It's all Bill, all the time.
There's Bill Clinton on television talking about President Obama. There's Bill Clinton talking about the Tea Party. There he is talking about the midterm elections, the Clinton Global Initiative, his healthy, not-quite-vegan diet. There he is talking about Ireland. There he is talking about Tony Blair. (There's Tony Blair talking about him.) He's receiving invitations to campaign from politicians around the country who wouldn't be caught dead standing next to Barack Obama. Chris Matthews is making a documentary about him. All this just weeks after the celebrity media couldn't get enough of his daughter's wedding.
And now there's a poll pronouncing him "the most popular politician in America."
Bill Clinton? One of just two American presidents to be impeached? The man whose last name was linked with the word "fatigue" at the end of his presidency to describe the country's exhaustion with him -- and with the opera buffa that had been running nonstop since Star magazine's introduction of Gennifer Flowers a year before his presidency began? The man who made a fool of himself during his wife's campaign for the White House only two years ago? That Bill Clinton?
What's going on?
There's one obvious answer: The '90s were the last years in which the country could be said to have worked. Unemployment was low, the stock market sky high. The name Osama bin Laden was known to few outside the nation's national-security apparatus. If the government was effectively disabled from January 1998, when the name of Monica Lewinsky surfaced in the press, to January 2001, when the hobbled president left office, it didn't matter: Bellies were full, houses were gold mines, the Cold War was over, American troops were not dying on foreign shores, and the majestic home run records of Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire had not yet been adulterated by the knowledge of the chemicals propelling the balls over the fence. The years of Bill Clinton's presidency were a golden age compared to the years that have come since, filled with war, hard times, and fear.
There's more, of course -- with Bill Clinton, there's always more.
Democrats see a man comfortable with politics. Disappointed with the current president's seeming lack of combativeness, they recall fondly a man who was never above getting his hands dirty in the rough and tumble of our nation's capital.
Republicans all of a sudden are Bill Clinton fans, too. As Steve Kornacki pointed out recently in Salon, they seem to have given up -- or put on hold, anyway - the hatred that drove them to seek Hillary's indictment and Bill's removal from office. This right-wing reappraisal has nothing to do with Bill and Hillary and everything to do with rabid hatred of Obama. One right-wing meme making the rounds has it that Hillary, appalled at the performance of the man who defeated her two years ago, is just biding her time before she announces her candidacy to unseat him in 2012. And so Hillary is no longer America's ultimate feminazi megabitch, Bill is no longer the nation's premier lech and pothead. Both now earn right-wing admiration for the contempt they must feel for the Marxist usurper occupying the White House that should once again have been theirs.
Certainly, Bill Clinton's faults have receded with time. Monica was ages ago, and who was Marc Rich, anyway? Economic turmoil has erased memories of not just Bill's embarrassing performance in 2008, but Barack's inspiring one. With the presidency of George W. Bush now behind us, Clinton's best-known lies seem trivial compared to those of his successor, which concerned not the sexual neuroses of a wayward husband but a military attack upon a sovereign nation and resulted in the loss of tens of thousands of lives.
But there's even more to our enduring affection for our forty-second president. Because "more" is what Bill Clinton is all about.
In talking, thinking, and writing about Bill Clinton for the past five years, I've come to realize that Bill Clinton is just more. More of everything. There are smart people in the world, people with Ivy League educations and big jobs. Bill Clinton is smarter. He can read a book, scan a newspaper, and do a crossword puzzle all while receiving a detailed policy briefing from an expert on his staff. And at the end of the presentation he'll ask the one question that shows he understands the topic as well as the briefer, if not better. There are gregarious people in the world. Bill Clinton knows more people, knows more about more people, more loves being with people, than anyone else. Somehow he finds the time to keep up with thousands upon thousands of Friends of Bill -- remembering their birthdays, calling when their mothers are sick, congratulating them on their achievements. "He's a people prostitute," says a good friend of his from Arkansas. "He has to have people around him. He needs that."
And there are reckless people in the world. Bill Clinton risked the most powerful office in the world -- an office he'd worked his entire adult life to occupy - for the sake of ten blow jobs (eight of them not even completed) with an intern half his age.
His energy, his empathy, his self-indulgence, his appetites -- for food (unsated as it must be these days), for sex (maybe sated these days, maybe not), for attention, for power, for good deeds -- are all outsized. But instead of separating him from the rest of us, these traits endear him to us; they render him not inhuman but more human, perhaps the most human human among us. We all know people who generally do what is right but occasionally make big mistakes. We know smart people who do stupid things. We know people whose craving for attention leads them to embarrass themselves. We know people who overeat when they know they shouldn't, people who give in to sexual urges they know they should resist. We know these things about our friends and families and coworkers; we know these things about ourselves. Bill Clinton's virtues and his flaws are so exaggerated and so public that we see ourselves in him.
In the opening to The Human Stain, author Philip Roth's narrator, Nathan Zuckerman, describes the summer of 1998, when "Bill Clinton's secret" - about Monica - "emerged in every last mortifying detail - every last lifelike detail, the livingness, like the mortification, exuded by the pungency of the specific data." Many Americans were dreaming of "the brazenness of Bill Clinton," Zuckerman continues. "I myself dreamed of a mammoth banner, draped dadaistically like a Christo wrapping from one end of the White House to the other and bearing the legend A HUMAN BEING LIVES HERE."
We can't help loving Bill Clinton -- and hating him and admiring him and laughing at him and listening to him -- because there are so few people so visibly, so extremely, so outrageously human. He is who we are. And we are fascinating, aren't we?
We have met the ex-president, and he is us.
Follow Michael Takiff on Twitter: www.twitter.com/MichaelTakiff
Excellent article....really says it all.
I'll tell you.
Yet another attempt to lionize someone most people hadn't really thought of in ages, at the expense of the current President.
About a week ago, someone even tried a similar unfavorable comparison of the President to another, but replaced Clinton, with Bush. Even the most ardent Obama hater couldn't do that with a straight face.
These "reporters" invaribly end these testimonies to "our" flawed "heroes" by using a string of "we's" to imply that everybody agrees with the virtues they have bestowed on this suddenly remembered giant..
Recently, these "reporters" have most often been, but not always, former Hillary supporters, still hoping by some miracle that she will somehow ascend to the White House sooner rather than later. (Thus the recent "Biden should step aside for his own good and the good of the country" trial balloon a week or so ago.)
Though these testimonials sound wonderful, they are of course, complete fabrications by the writer. There is no burgeoning groundswell of nostalgic support for Clinton or Bush. If there is, where would we go with it? There's the Hillary connection with Clinton, but what could we possibly do with the memory of Bush?? We have too many "issues" right now to be distracted by unproductive strolls down memory lane.
Mr. Takiff,let's stop with the hyperbolic comparisons to disparage the President. It is divisive, and lacks any supporting evidence. "We" Democrats all still love Bill, but not that much!!
Are you the new spokesperson for "We", I didn't get the memo. ;)
Bill Clinton is the most popular political figure in the country and he's campaigning all over the nation, often at the request of the administration.
I seriously doubt that the president feels threatened by the Clintons whom he's chosen to work with but it's astounding how the mere mention of the name makes some of his backers foam at the mouth.
Dick Cheney
Liz Cheney
Sarah Palin
Rush Linbaugh
Joe the Plumber
Bill O'Rielly
Glenn Beck
all the time.
Who is "we"? Please, speak for yourself. I do not see myself in him, at all!
My but your paranoia runs deep
Nafta-was the end of manufacturing in America and loss of 8m manufacturing jobs
Repeal of glass steagal-led to wallstreet manipulating everything and eventual crush
I went to a luncheon with Bill Clinton today, and believe me, I haven't forgotten the sh!tty legislation he signed while president, nor have I forgotten the absolute h3ll the Republicans put him and us through in their witch hunt trying to bring him down. However, I being in the same room with him, was reminded of all the good things he accomplished while he was in office, and I'm thankful that he's out there reminding folks how far we've come and how far we've fallen since he left office.
The fact is that Clinton did more for deregulation than any Reaganomics acolyte could've ever dreamed of. That - and 'too big to fail' - are Clinton's true legacy (and it's far more than JUST Glass-Steagall.)
But yeah. You're right!
The truth of the matter is Clinton signed to bills that were to change America forever and that eventually caused the recession..Repealing of glass steagal in 99 which led to derivitives and wallstreet manipulation and signing of Nafta which led to the de@th of manufacturing in America..As a matter of fact if it were not for the dot com boom and the beginning of the internet which clinton had noting to do with he would have been toast..Thast why rachel said clinton was the best president for conservatives..Nafta and Repeal of glass steagal.
I remember the debate between perot and al gore on nafta on larry king..Perot said Nafta will be a giant sucking sound of manufacturing jobs from USA and he was right..