Falling Out of Love With Bill
Could Democrats and Republicans be finding new common ground—in seeing the ugly truth about their erstwhile heroes?
Illustration by Jack Unruh
Until he was an ex-president, I never felt any special fondness for Bill Clinton. From the start, he seemed a bit skeevy to me. On the night in 1992 that he accepted the nomination, as he dined in midtown with Hillary and the Gores, he was introduced to a reporter from Spy, of which I was then editor. The future president smiled, popped to his feet, and ushered the reporter off for a private chat. Spy had just published a cover story called “1,000 Reasons Not to Vote for George Bush—No. 1: He Cheats on His Wife.” “I want to thank you guys,” Clinton told the man from Spy, “for leveling the playing field with that piece you did on Bush’s girlfriends.” But were there more women? he asked repeatedly in the course of a several-minute-long chat.
Nor did my admiration increase, six years later, when he obliged me to answer questions from my daughters, then 8 and 10, about semen stains—“How did the stuff get on the dress, Daddy?” and “But why didn’t she take it to the cleaners in three years?” (And people wonder why the latest generation of Democrats is not bedazzled by Clinton nostalgia.)
Yet despite all his sleazoid tendencies, he was, of course, a pretty good president—and he turned out to be an absolutely exceptional ex-president, the best of our lifetimes. The William J. Clinton Foundation is an ambitious, effective mega-NGO, with pragmatic approaches to tackling the problems that beset the poorest countries—HIV/AIDS, tropical diseases, foul water, undercapitalization. It is to the U.N. what HBO is to PBS, nimble and exciting instead of elephantine and ungovernable.
Each of the last three summers, I saw Clinton interviewed live onstage, and each time I was agog. The breadth and depth of his extemporaneous command of information and nuance—about green economics and technology, Iraq, Israel and Palestine, electoral politics—were extraordinary. He was supersmart, nuanced, witty, casually eloquent.
In other words, so not George Bush. Clinton’s Energizer Bunny philanthropism since he left office would have rehabilitated him on the merits, but by comparison to his successor he seemed like some golden demigod, a living reminder of what an American president could be.
Until this year. For me and most of the people I know, the postpresidential love for Bill Clinton has evaporated completely and breathtakingly fast. No matter how many mosquito nets and microloans he helps supply to the Third World, I’m out of love. I found Bill Richardson’s endorsement of Obama two weeks ago especially gratifying not in spite of its fuck-you to his former patron but because of it.
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