Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America

Fanatics and Fools: The Game Plan for Winning Back America Arianna Huffington Date: 14 April, 2004   —   $16.77   —   Book product page Rating:

Poor Arianna! I keep giving her books only four stars. My biggest problem with this book is that she spends the first half ticking off reasons why we should not reelect President Bush. I'm already sold, and I've already read most of the reasons in other books.

She does actually throw in a couple things I hadn't heard of before. For instance, President Bush telling former Palestinian Prime Minister Mahmoud Abbas, "God told me to strike at al Qaeda and I struck them, and then he told me to strike at Saddam, which I did, and now I'm determined to solve the problem in the Middle East. If you help me, I will act, and if not, the elections will come and I will have to focus on them." Creepy, but at least we know where the President's priorities lie.

In true progressive form, Ms. Huffington covers corporate excess and political graft, poverty and education, energy policy and the environment. It's all good, but I would have liked to have heard more about her campaign for governor of California. I hope she'll write a book dedicated to the subject. As a resident of California, I'm still not completely sure how the phony "energy crisis", created by profiteering energy companies and sanctioned by the White House, sparked outrage against a Democratic governor who had just been reelected by a comfortable margin, and then resulted in the installment of a Republican action hero as governor of the fifth largest economy in the world. Who then had the balls to institute exactly the same bailout plan as his predecessor, the only difference being the replacement of higher car taxes with cuts in social programs and first responder funding. Go figure.

Ms. Huffington does do a great job revealing Schwarzenegger as a Bush-style phony "compassionate conservative", and while she doesn't cover the campaign in the painstaking detail I would have liked, she does cover it.

Then she turns her sights on "the fools": The Democrats who stood by bewildered as Bush and Schwarzenegger ran roughshod over them. As a Democrat, it's pretty humbling to read that section. We weren't, and still aren't, a very good opposition party, but we're getting better.

The best thing about Arianna Huffington books is that she doesn't just bitch about stuff. She offers alternatives. In fact, she offers a full "New Contract for a Better America", which promises to:

1. Achieve energy independence
2. Prescribe a cure for the health care epidemic
3. Treat lost jobs as a social calamity, not a lagging economic indicator
4. Truly leave no child behind
5. Break down barriers and create new opportunities in education
6. Call a truce in the drug war
7. Secure the homeland first
8. Be a leader, not a bully
9. Restore integrity to the political process
10. And put people above corporate profits

This book is ultimately all about what the Democratic challenger needs to stand for if he's going to beat Bush in November. We need a leader who can inspire us with big ideas. We need a leader who will ask more of us in these trying times than to just go shopping and keep a suspicious eye on our neighbors. Ultimately, we need a leader who will remind us that there is more to being an American than just consuming.