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Politics : PRESIDENT GEORGE W. BUSH -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Eashoa' M'sheekha who wrote (585351)	6/25/2004 2:55:42 PM
From: Andrew N. Cothran	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 769670

Reagan makesClinton look small www.nydailynews.com by Charles Krauthammer Since 1960 we have had only two politically successful Presidents - reaffirmed and reelected, dominating their decades: Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton. Clinton's autobiography, appearing as it does in such close conjunction to the national remembrance of Reagan, invites the inevitable comparison. The contrast is obvious. Reagan was the hedgehog who knew - and did - a few very large things: fighting and winning the Cold War, reviving the economy and beginning a fundamental restructuring of the welfare state. Clinton was the fox. He knew - and accomplished - small things. Small but not always unimportant. Clinton did conclude NAFTA and did sign welfare reform. His greatest achievement was an act of brilliant passivity - he got out of the way of one of the largest peacetime economic expansions in American history. And though he takes personal credit for all the jobs created - a ridiculous assertion to make about the decade of Jeff Bezos and Bill Gates - he does deserve credit for not screwing things up. Presidents often do. He easily could have. His great failing was foreign policy. Viewing the world through the narrow legalist lens of liberal internationalism, he spent most of his presidency drafting and signing treaty after useless treaty on such things as biological, chemical and nuclear weapons. All this in a world where the biggest problem comes from terrorists and rogue states for whom treaties are meaningless. Clinton let a decade of unprecedented American prosperity and power go without doing anything about Al Qaeda, Afghanistan or Iraq. Al Qaeda declared war on America in 1996 and, as we now know, hatched the Sept. 11 plot that same year, continuing to flourish throughout the decade. Looking the other way was largely a function of the age - our holiday from history, our Seinfeld decade of obsessive ordinariness. Clinton never could have been elected during the Cold War. In the 1990s, history produced the President perfectly suited to the time - a time of domesticity, triviality and self-absorption. One is inevitably reminded of the quite unbelievable image of the President of the United States on the phone with a congressman discussing Bosnia while being simultaneously serviced by Monica Lewinsky. What was always staggering to me about this scene was not what it says about Clinton's sexual practices - I couldn't care less one way or another - but about his unseriousness. I never hated Clinton. On the contrary, I often expressed admiration for his charm and for the roguish cynicism that allowed him to navigate so many crises. Nor was I scandalized by his escapades. What appalled me then, a feeling that returns as Clinton has gone national revisiting his own presidency, is the smallness of a man who granted equal valence to his own indulgences on the one hand and to the fate of nations on the other. It is the smallness that disturbs. It is that smallness that history will remember. Originally published on June 25, 2004