The Governor-President nytimes.com
James, I'd agree with you on the morals and ethics questions, of course, but I'm more commonly called stupid here than immoral, at least when the good Reverend isn't around. You might enjoy this article from last week's NYT Magazine. Normally the Magazine articles don't go online, I was afraid I'd have to scan it.
There is already a rough consensus among historians that Clinton is a significant President. He stands to be remembered, most obviously, for causing a big scandal and getting impeached, but also for getting re-elected, something no Democrat since F.D.R. had done. But Clinton, I think, will also be remembered for reforming the Federal Government and for reshaping his party. Most strikingly, Clinton, like Andrew Jackson and F.D.R., has changed the very nature of the American Presidency. Where those two Presidents expanded the role and importance of the Presidency, Clinton has downsized the office, both in the negative sense of stripping away some of its dignity and in the positive one of making adjustments demanded by the historical moment.
Coming to the White House from the governor's mansion in Little Rock, Clinton has recast the Presidency on the more modest model of his previous job. Unlike Presidents, governors have few opportunities to be visionaries. Instead, they do what Clinton has done -- a job of crisis management, political accommodation and governmental reform.
In one way, the public doesn't expect much from a governor; in another way it expects a great deal. A governor is expected to address whatever issues arise, from upgrading the skills of his state's work force to reducing traffic congestion on its highways. Financial constraints deny governors the possibility of grander schemes. Within the confines of balanced and limited budgets, however, they can distinguish themselves with creative social policy ideas. In smaller states, the governor is a familiar figure whose blunders and foibles are as well known as his cartoon caricature. If the governor proves himself intelligent and capable, people tend to be willing to indulge a fair amount of rascality on his part. As flawed as he may be, he's all that protects them from a Legislature that's inevitably far worse than he is.
I'd think that Libertarians, at least, would approve of this particular downsizing. I don't know about conservatives, the whole moral reformation business has gotten me quite confused as to what it means to be "conservative". I guess I should just be glad that the political theologians have vacated the left for the right. One other excerpt, on the subject of Clinton hatred:
But the culture-war argument doesn't do justice to an antipathy that goes back to Clinton's candidacy. I think there are three separate psychological profiles of Clinton-hating, which have blurred together at times. The first type of Clinton-hater is liberal, and he does derive his hatred from the 60's. His is the view that Clinton is a fundamentally disingenuous and inauthentic person who uses public interest as a cover for private ambition. This opinion, which is manifest in much of Clinton's press coverage, does not draw a line between the personal and the political. The problem isn't that Clinton committed adultery or that he lied about adultery. Indeed, these lapses have inclined liberal critics to support him. What they object to is that Clinton cares about winning more than he cares about principles; that he has thrown overboard such worthy causes as civil liberties, intervention in Bosnia, human rights in China and campaign finance reform.
That would actually be me, more or less. Not really, though, I never expected Clinton, or an other politician for that matter, to be in sync with my personal views; that's hopeless in a two party system. Unless you're willing to warp your views to fit your party.
A second kind of hostility to Clinton is neither liberal nor conservative but comes from the Washington establishment. Sally Quinn, the journalist and Washington hostess, has written that the Clintons "dissed" Georgetown society -- a culture she approaches not merely as an anthropologist -- by neglecting its advice and avoiding its company. This is true, but the falling out goes well beyond a mere social snub. By downsizing the Presidency and ushering in an era of a less ambitious Federal Government, Clinton has made Washington and its establishment less important. By turning away from both foreign affairs and big-ticket domestic programs, Clinton has made Washington less central to the concerns of the nation than it was in the days of SALT treaties. Turning the Presidency into the country's biggest governor's job is contrary to the political establishment's sense of the office and their relation to it. By allowing the Lewinsky scandal to happen, Clinton has turned the American Presidency (and by extension those who feed off it) into an international laughingstock. "Clinton acted . . . as if he does not recognize what it means to be President of the United States," wrote David Broder, a Washington Post columnist, after Clinton's first nationally televised mea culpa.
The third and most potent kind of Clinton-hating is conservative, but is related to the liberal kind in its aversion to a Democrat who plays politics to win. Instead of being pleased that Clinton has enacted parts of their agenda, Republicans are furious at him for co-opting the best bits of it. With the end of their monopoly on such issues as crime, welfare and balancing the budget, Republicans are forced to contend with Democrats over issues where their positions are distinctly less popular: education, the environment, Social Security and social issues like abortion and homosexuality. Clinton's seizure of the center has driven the G.O.P. to the right, empowering the radicals who want either to legislate on the basis of a narrow moral code or drastically curtail the Federal Government's role, or both. To conservatives, Clinton didn't win the center legitimately. He stole it from them.
That last is of course the dominant variant of Clinton hatred here, by all indications. All in all, I found this article very interesting. I was in general quite negative about Clinton up till now, no matter how many times I've been declared a Clinton lover. Now, I have to wonder if his peculiar political skills have actually ended up doing some good. The "centrist" case had been made to me long ago by someone long departed from this forum, maybe there's more to it than I thought. |
