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Thursday, Nov 26, 2009
As the newly liberated president travels the country to cement his legacy, he reminds us we'll miss him as much as he'll miss us.
Jan 13, 2001 | During his manic drive for a noble legacy, President Clinton has managed to reprise his entire presidency in a few short weeks, much the way your whole life is supposed to flash before your eyes at the moment of death. One minute he's brave, heroic, awe-inspiring, and the next he's grandiose, self-deluding, bathetic -- sometimes within the very same speech.
He's everywhere these days, as if there were four of him: In Michigan, pressing the flesh of adoring college students; on a sentimental, taxpayer-funded journey to New Hampshire, playing his saxophone and thanking the primary voters who saved him from himself in 1992, after the Gennifer Flowers debacle; in Chicago, defiantly telling "the truth" about the coming presidency of George W. Bush: "The only way they could win the election was to stop the counting in Florida."
In just three weeks, he signed the treaty establishing an international War Crimes Court; issued an executive order protecting a third of national forests from logging and road building; offered clemency to 62 prisoners, including two women serving heinous sentences for minor involvement in their boyfriends' drug crimes; approved major new regulations on medical privacy, workplace health and auto emissions, and on top of it all, put forth a blockbuster, if probably doomed, Middle East peace proposal.
Clinton's critics, of course, are furious about his frenzied final days. The last-minute activism proves "this has been the most left-wing presidency in our nation's history," fumed a fed-up Peter Parisi in the Washington Times. Bush's spokesman, Ari Fleischer, called Clinton, oddly, "a busy beaver," and promised his boss would review the flurry of new rules with an eye toward undoing what he could. The Brookings Institution's Paul Light called Clinton's closing acts a "bacchanal" -- subliminally reminding us that the big man has a big appetite, and once again he'd let his desires get the better of him, this time politically.
Of course it's Clinton's own fault that images of beavers and bacchanalia have icky double meanings when applied to him. But the choice of words was probably no accident. Even the most resolved Clinton haters, the ones who believe the man lies for breakfast, have to acknowledge the truth in at least one thing he's said: "They may find someone who does this job as well as me, but I don't think they'll ever find someone who will have as much fun doing it." And they despise him for it.
The core of the establishment's grudge against Clinton -- and the core of his appeal to the rest of us -- has always been his outsize appetite and ambition, his lusty connection with the common folk, his small-d democrat's awe at the trappings of his own power, the sense he conveyed of having big fun working overtime doing the people's business. All that low-rent energy and ambition, his enemies sniff, naturally and inevitably led to his diclassi romp with the fleshy, big-mouthed intern, just as naturally and inevitably as having a wealthy father who went to Andover and Yale means a son of privilege, however trifling, will wind up following him there. Class tells.
Conversely, to Clinton's admirers, these hectic closing days are a bittersweet reminder of what might have been -- the legacy of activism, compassion and stewardship that could have been Clinton's if he hadn't been kneecapped by the vast right-wing conspiracy and his own self-indulgence. I've always been ambivalent about Clinton, but I've felt two moments of genuine pain at the prospect of his passing. The first was the day Bush went to visit the White House after his friends on the Supreme Court gave it to him. The president-elect looked childlike, twitchy, supremely insecure, next to the calm grown-up in the chair beside him. Clinton was gracious if lordly, bantering knowledgeably with reporters about the state of the economy, while Bush sat tongue-tied, anxious, mostly mute. Behind Clinton's friendly smile you could see him looking at his successor and thinking: Poor little guy; hes gonna make them miss me, more than anything I could ever do.
The most poignant moment came last week, at the press conference where Clinton declared forest lands off limits to loggers and road builders. He announced his decision dramatically, in Washington's National Arboretum, framed by bare black trees etched in white snow. He wore a black topcoat, his hair was white against a gray sky and the way his eight years in office had aged him was never more obvious. Yet he projected authority and a dignity born of loss and defeat as he announced his bold stand for the environment. You knew the chain saws of anti-government invective were revving up around the country, but for a moment there was calm, and he never seemed nobler.
What if that Clinton had governed these eight years? What if the brave, bold activist, the wise public man, had been president? Of course romanticizing Clinton that way is as blind and unfair as dismissing him as a lying, priapic Stalinist. If you're going to love Bill Clinton, you've got to love all of him -- that may be the most important lesson, politically and personally, his presidency taught us. The triangulating dealmaker, the Dick Morris acolyte, the one who bombed a pharmaceutical factory in the Sudan he claimed was making weapons, the man who preyed on a naive young employee -- it's all part of the Clinton legacy: the weak, the strong, the noble and the selfish. Never has a president worn his imperfection, his capacity for change and his desperate need for it, so openly. We watched him grow up no less than we did Chelsea.
