It doesn't take a great, incisive mind to point out the similarities between Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton. The two men are nearly exactly the same age, they both defined their respective political parties during the late 20th century, and they both proved to be too slimy for their own good. In a preface to The Pact, Steven Gillon says that he planned to write a straightforward account of the complex relationship between Gingrich and Clinton. Instead, upon finding some notes on a meeting, he determined that just before the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke, the two politicians were going to form an alliance and reshape America into a centrist's paradise. Frankly, this is kind of unbelievable, and the hypothesis that Gillon pulls from this information is tenuous at best.

Which is not to say that the book is without worth. Gillon's biographies of Clinton and Gingrich are direct and to the point, which is an incredibly uncommon trait for a political book, and his description of the way that the two men would romance and then repudiate each other is at once colorful and credible. The thought that both men, with their trivial peccadilloes and boundless neediness, were the preeminent political figures of their day is more than a little unsettling.

But the book returns to its core concept, that together the men could have repaired the "political third rail" of Medicare and Social Security through the magic of centrism, and the doughiness of that concept is impossible to ignore. Gillon basically lays the failures of 1990s government at the altar of the party divisions caused by the Lewinsky impeachment proceedings, but this gets it exactly backward. It was partisan divisions that caused the Lewinsky proceedings in the first place. The idea that centrism could have been the magic political tool of that era ultimately bears no relation to reality.