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.
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I’d write 1,000 pages if I got the equivalent of $10,000 a page.
We don’t pay for our TV viewing
Do you mean that you don’t have cable or satellite? If so, I guess you meant you don’t directly pay for television, right?
You do pay with your time and attention to broadcast commercials and government subsidies for broadcast TV:
For decades, local TV stations have been granted free access to broadcast channels to distribute their analog signals. In 1996, the government handed them the right to use parallel digital channels to roll out high-definition TV.
Such “spectrum” space — radio frequencies on which they can broadcast with no interference — is incredibly valuable in the digital age. Once 85% of households are receiving HDTV, the broadcasters are supposed to shift completely to digital and, in turn, give their old spectrum back to the government. Trouble is, consumers are years away from going HD. So local stations are sitting on both their analog and digital channels — sort of a Sutter’s Mill of spectrum.
The airwaves belong to the public. If the government could auction them off in an open market, they might be worth as much as $50 billion, according to consensus economic estimates. So local TV stations get $50 billion worth of public airwaves, pay nothing, and citizens barely notice.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5030951/
We don’t really watch TV as a family. The kids watch PBS sometimes, but that’s about it. On the rare occastions when wife and I watch TV, we try to make out during the commercials, so we won’t be seduced by any clever ads.
What a unitive, life-giving idea!
Some years ago I learned that Clinton’s ability to mesmerize people, to get them to like him, is almost unnatural. For example: a good friend of mine–in her sixties, highly intelligent professional person rightly beloved by those she works with, someone not even particularly liberal in political or social views–told me quite sincerely that she believes that both Bill and Hillary Clinton are extremely caring, selfless people.
I would not have believed that my friend could be so utterly taken in, had I not heard the words from her own mouth. No doubt she is far, far from alone.
Ideologically liberal people, however, were and are largely *not* taken in by the Clintons; people like Richard Cohen and Maureeen Dowd made clear repeatedly that they had Clinton’s number. But Clinton was useful. Also, because as President he was the Champion of the Sexual Revolution, and would be succeeded by a klunky automaton, he had to be defended at all costs.
Also, pride was involved. These people–like the feminists you mention–could not stomach the possibility of the pro-lifers, the religious conservatives, and the GOP scoring such a big political victory as to successfully remove the Narcissist from office. That was probably at least as much a factor as defending the Abortion Protector.