Good comments on Clinton's memoirs by Bret Stephens:
On the whole, the elevated criticism of My Life has been pretty disparaging: "Sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull," was the verdict of New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani. This she finds somewhat surprising: "Mr. Clinton would seem to have all the gifts for writing a gripping memoir: gifts of language, erudition and charm, combined with a policy wonk's perception of a complex world at a hinge moment in time."
Kakutani's point is one Clinton's critics, particularly his liberal critics, often make: How could such a brilliant guy have been such a so-so president? Their answer is that he was undone by character flaws, especially his lack of self-discipline.
This idea, that whatever else Clinton is, he is very, very smart, is the great unexamined prejudice of Clinton's admirers and detractors alike. It stems, I think, not just from a faulty estimate of the president's intelligence, but from a faulty notion of what "intelligence" is. More specifically, it stems from a totally erroneous idea of what kind of intelligence a president – as opposed to a lawyer or a scientist – needs to have.
It's no mystery why Clinton is commonly thought to be intelligent. He can flawlessly deliver a State of the Union address with the teleprompter off, as he is said to have done in 1994. He can discuss HIV-infection rates in sub-Saharan Africa and rates of micro-loan usage in Bangladesh with assurance. He can argue his side, and he can argue the other side, as competent lawyers are trained to do.
All this adds up to what the ancients called the faculty of cleverness (in Greek, deinotes). Cleverness is being a smooth talker, or being fast with figures – the sort of things Clinton is manifestly good at (and which the current president is manifestly bad at). But cleverness, the ancients insisted, was not the same thing as intelligence; that is, there is nothing intrinsically praiseworthy about it. Rather, "if the mark be noble, the cleverness is laudable, but if the mark be bad, the cleverness is mere smartness." What distinguishes intelligent people from clever ones is that the former actually know which marks are worth hitting, and which ones aren't.
Here, then, is something that leaps from the pages of Clinton's memoir. What is the Clinton presidency about? It's about housing vouchers for Russian soldiers. It's about after-school programs and preschool programs. It's about securing Russia's nuclear stockpile. It's about affordable health care. It's about peace in the Middle East. It's about sustainable development. It's about access to Chinese markets. It's about racial reconciliation. It's about a balanced budget. It's about free trade and fair trade. It's about Africa. It's about the Third Way. It's about affordable housing. It's about gun-safety proposals.
It's about all these things, and all of them pretty much in equal measure. The bowman with a thousand arrows in his quiver sends them flying in a thousand directions, with no thought of whether some targets are worth hitting more than once. This is not mere prodigality, but something approaching active stupidity, because if there's one thing an intelligent person knows about the presidency is that it's a magnificent pedestal for accomplishing One Big Thing. Ronald Reagan knew this: His epitaph reads, "The Man Who Beat Communism." Clinton, by contrast, did not know this, which is to say he didn't even know what his job was actually about. This is a classic case of losing the forest for the trees; not exactly the mark of an intelligent man.
PARADOXICALLY, perhaps, the one thing Clinton's memoir does show about the man is that he really does have character, at least political character.
Early in the book, he writes that his favorite movie is High Noon, and its influence on him: "Over the long years since I first saw High Noon, when I faced my own showdowns, I often thought of the look in Gary Cooper's eyes as he stares into the face of almost certain defeat, and how he keeps walking through his fears and toward his duties."
In many respects, this really was Clinton. He had charisma, and empathy, self-assurance, the remarkable self-belief that keeps most ordinary mortals far from politics. Above all, he had the character not to fold: not after being defeated in his race for Congress, not after being defeated for re-election as governor of Arkansas, not after Gennifer Flowers, not after the collapse of HillaryCare, not after impeachment. Every time he got kicked to the ground, he stood up and kept going. He was the first Democratic president to serve two full terms in office since Franklin Roosevelt. This is no mean achievement.
And if he'd had the wit to know what to do with his gifts, he might have been a great president.
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