Scandal: How "Gotcha" Politics Is Destroying America

by Lanny Davis

Book Overview

Polarised politics in America has been driven by a vicious scandal machine comprised of partisan politicians and a sensationalist media. The Special Counsel to the Clinton White House examines... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1403974950
• Release Date: September 2006
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Length: 304 Pages
• Weight: 1.30 lbs.
• Dimensions: 9.5" x 1.1" x 6.3"

Customer Reviews

From Watergate to modern times, the scandal machine has revved up

In the late 90s the author was special Counsel to President Clinton and was offered a ringside seat to the inner sanctum of the political process: SCANDAL: HOW 'GOTCHA' POLITICS IS DESTROYING AMERICA offers damning details on all parties as it surveys the evolving 'scandal culture' affecting political elections and decisions. From Watergate to modern times, the scandal machine has revved up: SCANDAL documents exactly how it has evolved, the ideas underlying party manipulation of the political system, and different paradigms of change. Diane C. Donovan California Bookwatch

A review of abuses on both sides for political advantage

Lanny Davis is certainly a partisan Democrat. And that is just fine. His political leanings are more centrist than leftist. That is, he is more like Bill Clinton (whom he served and still defends tenaciously) than the MoveOn wing of the party. One of the goals of this book is to spark a centrist realignment of the parties into a "Purple Nation" and freeze out the extreme wings of both parties. Davis is not the only person with that fantasy, which is almost certainly going to remain unrealized. Because American politics is tends to be somewhere close to 51-49, people on the losing side tend to see those just across the divide as possible allies. Davis thinks that the middle should get together and form a party of compromise without all the harsh "politics of personal destruction" that we are all heartily sick of. I have to give Davis a lot of credit. He is the first Democrat or Republican of recent times that is willing to recount the abuses of the other side by his side (of course, while recounting the abuses of his side by the other side). Here he admits that Walsh did bad things. That Meese, Donovan, and Ted Olsen were all abused (as were, Davis says, Hamilton Jordon, Bert Lance, and Jim Wright). OK, I hear you starting to choke. Let me say again, that depending on where you stand, the more Davis is going to seem either partisan or too kind to the GOP. And that is one of Davis' points. Our politics has become so fixed in partisanship for the sake of partisanship that we have a hard time granting any credit at all to the other side. And this is a fine point that needed to be made. I thank Lanny Davis for making it. Anyone reading this book with an open mind will be given food for thought about this serious issue in our current political scene even without agreeing with all the points Mr. Davis makes. Where I think Mr. Davis goes off the rails is why these personal attacks are used in our current political system. In my view, it has two principal sources. The first is that the Congress has long abdicated dealing with the hot political topics of the day. They only want to deal with it when they have to. Otherwise they stall and fob it off on agencies full of unelected bureaucrats. To be at the front of a political fight is to get noticed and if the politics shift, you lose your office. And since getting elected is the real purpose of being in office nowadays (and we let them get away with it), they don't want to take the risk of giving their opponents any ammunition or finding themselves standing on the plank out over the water. The second issue flows from this first one. It is the way the judiciary has stepped in to "fix" social problems with rulings from the bench without any actual basis in law. They simply make it up and assert it, and we buy it. So, to protect these phony rulings the extremists get further and further out on the lever (on both sides) and so only the extremists end up with power. So, in rea