Here was Professor Brinkley on CNN, doing the same refurbishing routine for Bill Clinton: "Hopefully, we'll have a fuller view and also understand that he's had a great many important strengths. He is the first post-Cold War president, he had to put America into -- he signed a lot -- over 200 trade pacts around the world, NATO expansion, at least attempts at peace in places like Bosnia and Northern Ireland and the Middle East."
On Saturday night, Tim Russert booked Clinton biographer David Maraniss and the ubiquitous Doris Kearns Goodwin. Maraniss's biography is much more balanced than his syrupy 1992 Clinton campaign dispatches. (Any biographer more critical of Clinton - from Meredith Oakley to R. Emmett Tyrrell to Roger Morris - need not even bother trying to get on TV.) Goodwin is a regular on both Jim Lehrer's "NewsHour" on PBS and NBC and its cable outlets. Every once in a while, they'll note she worked for Lyndon Johnson. But they'll never mention she's a Friend of Bill and Hillary. (They loved her book on Eleanor and Franklin Roosevelt so much that she was awarded one of those hundreds of Lincoln Bedroom sleepover slots.)
Then on Today on Monday morning, Katie Couric welcomed Douglas Brinkley and Doris Goodwin. Brinkley worried: "I think the serious scholars looking at the Clinton presidency will be able to pick and choose the best part, but unfortunately like Nixon, we don't realize Nixon is the father of the Endangered Species Act or the Environmental Protection Agency. We think of Nixon as Watergate. And I think Clinton will be remembered predominantly for impeachment, even though many other good things occurred on his watch."
I CAN'T THINK OF ONE!!!