Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
Electoral Math
Reality-BasedTM Political Numbers from Nicholas Beaudrot
More great quotes from Robert F Kennedy. | Home | Political Operative Geek Heaven, Part Deux
Government not working for you: King County Metro has split the 7, which ran from the U-District down to Rainier Beach, into a Rainer-to-Downtown line and a Downtown-to-UW line, eliminating my single-bus trip to work that ran every ten minutes.
Grrrrr.
Be warned, Ron Sims. The Amazon Employees Who Live in Capitol Hill are coming for you. Even if it means an alliance with all those Rossi backers.
[I tease; I like Ron Sims, and I always have the 14 -- which is a faster bus anyway, even if it is less frequent.]
Chapter three introduces “Daddy”, otherwise known as Roger Clinton, who is not Bill’s biological father, but who was the most consistent fatherly presence in his life. Clinton gives us several vignettes of life as a little kid with Roger, including both the highs and the lows. The highs consist mostly of the qualitiy time he got to spend with Roger, which was never enough. The lows, not surprisingly, involve Roger’s drinking and subsequent self-implosions. He spends the most time on a very traumatic fight between Roger and his mother, when Roger fires his pistol at the wall in between Virginia and Bill.
Chapter three is also the last of Clinton’s years in Hope, Arkansas, where he met his future chief of staff Mack McLarty (who was a prominent state legislator in his own right before moving to Washington), and fell in love with High Noon.
Some choice quotes:
I’m sure Daddy didn’t mean to hurt her and he would have died if the bullet had accidentally hit either of us. But something more poisonous than alcohol drove him to that level of debasement. It would be a long time before I could understand such forces in others or in myself. - On what he though of Roger shooting at himI later learned that Mitzi was developmentally disabled. The term wouldn’t have meant anything to me then, but when I pushed to expand opportunities for the disabled as governor and President, I thought often of Mitzi Polk. - On the people behind the funding numbers.
As for me, all I knew was that he was good to me and had a big brown and black German sheperd … - on meeting Roger Clinton
I’ve yet to scratch the surface of the good parts, which start with Clinton’s days as in Arkansas politics (and if you think 1993-1994 were bad years for Clinton, they were a walk in the park compared to 1979-1980) and his time as President.
Overall, My Life is a good book if you’re a policy nerd, if you want a sense of what White House operations are like on a day-to-day basis (on this score I also recommend Bob Rubin’s In an Uncertain World), or if you like Clinton’s meandering storytelling ways. Otherwise, it’s not necessarily worth slogging through all 900 pages.
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updated by Nicholas Beaudrot on 11:26 07 June 2005
