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Posted on 12/16/2001 4:45:02 AM PST by Oldeconomybuyer

It happened at still another of those periodic post-mortems on the Arkansas Gazette. One of the mourners in attendance was complaining that today's Democrat-Gazette hadn't published enough positive news about Bill Clinton during his presidency. I noticed that the comment was enough to merit a strained smile from at least one member of the audience--Rex Nelson.
    Rex is now on Governor Mike Huckabee's staff, but he was out in the newsroom at the start of the Clinton Years, when he was the Democrat-Gazette's political editor. Lest we forget, that was a time when the prospect of having a president of the United States from Arkansas was a point of pride rather than embarrassment. And in that too brief period of Clinton Chic--remember it?--hopes were high and the tone of the news was not only positive but glowing. But then our native son was inaugurated.
    The spring of 1993 soon brought Travelgate, Nannygate, Lani Guinier, Don't-Ask-Don't-Tell, Waco, Hillarycare ... and what Betsey Wright dubbed the bimbo eruptions were still to come. But you could feel their tremors. You bet Rex Nelson would have loved to find positive news to report about Bill Clinton, but it grew scarcer by the day in that spring of our discontent. And that was long before impeachment.
    Nor will Clinton apologists believe how hard we on the opinion side of the paper scrounged for good things we could honestly say about a president from Arkansas. We leapt at every chance, but they tended to be few, even imaginary.
    But now that William Jefferson Clinton has joined the olympian ranks of former presidents, you'd think chances to applaud the country's youngest elder statesman would multiply. How hard could it be to go around the country saying nice things everybody could agree with?
    Look at Jimmy Carter and how much not being president improved his performance. Look at Gerald Ford. Or George Bush the elder. What's to criticize?
    We thought we had a chance to praise Bill Clinton just the other day, when the press reported a couple of his first post-presidential speeches--one at Harvard, the other at Georgetown University. According to the dispatches, he'd said all the right things about the country's needing to unite behind this new president, fight terrorism, respect one another, and so quite properly on. Perfect.
    We'd already done the first draft of the editorial praising this new, humble, unifying Bill Clinton when we made our fatal error: We took the precaution of actually reading the texts of his speeches. That's always a mistake.
    It was embarrassing. He hadn't changed a bit. All the nice platitudes he uttered came bubble-wrapped in the same old slick, shiny swirl of self-promotion, and utter self-absorption. The man seems unable to mention an event, a policy, an issue without placing himself center stage. Think I exaggerate? Here are just a few excerpts:
    "One point I made ten years ago still seems to be particularly relevant ten years later, and I would like to begin with that ....
    "The terrorists who struck at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon believe they were attacking important symbols of corrupt American power and materialism. They were quite wrong about that. I live and work in New York now. My wife, Hillary, represents the people of New York in the United States Senate. I was commander-in-chief of the people who work in the Pentagon every day ...
    "In the years that I served as president, career law enforcement officials worked very hard in the hope that a day like September 11 would never come. They prevented many terrorist attacks from occurring, and successfully brought to justice many perpetrators of terrorism..... Counter-terrorism budgets were hugely increased. We began training civil responses in the 30 biggest communities in America ...
    "Listen to this, when I became president in 1993, there were 50 sites on the World Wide Web. When I left office the number was 350 million and rising....
    " ... first, the global economy. It brought America over 22 1/2 million jobs in the last eight years ...."
    "I was honored to be president when for the first time in history more than half the world's people lived in democracies....
    "I was the first president ever to observe every year the feast of Id-al-Fitr at the end of Ramadan, which is coming up pretty soon....
    "Thank you, Dean Gallucci, for helping me to come here and for the great work you did in our administration when I was president ....
    It is all so ... embarrassing. In a review of a recent biography of Winston Churchill, the always incisive Gertrude Himmelfarb said of Churchill: "He lived his life with a vigor and passion exhibited by few men. And he wrote about it even as he lived it--not narcissistically, like so many memoirists of our own time, but historically, so to speak, fully conscious that in writing about himself he was writing about his country and his times."
    Bill Clinton strikes me as precisely the opposite: When he speaks about his country and his times, he seems no longer even conscious that he is speaking only about himself. Which is the hallmark of every truly great bore.
    It's as if, ineligible to run for president again, the perpetual candidate is out to buttonhole Clio, muse of history. And he approaches her as if she were just another susceptible voter, waiting for her to applaud as reflexively as the kids at Harvard or Georgetown.
    The Hon. William J. Clinton doesn't seem to grasp that his place in history will be determined not by his contemporaries but by future generations of Americans--if they are interested in the highly forgettable Nineties at all. (In the event they should be drawn to Bill Clinton's politics, I'd bet they'll be interested mainly in his impeachment and any of its implications for their own times.)
    No, being out of the White House doesn't seem to have worked its familiar magic on this former immortal. He is still rehashing his Great Accomplishments, and trolling for the Next Big Idea he can campaign on. He says only the expected, which is one definition of the not worth hearing. And the over-all effect is stultifying.
    I recommend a good editor--one who would go through the text of his speeches and blue-pencil every self-reference. Only inoffensive platitudes might remain, but at least they would be inoffensive. People might be bored, but not embarrassed.
    Let's hope the folks designing the Clinton Library won't be taking these Clinton speeches as their model. To inspire future generations, they need to reach back to that almost forgotten spirit of Clinton Chic--to the promise of the president Bill Clinton was going to be, not the one he was.

Paul Greenberg, editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, has won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing.

Clinton's Legacy

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