Until his Presidency became deeply mired in scandal, in 1998, Bill Clinton had done a rather good job as President of the United States.
Peace and prosperity (partly due to Clinton, if also just the luck of his draw).
His political impulses seem to have been basically caring and constructive. But he was also ready to make deals with the devil, when he thought them necessary to protect against his political vulnerabilities so that he could maintain support for his presidency and his achievement of other goals.
A very bright, articulate, mostly well-intentioned leader. And one hell of a politician, who bested Newt Gingrich in their showdown a while before the 1996 election.
Under him, the gap between the rich and the poor began to narrow ever so slightly, for the first time in many years.
We had reason, in those Clinton years, to hope that the future for the United States would be onward and upward.
But of course, our future isn’t what it used to be.
And that profound disappointment does connect with disappointments we had about Bill Clinton’s character. Of course, I’m talking about the Lewinsky affair. But I’m not talking about Clinton’s sexual ethics.
The issue is the weakness of character Clinton displayed by entering into this liason despite:
His knowing that enemies (Kenneth Starr and the Clinton-slandering right) were gunning for him, seeking to destroy his presidency by any means possible; and The huge responsibilities that come from being President of the United States.Such responsibilities (of a magnitude beyond the human scale) should overrule everything personal (just at the human scale). A man of character will say to himself: “No impulse will be strong enough to bend me to temptation, because there’s just too much at stake. I will take no risks that could give my enemies [who, as we have seen, would take the nation in terrible directions] the means to rob me of my power to move this society in constructive directions.”
Whatever one’s beliefs about sexual ethics, the American reality required Clinton to avoid taking risks of exposure. Like the hero of The Odyssey, a president in Clinton’s position and with his philandering impulses needed to “tie himself to the mast” to assure that he would resist “the siren’s call.”
Yet he yielded to those impulses.
His lack of sexual discipline had great costs to America. One might reasonably argue that one consequence of Clinton’s lack of such discipline was the presidency of George W. Bush. (In so close an election, it doesn’t take a huge impact for a given factor to have enabled Bush to win.)
Take out the Lewinsky affair, and I think it reasonable to bet the we end up with President Gore, and are spared the nightmare of the W presidency—
with its torture and its torture memos, with its lying us into war, with its continual fear-mongering to use “the war on terror” for its own political purposes; with its contempt for the rule of law, with its alienation of our traditional friends, who have switched to seeing America favorably to seeing it unfavorably by a 2:1 margin, for the first time ever; With its severe damage to the international order, when the nation that has done the most to lead the world into an international order becomes the one to shred that order in defiance of its friends and world opinion; With its taking the attitude that “we are the world’s only remaining superpower and so we will break the rules in order to remake the world in furtherance of our imperial designs (Cheney);A huge price for Clinton’s lack of the necessary discipline.
So I have deeply mixed feelings about Clinton. Mostly, I can’t help myself, I just like the guy, and I am very impressed with him.
When I was ending my campaign for Congress in 2012, my wife and I were minor semi-dignitaries attending a big event for Bill Clinton to speak in Roanoke. After he was introduced, rather well, by Terry McAuliffe, Bill Clinton stepped up to the mic and proceeded to talk for over an hour in support of the re-election of Barack Obama.
It was a most impressive – even masterful – performance. I have been a teacher, and what I saw on that stage was a truly great teacher, who was also a politician. He understood what was what in our political scene, and he could bring it to life and use it to persuade all to get out and work to re-elect President Obama because it’s important and right.
A man of very great ability.