Ok, so this criticism is pretty picayune, but in his review of Tony Blair’s new memoir, A Journey: My Political Life, Fareed Zakaria writes the following sentence: “The fact is that Bill Clinton and Tony Blair were the two most successful political figures in the post-cold-war world because they understood the essential truth of economic policy in our times, which is centrist pragmatism.”
Here is a one-question exam:
In fifty years, which of the following political figures will loom largest in the history of the post-Cold War era:
A) Tony Blair
B) Bill Clinton
C) Nelson Mandela
Even using Zakaria’s own standard of centrist economic pragmatism, and even ignoring the decades before 1990, the answer is C. And it really is not even close.