The events of life are messy, and the events of a presidency can be even messier. And when it’s former President Bill Clinton you’re talking about, well, better get a mop.
Scholars are doing just that, trying to stuff Clinton’s messy life and irresistibly messy presidency into neat and tidy boxes. The result, however, might not be messy enough to give a full account of a complex man and administration.
In a conference at the University of Arkansas here titled Vantage Points: Perspectives on the Clinton Presidency, a dozen professors from political scientists to historians, essayists to journalists spent all day Thursday presenting rough drafts of chapters they wrote for a book due next spring.
Organizers say it is the first interdisciplinary conference on the Clinton presidency, and the resulting book likely will be the first comprehensive one with the stamp of academia on it. A flood of other books, including Clinton’s memoir, are likely to come out within the next few years. (Full disclosure: I’m doing research for a book on Clinton, a history of the administration, so have your salt at the ready.)
America’s `black’ president
From his relations with Congress to his China policy to author Toni Morrison’s contention that Clinton was the first “black” president, the academics from around the country tried to put pieces of the Clinton picture together. In broad strokes, the mostly Clinton-friendly scholars paint this image: Clinton was a feminist’s ally, a supporter of African-Americans, a centrist, a Democrat, a family man, a policy wonk, a post-modern president, a success.
But in the course of their remarks, the same scholars said he was also a celebrity, a spinner, a charmer, a Republican, a put-on personality, a cheater, a liar, a politician, a disappointment.
The problem is that he’s all these things, and many others at once. People tend to focus on the one part they find most interesting about Clinton. But the good parts and the bad parts can’t be separated into different boxes: For Clinton, greatness and foolishness are one and the same. Clinton is the ultimate “Yes, but” president. For whatever positive, there is a corresponding negative, and vice versa.
Throughout the conference, nearly every major initiative, event or scandal got mentioned at least once, but many were only in passing. The right’s hatred for Clinton was brought up sparingly, and most would argue that one legacy of the `90s was the launching of an organized right-wing offensive on radio and television. Yet Rush Limbaugh’s name was never uttered at the conference.
Not enough Hillary
Hillary Rodham Clinton was a nearly equal partner in most of his political life, and she probably deserves her own chapter in any Clinton book. But she came up almost exclusively as the subject of People magazine cover stories or as the stand-by-your-man wife on a 1992 “60 Minutes” interview. You can’t understand Clinton without understanding Hillary Clinton or the right.
Clinton’s life and presidency are most appropriately considered as an organic whole, where a decision in one area affects another. The Monica Lewinsky affair compounded his relationship with Senate Democrats, to whom he became indebted for bailing him out of the impeachment. His decision to focus laserlike on the budget process and then NAFTA hurt his chances on health care in his first two years.
Intriguing observations did come out of the conference, including a debate on whether Clinton was a Southerner.
Randy W. Roberts, a history professor at Purdue University, said Clinton isn’t.
“Denial of region is important,” said Roberts, citing Clinton’s time at Georgetown, Oxford and Yale. On the flip side, contended Randall Kenan, an author and professor at the University of Memphis, Clinton is the “quintessential `New Southerner,'” able to turn it on or off at will. Clinton has been able to “Northernize” himself when necessary. He can be “Bubba” or William Jefferson Clinton, depending on the company.
This leads to one of the conference’s agreed-upon generalizations that Clinton is an opportunist and not necessarily in a negative sense. He’s a creature of circumstance, a politician who survived exceptional adversity by shrewdly adapting to circumstance. He is both the hero of the New Democrats and the hero of African-Americans, the Democratic Party’s most liberal wing.
Clinton’s presidency “was the high point of black political power,” said Darlene Clark Hine, a professor of history at Michigan State University. He gave substantial Cabinet-level opportunities to blacks.
Yes, he did some good
And while his personal behavior kept him from doing all the good he hoped to do, he still did a lot of good. Partisans of all stripes can debate his role in the `90s economic boom, but it’s a fact that he was the country’s steward during that time. Although subject to cries of tokenism, he had the most representative Cabinet in history.
The X-factor for any historian, scholar or author writing about Clinton is not sex–or not just sex–but his ability to bridge other people’s personal space. It’s ugly, that seduction, and it’s not just physical. He locks eyes and squints intently to show his interest, his knowledge and his warmth. That ability muddies scholarly study and was little dealt with by the conference participants.
That skill is either the quality that keeps him from being a complete opportunist, or it’s the quality that makes him the best opportunist in the history of politics. How does one explain the palpable one-on-one magnetism and genuine-seeming empathy he shows for the infirm or the downtrodden? You can’t put it into numbers. You have to trust your gut or your judgment.
