COVER -> DAY ONE
 |
Barring Lyndon B. Johnson -- who was pitched into and out of the Presidency without ceremony -- every Democratic occupant of the White House since the Second World War has gained respect and recognition in retrospect having been reviled in office.
This is hardly remarkable.
Just as we expect a higher standard of morality from the clergy than we do from corporate executives, so we expect a higher moral code from liberal politicians than we do from conservatives, even though they face the same problems and temptations.
Liberals, too, are apt to expect more of themselves and government so they more often fail to meet their own expectations.
Thirdly, the mass media that acts as a filter between politicians and the people generally favour the conservative over the liberal.
Fourthly, hindsight facilitates the comparison of Eisenhower with Truman, Nixon with Kennedy and Reagan with Carter. Add to that the general tendency to sentimentalise the departed and you can understand the afterthoughts of regard accorded to Truman, Kennedy and Carter.
For all of those reasons, but particularly the comparison allowed by hindsight, Bill Clinton is certain to join that merry band of the retrospectively admired. Not so much, perhaps, because of his Presidency but that of George W Bush. Clinton's only achievement of lasting importance has been to delay for eight years the strangulation of the United States by the three corded braid of an untrammelled capitalist economy in the control of a deregulating legislature and an un-executing executive branch. For this stubbornness made more provoking by his unalloyed charm, Clinton was reviled. He frequently bowed but never broke.
In retrospect we will all be haunted by the so-called Monica Lewinsky affair not because of what Clinton is supposed to have done but because of the way in which the rest of the Constitutional machinery operated. A group of far right financiers not very secretly resolved to bring down the President. They arranged a complex web of intrigue and entrapment which ultimately led to a Bill of Impeachment on the basis of the report of evidence from a Grand Jury. Where was the separation of powers when it was crucially required? Where was the vigilance of Congress to protect justice? Where was that bipartisan piety to uphold the law and good government? Where were there wise Republicans and brave Democrats to be found on the floor of the Senate? Where were the descendants of Ed Murrow to remind us of Joseph McCarthy? Where, for that matter, were there any voices for calm in the mass hysteria of those January days?
The same could, of course, happen to a Republican President in the face of a Democrat House but it is much less likely and if Bush proves to be an effective President it will become unimaginable.
If he keeps his word (and this is one of those rare occasions when it would be good for a politician to break a promise), Bush will give executive power away like a quarterback throwing down field without looking for a receiver.Besides, in the sweep of history, Republicans have much more to gain from the discrediting of government than the Democrats because they want it belittled.
If Bush cuts taxes and indiscriminately deregulates the economy he will complete the United States' journey, begun by Reagan, to render it ungovernable. From which point on its citizens can happily anticipate the death of fish, the industrialisation of meat, the chemicalisation of vegetables and the successive abolition of water to drink and air to breathe.
In these straitened times it will be a miracle if Clinton is not declared a national saint with his own memorial day.
Against these massive considerations, failure to tinker with the health system, slight success in Ulster and great labours in the Middle East will be of little account. The American public may well have been wrong in general to prefer Bush to Gore but it was assuredly right not to give Clinton and by extension Gore, any credit for what had been economically wrought by Messrs. Volker and Greenspan. As the economy has strengthened Clinton has fiddled and fidgeted but even that may in retrospect seem to be virtuous in comparison with what is likely to be an unprecedented squandering of public assets for the benefit of private gain.
Clinton's great failing, apart from his ambition which is excusable and in a Democrat perhaps even necessary, was his love of popularity.
This is not a remarkable vice in the generality and politicians are particularly prone to it. His supposedly greatest vice was to seek popularity for its own sake, as an end rather than as a means, but this charge was repeated ad nauseam by those who divided their time equally between making it and voting down everything he proposed.
He had the political skill to stop anything really stupid being enacted but not to get anything enacted on his own behalf. He could painstakingly construct temples of reason out of cards but he could not stop the tanks from razing them.
What, we may ask, would have been the verdict without the machinations of Linda Tripp and her backers?
Well, the difference would have been in the name of the lady and the form of the entrapment, that is all. To have established that Clinton enjoyed the attentions of young ladies is not to have established much. To have shown that people in tight corners are not always truthful even when it is wise as well as moral to be so, should hardly have surprised anyone, not least those acutely moral Senators of the GOP.
Clinton had equally a modicum of everything a public figure needs and can do without; he neither had an arresting talent nor a fatal flaw. He would have made a magnificent President during the 1930s but that is only to say, metaphorically speaking, that Roosevelt would have had a very indifferent 1990s.
For the rest, I should declare some private feelings without which no obituary is properly complete.
- First of all, let me confess that I have an unalterable (if irrational) prejudice in favour of intellect over stupidity which has led me to estimate Clinton.
- Secondly, I am an easy prey to natural charm.
- Thirdly, I could not survive without an abiding if often seriously damaged faith in my fellow creatures which all liberals share and all conservatives ridicule.
- Fourthly, there cannot be a Wright without an Icarus.
- Finally, and for me most convincing of all the factors in Clinton's favour, he complained remarkably little at the way he was treated; it was a quirky and uncomfortable fortitude but without fortitude there is no pilgrimage.
There may never be an era of pilgrimage to succeed that which started with Roosevelt and ended with Clinton. Some banners have been torn down, others have been abjectly stowed and will soon fade. We can only hope that their emblems and exhortations, shrunk to the relative obscurity of an archive, will some day be resurrected in new form for a new journey, hopefully in time to save the fish, the farm, the water and the air.
