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.