Month: June 2004

I watched the first half of the BBC interview with Bill Clinton, which you can see here. You may have heard that he grows angry with the interviewer, and so I’ll save you some time if you want to see it: skip to 19:00, and you’ll see the lead-up. The outburst starts building at 24:30, with a crescendo at 28:50.
I thought of so many things while watching it, but I am so tired of thinking about that man that I cannot summon the energy. A few thoughts, though:
A close family member used to work with Ken Starr. One of my best friends took a constitutional law class with him. When I had lunch with a senior editor at another news organization, he said he had interviewed Starr many times over the years. All of them, to a man, remarked how fair and honest he was, and that he was light years away from the snarling partisan that Clinton imagined, and continues to imagine in this interview.
Some of his facts are flat-out wrong. Susan McDougal was jailed for contempt of court by a judge, not Starr, who was not a prosecutor. She was one of the “little people” Clinton says were trampled by the all-out rush to ruin him. Governor Jim Guy Tucker, the sitting governor of Arkansas, also resigned and went to jail as a result of Starr’s investigation. Apparently the criminal justice system had it in for Clinton, too.
The outburst itself was classic Clinton. The childish sense of persecution, the peevish remarks to the interviewer such as “people like you always help the far right” (was he even familiar with the guy interviewing him?) His descriptions of how “the other side” operated was the mirror opposite of the truth. He says the evil Republicans thought that politics was about power, and he thought it was about how power ought to be used. But if there is a modern politician who believed in acquiring power for his own sake, it would be him.
Clinton doesn’t ever say “I lied,” he says “I did not tell the truth.” He talks about “personal mistakes,” too. His language is carefully selected so he can admit to the bare minimum (“leading parallel lives,” whatever the hell that means — maybe he has a different view of the space-time continuum, and thinks there are actually two Bill Clintons.)
I’m not very interested in re-fighting the 1990s. I just wish he would go away.

Right around the time Clinton left office, I was at my father-in-law’s house on the Eastern Shore, flipping through the cable channels. (We don’t pay for our TV viewing, so it’s a small pleasure when I can do that.) An ad for a video caught my eye, with the title “Funniest Presidential Moments” or something like that. There was one scene with President Clinton and Boris Yeltsin are laughing at an off-camera incident. Both of them are roaring with mirth.
It occurred to me that this was the first time I had ever seen Clinton in an unselfconscious moment. He always seemed to be looking around at who was watching him, playing to the crowd, giving people what they wanted to hear. But here he saw an incident and laughed at it, not to get on someone’s good side, but merely because it was funny.
Then a subsequent thought hit me: since early 1992, when he first became nationally known, I had never thought of Bill Clinton as anything other than a fraud. There have been other politicians I have loathed for their politics, but I could concede that at least on one or two issues, they really believed what they said, or they had some trait that humanized them.
Clinton is all appetite, as Jesse Jackson once remarked. He was, and is, driven by his emotional needs and sexual desires, which are probably indistinguishable. His soul is a black hole for adulation, which he craves like a narcotic. Anything he gives, he gives only in the expectation of getting.
It would be difficult to think of a more perfect narcissist — his life and career were completely ordered toward maximizing his own self-importance. He never sacrificed for others, but asked others to make great sacrifices for him. Many of them did: Susan McDougal went to jail to avoid implicating him in a crooked real-estate deal. The feminists destroyed their own movement when they defended his abuse of power. (Who can possibly take them seriously about sexual harassment, or anything else?) Congressional Democrats went from a majority to a minority because of Clinton, yet they issued teeth-bared defenses of him when he was impeached.
So who are these two million people buying Clinton’s new book? Presidential memoirs are a dreary sub-genre, even for presidents like Reagan who knew how to express themselves. For a known liar and slight-of-hand artist like Clinton, who never expresses his own mind without doing the political calculations, why would anyone care to buy it?
The best explanation I can provide is that for the Bush-haters, it’s a demonstration of their contempt for the current president. I can’t imagine more than a tenth of the buyers will be able to plow their way through almost 1,000 pages of preening. His book might have been interesting in 20 years, after time has worn down his body and his partner has left the Senate.
According to the reviews I’ve read, such as the AP’s, “It’s like being locked in a small room with a very gregarious man who insists on reading his entire appointment book, day by day, beginning in 1946.” If someone else wants to read it and post their thoughts, by all means, and I salute your bravery and tenacity.