This review of Bill's book, TRAINWRECK, appears in the June 2008 issue of The American Spectator, in the "Slaughterhouse" section.
Don’t Press Your Luck

TRAINWRECK: The End of the Conservative Revolution (and Not a Moment Too Soon) by Bill Press (John Wiley & Son), 256 pages, $24.95

Reviewed by Jeremy Lott

“DOWN IN FRONT!” yelled one guy a few rows back. “This is a baseball game, not a photo op.”

I hesitated, then sat down hard. After all, he had a point. Our “cameraman” fiddled with the camera function on the PDA, and Bill Press—the former Crossfire co-host, former chairman of the California Democratic Party, and current host of a radio show on something called XM—also shrank down. We never could get it to take the picture.

We were at a Washington Nationals game in D.C. in late April. My friend, the would-be cameraman who would probably rather go unnamed here, had spotted Press a few rows down and to the right, and I just happened to have his latest book, TrainWreck: The End of the Conservative Revolution (and Not a Moment Too Soon), in my lap. I’d been reading it on the Metro ride over to have a go at it for this journal of high democratic ideals.

When Press got up to head back toward the men’s, I waved it at him, and his eyes lit up like Christmas tree lights. He wanted to sign it and have a picture taken with me. Press asked where I was from and how I’d acquired his book. When I told him I was reviewing it for The American Spectator, he gulped but was nevertheless polite.

The inscription reads, “For Jeremy. Give it a good review! Bill Press.” Coming back, he made a small joke before he got to his seat: “You’re not reading my book!” The game was low-scoring enough to almost justify it: 2-0 Nats over Cubs. It was one of these games that couldn’t even manage to be a pitchers’ duel. Worse, it was early enough in the season that Chicago manager Lou Piniella couldn’t be bothered to tie Bobby Cox for most managerial ejections. There’s nothing quite like Lou losing it, kicking dirt at the umpires, and maybe stealing a base or two on the way out…

OH, SORRY, THE BOOK. How I wish I could follow Press’s advice here. But the point of this section is to help cultivate the much-neglected vituperative arts. To tell the Gandhis and Rodney Kings of this world, “No, we cannot all just get along.” To through that ball a bit inside to keep the batters from getting too comfortable in the box.

Besides, the book is not much to get worked up about. Press’s writing is at least clean and tart, though it’s rarely very funny. It is also misleading and at times maddeningly repetitive.

Press writes that “Despite spending billions of dollars and waging war in two countries at the same time, the Bush administration has made us less safe than before September 11, not more.” And then: “Let me repeat that: George Bush has made us less safe, not more.”

Again, with italics: “George Bush has made us less safe, not more.” And the threat: “I’ll repeat it as many times as I need to.” Please, don’t! Readers are told to “Try it yourself. It feels good,” and to go bother their neighbors about it. Say it with him now: We’re mad as hell at George W. Bush and not going to take it anymore.”

Press has made something of a cottage industry of angrily repeating himself. In 2004, he declared Bush Must Go! When that didn’t work, he accused Republicans in a subsequent book of stealing Christmas. Now, he’s reiterating all the reasons why President Bush is a failure, adding new charges into the mix, and tying that all together into a case for why the conservative revolution is over, kaput, done.

Press argues that the right is, and should be, a spent political force. To explain why that’s the case, he pursues two contradictory lines of argument. One, the right is through because it is wrong on all the great issues of the day. Two, it is through because there aren’t any real conservatives left.

Press presses the second point because he wants to use the words and deeds of mostly conservative Republicans past to beat Republicans present over the head. George W. Bush is not as isolationist as Robert Taft. He’s not as anti-government as Ronald Reagan. He’s neither as green as Teddy Roosevelt nor as prudent as George H.W. Bush. Unlike Richard Nixon, he doesn’t twitch when he lies.

This approach takes Press into uncomfortably conservative territory. In his chapter on the recent wars (in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and on terror) he highlights some of the history of the antiwar right, which held some sway well into the ‘90s and can still sporadically rear its head (see Paul, Ron). Press concedes that some of the loudest, most pointed critics of George W. Bush’s Iraq ignominy were in fact, conservatives.

On the one hand, Press is okay with the unsavory company that he keeps, up to a point. “[L]et me tell you a little secret about [Pat] Buchanan and [Bob] Novak, as someone who knows them well,” he confides to the reader. “Sometimes they get it right.” Chiefly, when they agree with Bill Press.

BUT THIS LIBERAL INTERNATIONALIST can’t even bring himself to have the courage of his contortions. He praises containment and constraint but faults many right-wingers for opposing America’s involvement in World War I and waiting until Pearl Harbor before wanting the U.S. to crush the Axis like a pancake.

The “hands-off approach to foreign policy advocated by Robert Taft no longer applies,” Press writes, in a very Bushian passage. “The world is too dangerous today. There are too many threats to global or regional stability, either from rogue nations or from stateless terrorist organizations. The United States must maintain a strong military presence and there are times when we must take the lead and intervene.

Provided, of course, that Democrats are sending the troops into battle. On just about every issue that you could pull out of a hat—from taxing to spending to regulating to disaster relief—Press argues that the Republicans have been an utter disaster. His proposed solution is to put his party permanently in power and allow the Republicans to be only a loud opposition, to help keep the Dems honest. He’s so magnanimous to Republicans, in fact, that he’d probably even allow them to sound off on Crossfire. Oh, wait.

Jeremy Lott is author of The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency (Thomas Nelson).

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