The Unending Conversation

Already this spring the tubes of the Internet have been thrumming with news of Sidney Blumenthal, the Clinton journalist/bootblack who first brought The Conversation to the attention of the world. In February 1992, Bill Clinton’s first presidential campaign was just beginning its rollercoaster run to the big victory in November. Blumenthal, then a writer with the New Republic magazine, smelled a winner. He wanted to do his part to help. His gift for flattery was well-developed.

So he published an article explaining the Clinton phenomenon to the readers of the magazine, which at

the time had readers.

“The essential principle of Clinton’s agenda,” Blumenthal wrote, “is the result of a rethinking of the future of liberalism and the Democratic party that he and his wife have been part of for years. This long project may be called The Conversation.”

Note the capital T on “The”: It is the Blumenthalian touch. Capitalizing a noun is impressive enough. Instantly the reader sees you’re not monkeying around. But capitalizing the definite article that modifies a noun that is already capitalized—now the reader is alerted that the writer is escorting him into the realm of the Doubly Pretentious. There might be other conversations out there that deserved a capital C, the writer is saying; but this Conversation, the conversation I’m talking about, is the only one that’s got a capital T. The One, The Only.

The Conversation, as Blumenthal explained it, was a kind of Freemasonry, and while neither you nor I, he made clear, was a part of it, we were destined to be its beneficiaries. The Conversationalists were, like Bill and Hillary Clinton, proud products of Ivy League schools, and many of them, like Bill, were Rhodes Scholars to boot. Some readers of the New Republic—honestly, there used to be lots of them—might not have been familiar with this husband and wife team from Arkansas (by way of Oxford and New Haven) in 1992. But “he is one of the best known people among the party elites,” and “his wife, Hillary, fits right in.” While everyone else was off doing other stuff, the Clintons and their friends had spent the 1970s and ’80s talking and talking and talking, laying the groundwork for the future that we all would enjoy.

“The Conversation is not about the nuts and bolts of getting elected,” Blumenthal wrote. “It is about why one should get elected and what to do if one is.”

Indeed, nuts and bolts of any kind are the last thing The Conversation was about. Those who recall the chaotic early years of the Clinton administration will doubt that the president or his colleagues had anything like a plan of “what to do if one is elected.” As we have come to see over the years, public discussions initiated by the Clintons and their friends are notably abstract and not terribly practical. Blumenthal’s piece gave a flavor of The Conversation, what it must have been like to be a fly on the wall listening in.

Once, he tells us, he asked Bill Clinton “how he squared the seeming contradictions between the extensive research of [pollster Stanley] Greenberg on the fears and hopes of working-class Reagan Democrats who have been alienated from the party with the notion advanced by [Robert] Reich in his latest book, The Work of Nations, that the realities of the global economy render only human capital non-portable across national boundaries, making education the salient priority.”

You’ll notice that this sentence begins to degenerate at about the halfway mark, roughly around the word “party.” By the end, when the Ivy League word “salient” pops up out of nowhere, it has become nonsensical. But it is an elevated kind of gibberish, the kind you’d hear as the adjuncts drained the seventh bottle of Chardonnay at the faculty club cheese tasting. The Conversation was quite comfortable with words and phrases that suggest expertise even when they betray the opposite. In a list of programs Clinton favors, for instance, Blumenthal lists “fast track free trade with Mexico.”

It certainly sounds official! Yet there is nothing called “fast track free trade.” Presidents can win “fast track authority” from Congress to simplify and accelerate trade negotiations. Maybe that’s what Blumenthal meant. Maybe. In any case, the astute reader quickly understood that The Conversation wasn’t about policy expertise; it was about creating an image of expertise, while something else entirely was going on behind it. The real fruit of The Conversation, Blumenthal said, were “circle squaring formulas” that resolved apparent opposites in the field of public policy. All those formulas constituted an agenda. The Conversation’s economic policy was “tough and smart.” It would install a “leaner, activist government.” It was idealistic; it was pragmatic. Clinton himself thus represented “a genuine fusion of various converging strands within the Democratic Conversation.”

At this point in Blumenthal’s old article a reader may succumb to conversation fusion confusion. Was the Democratic Conversation (no capital T) the same thing as The Conversation? Was there fusion, and if so, how? Certainly every Conversationalist was a Democrat. Yet not all Democrats were fit for The Conversation. Blumenthal was not only the chief publicist for The Conversation but also its Robespierre, exiling his elders with a tap of the keyboard.

Michael Dukakis, for example, the 1988 Democratic presidential nominee: “Dukakis was not really part of The Conversation,” Blumenthal wrote. And Bob Kerrey (University of Nebraska, Lincoln), the Vietnam war hero and Clinton’s rival for the nomination in ’92—“Kerrey is not part of The Conversation.” Walter Mondale, New Deal liberal? “Catastrophic.” Jimmy Carter, the Deep South governor? “Vacuous.” For fogeys like them The Conversation might as well have been in Urdu—totally incomprehensible. The phrase “non-portable human capital” probably never passed the lips of old Walter (University of Minnesota).

It turned out that the entire pre-Clinton generation of Democrats was not sophisticated enough to grasp The Conversation. It was a baby boomer thing. The torch was being passed to a new generation of talkers. It’s instructive that so many names in Blumenthal’s 1992 article are still familiar to us, still in the news. Al Gore is a high-tech centi-millionaire. Robert Reich, too, got wealthy serving a variety of nonprofit organizations, from Common Cause to the University of California. George Stephanopoulos has done well by doing good—or is it the other way around? Ira Magaziner now oversees various aspects of the Clinton charitable empire. At Yale the Conversationalist Derek Shearer had roomed with Strobe Talbott who, after rooming with Bill Clinton at Oxford, went on to marry Shearer’s sister, a Hillary Clinton staffer whose twin brother Cody is now running an international business that Blumenthal helped promote when Mrs. Clinton was secretary of state, whose advisers included Derek, Strobe, and Sidney, the last of whom, according to Politico, receives just-generous-enough monthly stipends from one Clinton organization or another.

So The Conversation continues as the Conversers reach retirement age. Many if not most of them are intimately connected with the various Clinton foundations, which have raised nearly $2 billion. The work of the foundations bears the unmistakable stamp of The Conversation. They are not charities as that word is traditionally understood. Only a relatively small portion of the foundations’ work is material, so to speak: feeding the hungry and clothing the naked, housing the homeless and healing the sick. Instead the work is abstract and discursive.

The Washington Post not long ago asked spokesmen for the foundations to describe what it was precisely that their organizations do. Here is a partial but representative list: 

“conducted a world wide survey” 

“partner[s] with celebrities like Jennifer Garner who encourage parents to talk to their children” 

“organizes health care organizations” 

“promote[s] development in regions where mining is common” 

“encourages economic growth”

“promotes conservation and renewable energy” 

“aims to improve the standing of women and girls”

“convenes global political and business leaders.”

Promoting and convening and aiming and partnering and conducting and encouraging .  .  . How would you spend $2 billion?

As innovative as this approach to charity is, there is something antique about The Conversation nowadays. Can it really revive itself, as Blumenthal and Cody and their colleagues doubtless hope, as a vehicle for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential ambition? Can they talk and rethink and dialogue and brainstorm all the way to the White House one more time?

For my own part, I doubt it. Today The Conversation’s relevance is mostly to the Conversers themselves. It has transcended politics completely. The Conversationalists are still talking, of course—they will never stop talking. But now they are talking all the way to the bank.

Andrew Ferguson is a senior editor at The Weekly Standard.