President Clinton sounded Monday night like he covets a third term more than a desire to bestow a political inheritance. His valedictory address to the Democratic National Convention easily could have been an acceptance speech with a call for four more years.
If his purpose was to rouse the nation on behalf of Vice President Al Gore, it seemed almost subordinate to his effort to remind people of the economic bounty of the Clinton years.
Clinton strung together the familiar list of accomplishments during his administration: the longest economic expansion, the 22 million new jobs, the lowest unemployment in 30 years, the highest rate of home ownership in history.
He hit themes central to voters in the middle of the road: education, health care, preserving Medicare and Social Security, and targeted tax cuts. He talked about unassailable moral issues such as an increase in the number of adoptions and a decline in teen pregnancy.
He offered an obligatory kind of praise for Gore, calling his selection as vice president “one of the best decisions of my life.”
“We’ve worked closely together for eight years now,” Clinton said. “In the most difficult days of the last years, when we faced the toughest issues of war and peace, of taking on powerful special interests, he was always there.”
He lauded Gore for casting decisive votes in Congress, but that also underscored some of the few official duties that the vice president has.
“Everybody knows Al Gore is thoughtful and hard-working,” Clinton said. “I can tell you personally he is a strong leader.”
He also offered warmer words for the political aspirations of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, the candidate for the U.S. Senate who shared the prime-time spotlight with him.
Even though the convention program pushed his address well past prime time in most of the country, the moment was his. The Democratic Party produced a stirring video about Clinton’s presidency, with all the Hollywood mythmaking that made it all seem like an unbroken string of triumphs.
For Clinton, it seems, the election is still about him. All the qualities that make the president one of the most gifted politician of the last 50 years also seem to have conspired to prevent him from truly ceding the stage to either his understudy, Gore, or his wife, who is running for the Senate in New York.
“To those who say the progress of the last eight years was an accident, that we just coasted along, let’s be clear: America’s success was not a matter of chance, it was a matter of choice,” he said.
He exuded the kind of passion that suggested so much unfinished business he would like to complete even though his official political career will be over at age 54. When voters turned to him in 1992, he was at 46 the youngest president elected since his political hero, John F. Kennedy, who was 43 in 1960.
Clinton expressed a thinly veiled eagerness to engage Republicans in the coming campaign, pointedly offering rejoinders to what the GOP used for its applause lines.
“We’re not just better off, we’re also a better country–more decent, more humane, more united. Now that’s prosperity with a purpose.”
With Clinton, it’s not so much what he says, it’s how he says it. His speeches always sound better than they read. It’s his conversational, sometimes confessional style, and his ability to make a simple accomplishment or proposal a matter of deceptively grand scale. His body language is a study in power worn well. He still draws obvious energy from the crowd, and the party faithful returns a kinetic form of affection.
Neither Gore nor the Republican nominee, Texas Gov. George W. Bush, will close the charisma gap with Clinton any time soon.
“He’s a rhetorical innovator,” said Ross Baker, a presidential scholar at Rutgers University. “It’s a new form of political speech, which is basically conversational speech as opposed to oratorical style. It’s a speech style made for people whose earliest memories include television. The old-style orator was for microphones in a large auditorium. His is made for the body mike and the studio voice that makes other speakers seem kind of old-fashioned.”
And it’s not always what he includes in his speech, it’s what he omits. His selective memory on Monday night notably did not acknowledge the sex scandal that led to his impeachment. His atonement in suburban Chicago last week, apparently, was meant to take that off the table. It was not a night to showcase sins.
The first Baby Boomer president holds up a cracked mirror for the electorate to view him. He is a confounding mix of conflicts, triumphs and failings, the personification of a generation often marked by its desire for too much of everything.
Clinton won two terms without ever capturing a majority of the vote. He won even though more than 50 percent of the people had serious questions about his honesty. He triumphed over his doubters because of an exquisite ability to read the public mood and respond in ways that won them over.
He has perfected the politics of the last man standing. Few politicians have been the object of such a visceral hatred. Few have survived so many attempts to undermine them.
And while there is much debate over the legacy he leaves, he left an unmistakable mark on the Democratic Party, arguably saving it in 1992 by dragging it to the center, blurring the differences between the two parties.
On many, if not most, major issues, the two parties are now fighting between each other’s 48-yard-line. They agree on welfare reform, get-tough-on-crime proposals, balanced budgets and targeted tax cuts–proposals not exactly part of the Democratic hymnal before 1992. So far, Bush is benefiting from that blurring more that Gore.
Early in Clinton’s presidency, when he proposed a dramatic overhaul of the health-care system, he was punished as Republicans took control of Congress, prompting his critics to question his relevance.
He wasn’t off balance for long, focusing on targeted tax cuts, welfare reform and a balanced budget. He boxed in Republicans during a government shutdown and squelched the so-called GOP revolution with a deftness that left them baffled. Even when Republicans led the drive to impeach him, Clinton almost dared them to go ahead. The booming economy gave him a nearly impenetrable firewall.
There was more. For all his failings, Clinton connects with people. He has an actor’s stage presence, a comedian’s sense of timing, a bad boy’s gift for seeking forgiveness.
“America gave me the chance to live my dreams,” Clinton said. “I have tried to give you a better chance to live yours. Now, with hair grayer and wrinkles deeper, but with the same optimism and hope … my heart is filled with gratitude.”
“He’s a great illusionist,” Baker said, “perhaps the greatest American illusionist since Harry Houdini.”
He is defined in many ways by his extraordinary capacity for things that make him loved and loathed. He is too young to give a quiet sendoff like Ronald Reagan did for George Bush in 1988. He is too infused with politics to adopt Dwight Eisenhower’s low-key approach when he gave way to Richard Nixon.
This was a night when Clinton was supposed to do a quick victory lap for himself, then hand the baton to Gore. He showed he wasn’t quite ready to leave the track.
