Bill Clinton Makes Me Tired
By Brian Wise (06/26/04)
Four days removed from Bill Clinton’s seduction (and subsequent mounting) of Dan Rather on 60 Minutes, I finally gathered the strength to watch the video. It was pure Clinton: Absolutely everything and nothing was said. Whatever your preconceived notions of the man, the vagueness of his answers (even to softball questions) reinforced them; absolutely no one’s mind was changed; the troops on both sides were sufficiently motivated; a few hundred thousand books were sold.
But the columnist is presented with a few problems, namely how to cram a long essay’s worth of analysis into a seven hundred and fifty word piece, and even then deciding which topics to cover, as the former president provided many to choose from. It occurred to me to attempt an entire column’s worth of quick observations – e.g., “Not to shine an indelicate light on it, but you’d think that someone who watched his mother get beaten by his step-father would have dedicated himself to better treatment of the women in his life” – but all anyone wants to talk about is the women. Specifically, the intern.
Clinton supporters are confused. Bill Clinton’s life has been a remarkable one, equipped with the sort of spectacular rise to power only a very few human beings have ever experienced. His potential (circa 1992) limitless, his gifts obvious. And even at their most uneventful, the themes of the world progress at such a pace as to guarantee interesting times for any two term president. Those events, when discussed candidly, can make for one hell of an autobiography. Why, as Clinton’s nine hundred and sixty page memoir is released, is Monica Lewinsky the dominant topic of discussion?
Not an unreasonable question. My answer (the same now as it was in 1998): I’ve never really cared about the sex. That it happened in the Oval Office gives pause, and that Clinton has never paid any particular attention to his marital vows is troublesome, but his trouble, not mine. The important questions have always been those so conspicuously left unanswered, even now. Exactly how and why did Lewinsky become the first intern in the history of the White House program to get top security clearance? Why doesn’t it seem to matter that some of Clinton’s phone sex calls to Lewinsky were being monitored (and most likely recorded) by foreign intelligence, and shouldn’t it be clear to everyone that an American president is not best serving his constituents when he’s putting himself in a position to be blackmailed? Is he even aware of how much easier his life would have been if only he’d told the truth and not obstructed justice? And so forth, up and down the line.
Bill Clinton exhausts Republicans in part because he attaches monumental importance to unimportant things (like Lewinsky) while dismissing as diabolical partisan conspiracies any concern about critical matters (like China), doing immense damage to his party in the process. Including even Nominee Kerry’s uninspiring campaign, when was the last time Democratism was a force to be taken seriously? Two thousand two? A party that couldn’t “find its message.” Two thousand? A party that screamed and cried (and continues to scream and cry, by the way) over an election it lost. Nineteen ninety-eight? Another routine dismissal at the polls. Nineteen ninety-six? The Clinton re-election; if not for six hundred thousand votes in twelve States, Dole is president, and the Republican majority widens anyway. Nineteen ninety-four? The Republican Revolution.
You go back twelve years to find the Democratic party’s most recent string of relevant moments, and only then because Clinton hadn’t yet destroyed the illusion of promise that surrounded him during the campaign, hadn’t yet stood still while foreign powers and enemies spit in his face, hadn’t yet constructed sophisticated structures around lies he didn’t have to tell. He may have gotten out of the way of a surging economy and signed a welfare reform bill that was forced upon him, but he ruined Democratism for at least a generation, in the name of Legacy.
Meanwhile, why was the Clinton White House in possession of nine hundred FBI files? Why did he pardon Puerto Rican terrorists (and Marc Rich)? How many nuclear secrets were allowed to walk out the door with the Red Chinese, and for how much? Who the hell hired Craig Livingstone? Just a few of the questions we can be sure will never be sufficiently answered by Bill Clinton, in or out of his autobiography.
And now that I’ve said so, I need a nap.
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