WRONG TRAGEDY:

The Tragedy of Bill Clinton (Garry Wills, 8/12/04, NY Review of Books)

Actually, the honorable thing for Clinton would have been to resign. I argued for that in a Time magazine article as soon as he revealed that he had lied to the nation. I knew, of course, that he wouldn't. He had thrown himself off the highest cliff ever, and he had to prove he could catch a last-minute branch and pull himself, improbably, back up. And damned if he didn't. He ended his time as president with high poll numbers and some new accomplishments, the greatest of the Kid's comebacks—so great that I have been asked if I still feel he should have resigned. Well, I do. Why? Partly because what Ross Perot said in 1996 was partly true—that Clinton would be "totally occupied for the next two years in staying out of jail." That meant he would probably go on lying. He tried for as long as possible to "mislead" the nation on Gennifer Flowers. He still claims that Paula Jones and Kathleen Willey made false charges. Perhaps they did, but he became unbelievable about personal behavior after lying about Flowers and Lewinsky. I at first disbelieved the story Paula Jones told because it seemed too bizarre; but the cigar-dildo described by Monica Lewinsky considerably extended the vistas of the bizarre.

Though Clinton accomplished things in his second term, he did so in a constant struggle to survive. Unlike the current president, his administration found in Sudan the presence of a weapon of mass destruction (the nerve gas precursor Empta) and bombed the place where it had existed—but many, including Senator Arlen Specter and the journalist Seymour Hersh, said that Clinton was just bombing another country to distract people from his scandal. "That reaction," according to Richard Clarke, "made it more difficult to get approval for follow-up attacks on al Quaeda." Even when Clinton was doing things, the appearance of his vulnerability made people doubt it. It was said in the Pentagon that he was afraid to seize terrorists because of his troubles; but Clarke rebuts those claims—he says that every proposal to seize a terrorist leader, whether it came from the CIA or the Pentagon, was approved by Clinton "during my tenure as CSG [Counterterrorism Security Group] chairman, from 1992 to 2001."

We shall never know what was not done, or not successfully done, because of Clinton's being politically crippled. He has been criticized for his insufficient response to the ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. Michael Walzer said of the bombing raids Clinton finally authorized that "our faith in airpower is...a kind of idolatry." But Clinton was limited in what he could do by the fact that the House of Representatives passed a resolution exactly the opposite of the war authorization that would be given George W. Bush—it voted to deny the President the power to commit troops. Walzer says that Clinton should have prodded the UN to take action; but a Republican Congress was not going to follow a man it distrusted when he called on an institution it distrusted.

At the very end of Clinton's regime, did Arafat feel he was not strong enough in his own country to pressure him into the reasonable agreement Clinton had worked out and Ehud Barak had accepted? Clinton suggests as much when he says that Arafat called him a great man, and he had to reply: "I am not a great man. I am a failure, and you have made me one."

Clinton had a wise foreign policy. But in an Oval Office interview, shortly before he admitted lying to the nation, he admitted that he had not been able to make it clear to the American people. His vision had so little hold upon the public that Bush was able to discard it instantly when he came in. Clinton summed up the difference between his and Bush's approach for Charlie Rose by saying that the latter thinks we should "do what we want whenever we can, and then we cooperate when we have to," whereas his policy was that "we were cooperating whenever we could and we acted alone only when we had to." The Bush people are learning the difference between the two policies as their pre-emptive unilateralism fails.

Clinton claims that he was not hampered in his political activity by scandals. He even said, to Charlie Rose, that "I probably was more attentive to my work for several months just because I didn't want to tend to anything else." That is improbable a priori and it conflicts with what he told Dan Rather about the atmosphere caused by the scandal: "The moment was so crazy. It was a zoo. It was an unr—it was —it was like living in a madhouse." Even if he were not distracted, the press and the nation were. His staff was demoralized. The Democrats on the Hill were defensive, doubtful, absorbed in either defending Clinton or deflecting criticism from themselves. His freedom to make policy was hobbled.

Clinton likes to talk now of his "legacy." That legacy should include partial responsibility for the disabling of the Democratic Party. There were things to be said against the Democratic Leadership Council (Mario Cuomo said them well) and the "triangulation" scheme of Dick Morris, by which Clinton would take positions to the right of most congressional Democrats and to the left of the Republican Party. But Clinton, as a Southerner, knew that the party had to expand its base back into sources of support eroded by the New Right. This was a defensible (in fact a shrewd) strategy as Clinton originally shaped it. He could have made it a tactical adjunct to important strategic goals. But after the scandals, all his maneuvering looked desperate—a swerving away from blows, a flurried scrambling to find solid footing. His very success made Democrats think their only path to success was to concede, cajole, and pander.

Isn't the point that Mr. Clinton went from that wise positioning in the middle--that let him recover from the losses of '94 and win re-election in '96--to pandering to the Left of his own party in order to keep their support during impeachment? And the problem for Democrats is that instead of following the popular trail of the Clinton of '96 they've instead nominated a candidate who resembles the Clinton of '98.

Posted by Orrin Judd at October 16, 2004 8:08 PM