Local Author Pens Book Shedding Light On Clinton And Gingrich
By John Ostapkovich
PHILADELPHIA (CBS) -- A new book by a Philadelphia native looks at a great political compromise that never was.
Rewind to 1997 and put President Clinton and House Speaker Newt Gingrich in the same room. You'd expect fireworks, right? Wrong, at least in the super-secret talks the two held on reforming Social Security and Medicare, detailed by Steven M. Gillion in The Pact. Gillion says this is not a cautionary tale about the dangers of bipartisanship.
"It's about, really, a tragedy. It's about this lost opportunity, this moment in time that none of us knew about, when the two most-influential political leaders of the 1990's evolved, and came to the point when they realized they could work together, and what they almost accomplished, had it not been for the Lewinsky scandal," Gillion explains.
But the Lewinsky scandal shattered the truce and led to political trench warfare. Gillion says hyper-partisanship and rigidity work against the compromises required in governing.
