These are some rough days for the pooh-bahs of Cambridge, Mass.
First you’ve got the 
continuing travails of Doris Kearns Goodwin, who got a rather feeble defense from Natasha Berger at Prospect Online a few days back. Other Harvard Yard/Boston Globe pooh-bahs and sub-pooh-bahs are circling the wagons for Goodwin, but really it’s not pretty.
Now Bob Reich is apparently also in the soup. According to this article in the Boston Herald, Reich told the Herald a few months back that Bill Clinton had encouraged him to get into the Massachusetts governor’s race.
At a speech yesterday Clinton said pretty clearly that this wasn’t true:
I like (Reich) fine, but I didn’t like the implication that somehow I encouraged him into the race when you already had one guy in the race that had supported my policies, and at critical points (Reich) didn’t. I wouldn’t have done that.
This runs pretty deep. Lots of stuff public and private. Reich has burned a lot of bridges with the Democratic establishment, and with Clinton in particular, over the last couple years. (The contrast with Steve Grossman, one of his Mass. gubernatorial opponents, is total). He became a more and more pointed critic of the Clintonian policy agenda as it came into focus in the late 1990s. But it may be fair to say that the policy Reich and Clinton disagreed about most was Clinton’s policy of remaining in office during the Monica Lewinsky scandal.
