The Quotable Robert Reich

As Amy Alkon notes, when Robert Reich writes, titles such as this emerge from his blog:

How to Create Jobs Without Them All Going to Skilled Professionals and White Male Construction Workers

But then, Reich has always had a way with words, as Jonathan Rauch spotted in a 1997 Slate article when he compared what Reich wrote in Locked In the Cabinet, Reich’s memoirs of his days as Bill Clinton’s labor secretary, with videotapes and transcripts of the actual events. Reich describes himself, as Jonah Goldberg wrote in Liberal Fascism (where I first discovered Rauch’s Slate article), as trapped in a Thomas Nast cartoon, “in constant battle with greedy fat cats, Social Darwinists, and Mr. Monopoly.” The actual transcripts and tapes describe a reality that’s far more pedestrian.

But then such fantasies of the Reich Stuff make him right at home with Bill Clinton’s “meaning of is” postmodernism, Hillary Clinton’s fantasy snipers in Tuzla, and also President Obama, who as a candidate similarly misremembered at least one meeting with big business.