John, there's always been scathing editorials and other reporting on Clinton from the dreaded liberal media. Remember Primary Colors? Not exactly a complementary portrait, and Joe Klein isn't known as a conservative. Then there was this piece from last September, in that bastion of liberal elite reporting, the NYT:
Clinton, Most Charming at a Distance nytimes.com
For the moment, I'm reevaluating my fairly negative view of Clinton somewhat, I was impressed by the analysis in
The Governor-President nytimes.com
Here's a more extensive excerpt analysing the omnipresent Clinton hatred in the U.S, I've posted before a smaller part of this previously.
One historical issue about Clinton's impeachment may be a simple extension of the current mystery: why a Republican Congress pursued it. Scholars of the 21st century will recall that removing a popular President from office was very unlikely, that it wasn't dictated by the Constitution and that demanding it was obviously harmful to the G.O.P.'s public standing. The episode will undoubtedly be measured, as it already has been, against Andrew Johnson's impeachment in 1868. A historical consensus now views Johnson's impeachment largely as a mistake that grew out of the aggravated passions of the Reconstruction Era. The deeper fight was over the terms under which the Southern states would be readmitted to the union. In 1999, we have a similarly overheated political environment, yet it's hard to see what the fuss is really about.
This time, the prime motivating factor in impeachment seems to be personal. There's a simmering hatred of Clinton, which has boiled hotter and hotter through his time in office and bears little relation to the passions people ordinarily bring to politics. What explains it? Historians examining this phenomenon years hence might ask first if Clinton-hating came from interests threatened by his policies, following the pattern of F.D.R. But Clinton has hardly been a foe to the moneyed classes. On policy grounds, Republicans might be expected to embrace a President who shares their views on big issues including free trade, balancing the Federal budget, crime and welfare.
The most common explanation is that hatred for Clinton is an expression of "a culture war." The idea here is that in their strenuous dislike of the President, conservatives are fighting a battle over the 1960's and its legacy. Clinton is the first baby-boomer President, the first who dodged the Vietnam draft and admitted to smoking marijuana. His conservative opponents, including many members of the same generation, see such a figure as a threat to the moral order. During the impeachment fight, Tom DeLay, the House Republican whip, described it as "a debate about relativism versus absolute truth."
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.
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.
Clinton himself is most focused on the Republican opposition. A year ago, he invited a group of historians to meet with him for a private talk. This was just before he was to give his deposition in the Paula Jones case. After a discussion about the Progressive Movement and past Presidents, Clinton held forth to a smaller group clustered around him. The right, he inveighed, controlled most of American politics. They had both houses of Congress, the think tanks and the big money. He was all that stood in the way of conservative control over the whole apparatus of government. Republicans would never accept him as legitimate, one of the participants remembers the President thundering at nearly midnight, because he was blocking their ascent to power. A few weeks later, the First Lady described her husband's opponents as a vast right-wing conspiracy."
The question of Clinton-hating finally transcends conventional political analysis. It's personal and aggravated. Detestation of the President is worsened by the phenomenon of sustained public support for Clinton, which his opponents find baffling. Why does this man's approval rating rise in the teeth of humiliation? At one level, Clinton's supporters have made a pragmatic judgment that he governs in their interest. But at another level, he draws on a reservoir not of love, not of respect even, but of identification.
Which is where the "you're stupid, and we're not" Republican party line becomes counterproductive. As I've said, politics is a blood sport these days, and if it's going to operate under the nasty personal attack rules Clinton didn't invent, I'm not going to fault him for fighting back by whatever means he chooses. I wish politics weren't so nasty, but given that it is, having Clinton as the Democratic candidate beats having Mondale or Dukakis.
On impeachment, mostly I think it's a waste of time. 2 years, and one of them is an election year when nothing much will happen anyway. Time to move on, the Starr Inquisition can continue its personal vendetta against Clinton the antichrist after he leaves office if they want. The one good thing to come out of this will be the end if the special prosecutor law, which has been a big waste. There's this big Joe Klein article about that I need to dig up sometime. |
