of advice. There are a series of assumptions here: (1) contributions are somehow morally questionable; (2) but PAC contributions are no worse than others; (3) if you're the one receiving them, you accept them and keep quiet; (4) because you aren't and your opponent is, you oppose them; and (5) this is the moral high ground. Positioning yourself to denounce as immoral a behavior you would engage in if you could? George may not have had that much to learn from Bill after all.

But he does become Bill's boy and there is an element of seduction here:

...I was moved by more than what he stood for or how much he knew. It was how I felt around him : uniquely known and needed, as if my contribution might make all the difference. Clinton spoke to the me yearning to be singled out for a special job--the boy who had wrapped his fingers around the archbishop's staff and waved the censer in the path of his dad.

Without truckling in Freudian analysis here, you can't help noticing the psychosexual dynamic here and that bit about a "special job" and fingers wrapped around a staff, sounds like it could be lifted from Monica Lewinsky's book.

If the image of Clinton as lover and father stuff isn't enough, Stephanopoulos next compares him to Christ:

The messianic streak in Kerrey's camp had left me cold. But I was yielding to a similar temptation with Clinton. I barely knew him--one meeting, a couple of phone calls. But the feeling I had when we first met was taking root, putting him and his cause at the center of my life. Maybe I couldn't help it. Maybe I had to romanticize the mission in order to survive the impossible hours, the inevitable compromises, and the intense personal pressures that I knew would come with any campaign. Maybe I had to turn it into a crusade. How it happened is still a mystery to me, but I was on the road to becoming a true believer, developing an apostle's love for Clinton and the adventure we were about to share.

This might not be so embarrassing if Clinton had a "cause" other than himself. But Bill Clinton is the sum total of what Bill Clinton believes in, and so Stephanopoulos is placing nothing more than another person, and not much of one, at the center of his own life.

Within a short time, Stephanopoulos was fighting off bimbo eruptions, draft dodger stories, and all those myriad other rumors, innuendoes and, as we ultimately discovered, perfectly valid allegations. Always in these situations it is Hillary who demands that the accuser be destroyed, while the candidate dissembles and prevaricates until the story has spun nearly out of control. But these battles themselves have a certain allure:

What began as a strange, even sordid, way to spend my time soon felt natural. Wake me up in the middle of the night, I could have told you all the lies in the Nichols story before I even opened my eyes. I began to think that doing dirty work was not necessary but noble, a landmark on the road to greater good. I began to fool myself, because fighting scandals can be fun; the action is addictive.

Just as the candidate seemed addicted to getting into these messes, the staff seemed to become addicted to cleaning them up, regardless of the validity of the charges or the means they had to employ. The pattern was set which would follow them to the White House and remains with us today (8/07/00). Clinton triggers another scandal, Hillary demands that opponents be crushed, and the staff spins like crazy.

One of the remarkable things about the book is how little things changed once they won the election. Campaign organizations are loose knit, flexible things, sometimes even chaotic. Often they think tactically rather than strategically. Appearance tends to seem more important than reality, because by the time anyone figures out the reality, the campaign has moved on or is even over. And no matter how you dress it up, no matter how important the issues raised, they are ultimately really only concerned with one goal: to elect the candidate. Despite the obvious weaknesses of this structure, it often suffices for the election. But only people who are profoundly irresponsible would try running the nation the same way. These are those people.

Other than Health Care, which Hillary took over, there weren't really any strategic plans for the administration, so they governed tactically. For all the talk of FOBs (Friends of Bill), there just weren't many top notch folks in the cabinet or at the upper staff levels, so the whole operation was a mess. The promise to have an administration that "looked like America" and the unfortunate Nanny-Gate brouhahas combined to leave them in the position of choosing appointees for who they were, rather than for what they were (in other words, female or Hispanic or whatever, instead of merely competent). There are a few things that are especially troubling about the administration's start up. First, that they were actually not appointing people because of the nanny nonsense. Second, that they were incapable of drawing any broader lessons from the experience. A more adept political operation might have taken note of the fact that even these upper class liberals were avoiding Social Security tax payments and used it as a jumping off point to reduce the payroll tax. Instead, their sole focus was to trot out the next female victim, having predetermined that the Attorney General would be a woman come hell or high water. This left us with the conveniently childless Janet Reno, who proceeded to cook the Branch Davidians because of their unusual religious views.

The big accomplishment early in the Administration was passage of the Clinton economic plan. Because of the inclusion of tax cuts, Republicans bailed out. It was left, perversely, to Democrats to as Clinton said, become Eisenhower Republicans and pass a supposed deficit fighting package. This was an important psychological moment because it represented at long lost a return of Democrats to the, at least somewhat, fiscally responsible fold, after seventy years of advocating increasing deficits. But the plan itself was entirely inconsequential. The economy, having readjusted to a peacetime footing, had already begun growing even before Bush left office. The eventual balancing of the budget was completely a function of declining defense spending--$300 billion deficits turned into a balance budget as $300 billion was cut from defense, you do the math. Passage of the plan did have the salutary effect of helping the GOP retake the Congress, which proved to be the best thing that ever happened to Bill Clinton, but from the perspective of folks like Stephanopoulos, the Democ

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Inside the Clinton Whitehouse
Review: As a conservative Republican, I read this book by a Northern Liberal to gain insight as to how this country kept voting for such a flawed individual as Bill Clinton when the truth was known. I also saw the author many times on Sunday talk shows smoothly defending the administration against everything negative!

Well, I came away from this book sorry that I never knew George S. even though I disagreed with his politics. His inside tales of the Clinton White House were entertaining and informative and showed a determined, competant, and energetic politician who is flawed like the rest of us.

These kinds of books show me how refreshing politics would be if politicians would speak into a microphone in the same way they speak in their inner circles when formulating policy. Would we ever be INFORMED voters then!


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