I have sung the praises for Talking Points Memo {TPM} founder and editor Josh Marshall many times on this blog. Today, once again, he shows he is one hell of a good writer with his insightful post about Bill Clinton in 2008:
If you step back from the carnage and electricity of this nomination battle, you see a vast drama that compares in its own way with any other in modern American history. And part of that shows you that it's on the Democrats' side of the aisle today that the questions roiling the country are being hashed out and decided. But if I were a novelist, it's not Obama or Hillary but Bill, in the current moment, who would fire my imagination. Perhaps some hybrid of Arthur Miller and William Faulkner, fresh from the cloning laboratories, could put it all together on paper. The incandescent rage, the political master just out of touch with the moment. The level of his investment in Hillary's campaign (on any number of novel-bearing levels) is palpable and not fully explained by anything as mundane as the hunger for power or as simple as guilt. And yet the circumstances of the race have forced him to stand just off-stage, where he's close enough to interfere but not to control or direct. It must be a unique kind of hell for him.
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