President Bill Clinton’s book My Life was released last week. No doubt the timing of its release is intentionally adjacent to a tough upcoming presidential election. Still, Clinton always struck me as above cheap tricks and propaganda. So on a recent visit to Barnes and Noble I picked up a copy.

Actually I didn’t buy the book, I bought the audiobook - as read by the author himself. 6 hours one-on-one with Clinton seemed a far more fitting way to experience the tale; After all this is a personal history not a work of literature.

He starts off by smugly explaining that one of his remaining life goals is to write a good book. “It’s a great story”, he laughs. There’s no question that this man has a big ego. In fairness a successful president needs a well developed ego, but this is not however a common requisite of a successful writer. His narcissistic tone obscures most of the first two CDs and I found it almost impossible to listen through it. Just get to the good stuff I kept thinking to myself, hoping that the inside scoop on his eight years in office was material worth suffering for.

As I had expected, the material gets increasingly compelling as the story progresses but his focus seems to shift from writing a good book to clearing his name. He frequently and irritatingly segues from the narrative in order to address scandals such as Whitewater and Lewinski. It starts to look like he has a pretty big chip on his shoulder.

Never give up on Bill Clinton. As the story unfolds it becomes pretty clear that he’s not simply trying to defend every misstep he’s been accused of. At many points he is actually extremely critical of himself and apologetic to the listener. Rather, he’s making a statement about 8 years of gross misconduct by the GOP. With little to no respect for legal precedence and ethics the GOP relentlessly harassed President Clinton. In just a few years we had a stronger economy, an effective new crime bill, universal healthcare for children, lower taxes for the middle class AND lower capital gains taxes for the wealthy. Such success by a democrat was devastating to the republican party. Clinton’s work even shrunk the bloated federal government, traditionally a republican preoccupation.

There was no avenue for them to attack the policies of his White House. The best they could do was to forget politics and attack the person. Whitewater was a recurring banner of propaganda, despite the fact that federal prosecutors had on many occasions stated that there was no evidence of wrongdoing by the president OR the first lady. Ken Starr actually waited until AFTER the mid-term elections before releasing findings from months prior that confirmed this. In public statements Newt Gingrich admitted to being purposely argumentative and bipartisan with Clinton during the budget standoff. The list of blatant interference Clinton gives is overwhelming - the republicans were playing dirty and he was constantly in battle.

Clinton did some stupid things, but then everybody does some stupid things. In the grand scheme of things, having a tryst with a White House intern is mild when compared to how George W. has lied to the American people about an international threat in order to make money and settle a family score.

My Life, though sometimes whiney and egotistical in tone, ultimately paints what is likely a fair picture of the eventful political life of Bill Clinton. Its prose will win no awards; the only eloquent moments come when he quotes his own speeches. Still, it is clear that Clinton is trying to communicate how much of an uphill struggle his presidency was — that the more he fought to build a more perfect union, the more the republicans fought to discredit him.