I'm lovin' it

Doris Kearns Goodwin has done it again. Team of Rivals is a terrific book. Her study of the Lincoln Presidency is evocative, well-written and so relevant.

I'm enjoying it so much that I'm reading is slooooowly. I don't want it to ever end. (Especially since I know how that evening at Ford's Theater came out.) So I'm putting it aside for my vacation. I hate to fly, so Honest Abe will accompany me and perhaps take my mind off aviation.

I fantasize about how much fun it would be to have Ms. Goodwin's career. Her books are so balanced and so successful that she gets extraordinary access to letters, archives, etc. But that's not all that makes her books so good. She somehow manages to put a new spin on the familiar history we thought we knew. For example, instead of just writing a biography of JFK, she developed The Kennedys and Fitzgeralds, and presented the Kennedy Presidency as the apex of an American immigrant saga. No Ordinary Time concentrates on the unique way the Roosevelts lived during WWII, and how their imaginative approach to life helped save the free world. And now Team of Rivals.

What's more, Doris is married to a genuinely cool guy, Richard Goodwin. If you've seen Quiz Show, you've seen him. He's the lawyer (played by Rob Morrow) investigating the quiz show scandal.

And I feel a kinship with her because she's a Red Sox fan. Cubs fans and Red Sox fans understand oen another on a very deep level.

Let's talk family values

Bill Clinton was impeached because he committed perjury, not because he committed adultery. But sex will always be sexy, so it's the adultery that people remember. I've heard commentators and regular folk ruminating on the state of the Clinton marriage. How could he cheat on her? How could she stay with him? It's a marriage of convenience, they can't possibly be in love. He made her a lesbian. Etc., etc., etc. I guess that, as a country, we're simply too cynical to believe that the Clintons love each other and have worked through this painful time in their relationship.

Yet the Republican party, the party of "family values," offers us declared Presidential candidates whose lives are riddled with divorce. Rudy Guiliani is on wife #3. John McCain is on wife #2. Newt Gingrich, who recently admitted to an adulterous affair as he was drawing attention to Bill Clinton's, is on wife #3.

Ironically, it's the Mormon Republican candidate, Mitt Romney, who has had only one wife.

It's almost as if many on the Right would have respected Hillary Clinton more if she left her husband. Why is it that the Clintons get all this scrutiny for staying married, while Guiliani, McCain and Gingrich seem to be getting a pass?