^{Clinton (The Boy in the Tree)}

At the risk of producing the third political Boneyard in a row and of saying nothing more than the “could’ve been great” or “great president/bad man” retrospectives going around, I want to comment on Clinton’s departure.

My own feelings about Clinton are a little different. I’m not sure he was such a great president and I’m not convinced he is really such a bad guy. (A bad husband, sure.) I have a hard time saying anything about Clinton without adding qualifiers, exemptions and warnings about the statements. Nothing conclusive ever comes out (which is why I always have to add something parenthetically).

First of all, you can’t get commentators more full of crap than conservatives talking about Clinton. Does anybody remember the frothing at the mouth that a President Clinton would deliver state dinners for Fidel Castro, socialized medicine and legalized pot? (And I’m sorry the later two never came about.) Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, Vince Foster’s “murder,” and all of the other theories about Clinton (including my favorite: that he had TWA 800 shot down to protect some secret or other) have all amounted to squat. Somebody should look into the “vast, right wing conspiracy.” It was there, and it’s kind of funny.

Usually, I would say that someone who inspires so much conservative anger must be doing something right, but here I’m not so sure. Conservatives seem to hate the guy they think he is. If a Republican president had passed NAFTA, GATT, the Defense of Marriage Act, Welfare Reform, the Communications Decency Act, the Telecommunications Bill, the Effective Death Penalty and Spy On Our Own Citizens Act, effectively killed health care reform for years to come and (needlessly) increased military spending more than any past president, the GOP would try to get him on Mount Rushmore. This is a guy who dragged the Democratic Party further and further to the right. (It was going there without him, but this is exactly where it didn’t need to be.)

Lyndon Johnson was president at a time of discord and he proposed the Great Society. FDR (who, granted, is not a fair standard for any president) was president at a time of despair and he passed the New Deal and convinced America to enter World War II. Clinton managed the country at a time of unprecedented prosperity (whether you give him credit for it or not, there it was) and used this unequalled opportunity to champion school uniforms and volunteerism. This failure of nerve is why I can’t go along with the first half of the “great president/bad man” consensus.

On the other hand, all I have to do is imagine Clinton running against George W and my respect for him grows. Clinton would have mauled him. Clinton could have exposed Bush as the slow-witted rich-boy he is. Clinton could have ripped into every Bush mistake in a way that Gore could not. I also have permanent affection for Clinton as the guy who made Newt Gingrich disappear. (It’s been said that Clinton is lucky in that his enemies are usually bunglers and creeps. True, but Clinton also makes them look like bunglers and creeps.) Every time I see Gingrich begging for his five minutes of talking head TV time I think “Viva Clinton!”

My favorite Clinton anecdote comes from David Maraniss’s excellent biography First In His Class. When Clinton was first running for office in Arkansas, a picture surfaced of a kid sitting in a tree protesting Nixon’s visit to the state. In the picture, the protestor is holding a sign with some radical message on it. Conservatives spent years trying to prove that Clinton was the boy in the tree. (This is the same group that spent years trying to prove that Clinton fathered a child out of wedlock with a black woman in Arkansas. See Primary Colors and The War Room for the reverberations of that rumor.) The fact that Clinton was overseas at the time the photo was taken did not dissuade them. Clinton had to be the boy in the tree, even if he wasn’t.

When people from the left (like me) hear this story, we tend scoff at the conservatives while simultaneously giving Clinton some respect for not being Nixon and for being on the side with the radical message. Some of the credibility and passion engendered by the boy in the tree rubs off on Clinton even though - again - he is not the boy in the tree.

Clinton was a president more active in our hopes or fears than in reality. He was a president who always received far too much hatred from the right (and far too much respect from the left).