There have been times in our nation's history when it was hard to do the right thing. As has been said many times, the people who signed the Declaration of Independence did so at risk of their lives.
After the war, George Washington could have just been declared King of the newly independent colonies. It's good to be king, as they say, but he did the right thing and turned it down. That might not have been hard in terms of any external threat, but most people would consider it hard because each of us has to fight the urge to seek power for its own sake and to use whatever power we have over others to solely selfish ends.
I've been looking forward to reading Matt Bai's book, The Argument, for months now. In the circles I run- which include Democracy Alliance donors, netroots activists, and Clinton administration folks, all of which are central characters in the book- everybody was buzzing about it, and more than a few people were more than a little nervous about what he would have to say.
I have to say, from a pure reading pleasure point of view, it was worth the wait. I feared that it would be one of those books that, since I already knew most of the stories told in it, that it would be pretty boring- one of those books that I had to read to know what nasty thing he said about whom, but not something I would enjoy slogging through. I turned out to be wrong, because Bai is an engaging writer who can be very funny in his writing a lot of the time.
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