Below the Beltway: Money, Power and Sex in Bill Clinton's Washington by John L. Jackley

From the Publisher

Below the Beltway skewers Washington in the age of Clinton with Jackley's trademark brand of outrageous humor and muckraking revelations. From the opening chapter where he accompanies an undercover television crew on a congressional sting that made headlines, Jackley takes you into the real world of Washington - the political back alleys of scandal and corruption. Jackley shows you how politics is really played in Washington: how laws are made, policies decided, influence sold, careers made and lost, spouses dumped - and taxpaying voters like you taken for fools. He introduces you to the "low-lifes in high places" who grease the wheels of Washington's corrupt political machine. He tutors you where necessary in the arcane lingo of the political class, a dialect spoken only by insiders. Below the Beltway lambastes politicians, pundits, bureaucrats, consultants, lawyers, and lobbyists with a vengeance that will have them howling with rage and you with laughter. But there is a dead-serious purpose to Jackley's hilarious expose: to reveal the wide and growing divide between America's privileged "public servants" and the people they purport to serve.

Publishers Weekly

Jackley's disillusioning experience as press secretary alternately to three Democratic congressmen during the 1980s led to his 1992 bestseller Hill Rat: Blowing the Lid Off Congress. Now he's back with a scathing, funny, breezy, irreverent dismemberment of the Clinton administration, which he views as elitist and arrogant. Characterizing President Clinton as a scam artist who temporarily convinced us he was one of us, Jackley sees both Republicans and Democrats as members of a "Permanent Political Class," beholden to special interests and evincing thinly veiled contempt for ordinary working people. He heaps scorn on Hillary Rodham Clinton, details political action committee payoffs, retails Washington sexual gossip and amusingly observes the disastrous diary-keeping habits of Senator Bob Packwood and Treasury official Josh Steiner. By this account, the latter's diary revealed that Clinton wanted tight political control over the Whitewater investigation. For good measure, he skewers ivory-tower political scientists, surfs the Internet to gauge its growing influence as a political forum and reveals his participation in an abortive sting operation (launched by TV's Inside Edition) to nab congressmen taking bribes. (July)

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