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The Clinton formula: forget the left-center divide--it''s not 1992 anymore. Defend government. Fight smarter. Smile. Win.

Article Excerpt
When Sylvia Plachy and I walked into Bill Clinton's Harlem office around 2:30 p.m. on Sept. 8, the former president was courteous to me, but he was more interested in telling Sylvia--who, aside from being a world-renowned photographer, is the mother of Oscar-winning actor Adrien Brody--that he'd enjoyed The Pianist, but he'd also recently rented and loved Oxygen, a 1999 thriller in which Brody played a kidnapper. How Clinton pulled that one out we didn't ask; we just took it as a quick reminder that there is such a thing as a president with broad intellectual and cultural interests, and got down to business.

The bulk of his time now is devoted to his book and to the Clinton Foundation HIV/AIDS Initiative, which delivers medicines to sub-Saharan Africa and the Caribbean. But there's always time for politics. The Clinton on display here is combative, and he has some surprising things to say about how this election's crop of Democrats needs to do more than just ape what he did in 1992. But let him tell it.

MICHAEL TOMASKY I'd like to begin by talking about the historical moment. Karl Rove wants to create a realignment along the lines of that which coalesced around the New Deal. This realignment would undo a lot of the work of the last 60 years, including, of course, a lot of your work. Do you think we're at such a turning point?

BILL CLINTON I do think it's a very important moment. Essentially, Karl Rove's politics are a combination of efforts by the increasingly conservative Republican Party to recover from the '64 election and assume a dominant position in America--through the advocacy of ideas and policies that were designed to have more appeal to the middle class, through the use of socially conservative issues that were designed to get people to vote for them for reasons other than economic ones, and through the extraordinary ability to increase their dominance in the mainstream press [and to] have a competing right-wing press and label Democrats ... almost turn them into cartoons in a way that got them votes from people who otherwise never would have voted for them. And that's basically been their strategy.

So they believe those things, coupled with their extraordinary ability to raise money from the people they're helping financially with the government, will enable them to pursue policies which are way to the right of where the American people are.

I don't think we're headed for a realignment. If anything, we should be realigning in the direction I took the country. When I left office we had a 65 percent job approval, or something like that, so two-thirds of the people favored my policies. And that's why they attacked me personally so much, why they tried to attack Al Gore and make him look dishonest. And to say that compared to President Bush, and their backgrounds in public life, that Gore was dishonest was ludicrous. But they got away with it.

And if you look at these tax cuts, they got a good return for their investment. I mean, people say, "Gosh, how did Bush raise $200 million, $300 million?" I say it's peanuts compared to the tax cuts he gave. It's not even a tithe, you know? Not even 1 percent!

MT They continue to get away with it ... .

BC Well, they do, but I think that we as a country, including the press and the political opposition, were profoundly traumatized by what happened on [September 11], and we were angered and we wanted to be united. And...