"That's a joke, son! Don't ya get it? I made a funny and you're not laughin'!"
Posted on 06/19/2004 6:03:30 AM PDT by livesbygrace
A BOOK CANNOT ELEVATE a president. That's true even for a book marketed by Dan Rather for an hour on 60 Minutes, its publication treated like a show-stopping event by the media, its author's tour seen as the equivalent of a high-octane political campaign, and its importance signified by the expectation of an entire summer in which the author will never be far from the spotlight. Bill Clinton should not get his hopes up. Presidents are judged by their record, not their memoirs. At best, Clinton is Calvin Coolidge without the ethics and the self-restraint.
Clinton is not a failed president, only an insignificant one. In his interview with Rather to plug My Life, he claims two great accomplishments. One is "the creation of 22 million jobs." The other is the toppling of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkan war. So Clinton takes credit, above all, for high job growth and a positive outcome in a relatively minor foreign policy crisis. One qualification: On jobs, while Clinton deserves credit, presidents merely make jobs a bit easier or harder for the economy to create. They don't create jobs themselves, except by expanding government. In sum, Clinton's twin achievements match Coolidge's almost exactly. The highlights of Coolidge's term were a flourishing economy and triumph in three minor foreign ventures.
Clinton had three major successes in Congress during his eight years in office, but it's no surprise he downplays them. They reflect his weakness as a president. The first was passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. This measure was proposed by President Reagan, negotiated and signed by the first President Bush, and ratified with Republican votes as congressional Democrats abandoned Clinton in droves. The second was welfare reform that reduced the rolls dramatically. He signed this Republican bill reluctantly in 1996 only after his political adviser, Dick Morris, told him his reelection would be jeopardized if he didn't. The third Clinton success was the arrival of a balanced budget, again a goal Clinton had warily endorsed but not expected to achieve so soon.
Now consider these achievements for a moment. Do they remind you of anyone's agenda? The answer is Reagan's. All three were longstanding aims of Reagan, not of Clinton or Democrats. Yes, Clinton campaigned in 1992 on changing the welfare system "as we know it." But the bill he was forced to sign cut far more deeply into welfare rolls than Clinton wanted and was fiercely opposed by liberal Democrats. The point is that the Clinton presidency was, in effect, an extension of the Reagan presidency, though Clinton would be loath to admit this. Completing the Reagan agenda was not his intention.
There are three primary methods of assessing, then ranking, a president. None helps Clinton. The first, most-often-applied test, goes like this: Did the president face an unprecedented challenge, did he respond boldly, and was he successful? Because they passed this test so impressively, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt are rated by historians as the top three presidents. Clinton faced no great challenge to which he could respond boldly and successfully. He was president during the period Charles Krauthammer has dubbed a "holiday from history." In fact, Clinton has complained he had no major war or crisis to confront.
The second way to judge a leader comes from the philosopher Sidney Hook. In The Hero in History, Hook distinguishes between eventful and event-making leaders. "The eventful man is a creature of events," Hook wrote. The event-making man causes events. "Both the eventful man and the event-making man appear at the forking points of history," Hook wrote. "The event-making man . . . finds a fork in the historical road, but he also helps, so to speak, to create it." Clinton was clearly not an event-making president. And it's a stretch to label him eventful. The two forks he encountered--Medicare and terrorism--he dealt with tentatively.
The third method comes from Fred I. Greenstein, a political scientist at Princeton widely admired for his writings on the presidency. In The Presidential Difference, he proposes six measures for appraising the "leadership style" of presidents: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Clinton is strong on communication, political skill, and cognitive style (absorbing and using information). On the other three, he falls short. His White House and his personal decision-making style were chaotic. Despite the talk of a "third way" in public policy, he was hardly a visionary. And he stumbled badly on emotional intelligence, which Greenstein describes as "the president's ability to manage his emotions and turn them to constructive purposes, rather than being dominated by them, and allowing them to diminish his leadership." To Greenstein, emotional intelligence is the most important trait of a president. Clinton, he says, "provided a reminder that in the absence of emotional intelligence, the presidency is a defective instrument of democratic governance."
When Clinton encountered two forks in the road, on terrorism and Medicare, he balked. Given the circumstances, that was understandable. But hesitation is not an act of bold leadership. On terrorism, he passed on the opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden as he flew from Sudan to Afghanistan. True, that occurred at a time, before the 9/11 attacks, when the enormity of the threat posed by bin Laden was not yet known. On Medicare, Clinton backed away from a chance to restructure the program and save it for decades to come. But he was beset by impeachment and chose to side with his liberal backers who opposed Medicare reform and were crucial to his staying in office. Thus the decision made political sense. By balking, however, he reinforced the verdict that no book can erase. Clinton was a president of little consequence.
Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.
BTTT
"Not even Clinton can get away with a book that completely ignores reality. He has to talk about Monica, etc. in the book because everyone knows it pretty much happened."
"Now, the same American media that has turned smut into a spectator sport is going to focus on the affair."
Yes, as they all walk in step to promote the liar-in-chief's book....they will all want the "news" on his affair with Monica. My question will be, will they ask him about Juanita and the hundreds of others? Will they ask him if he felt like he succeeded in keeping Chinagate off the front pages? I doubt it.
But, in their quest to re-build Bill, this will do nothing but bring up the liar's past and his degrading of the office of the President. I hope he gets what's coming.......a dose of a reality.
I went to Borders the other day to buy a book, and they had huge (about 4 ft high, 3 ft wide) photo posters of the Bilious hanging everywhere. It reminded me of the giant posters of Mao or Stalin. It was creepy !
I can't see large numbers of people actually reading his 957 page "book". As in his speeches as president, Clinton had no discipline. Obviously his model for speech writing was the Soviet dictators making 5 hour speeches in front of the Supreme Soviet. Of course leftists have a preference for quantity over quality.
Check out the review from the New York Times on Clintoon's book.
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/books/20CLIN.html?ei=5006&en=b1de08dbc243a997&ex=1088308800&partner=ALTAVISTA1&pagewanted=print&position=
I really liked the ending of the review:
"Lies about sex and real estate, partisan rancor over "character issues" (not over weapons of mass destruction or pre-emptive war), psychobabble mea culpas, and tabloid wrangles over stained dresses all seem like pressing matters from another galaxy, far, far away."
I read the NYT review. I've gained a modicum of respect for the times. They're seeming to "tell it like it is."
Pray for W and The Johnson Family
That's a new one.
BTTT
That statement by George Will is anchored proudly on my refrigerator for all the world to see.
That is, was and always will be his legacy. No amount of books, fabrications or anything else will ever, change that. We know it and so does HE. He made his bed...now he lies in it.
???What the he** is Fred Smoking?
Hello, FRED!!!
He failed us in national security, he failed to uphold good moral standards for all of us (most importantly, our kids) and failed to leave office with the 4.3% economic growth he inherited (it was 2.12% when he left office)
What does this goofball consider 'failing'?
"That's a joke, son! Don't ya get it? I made a funny and you're not laughin'!"
There are some things about Clinton that aren't often discussed, such as how he lost all of our nuclear secrets to the Chinese. He may, in fact, have sold those secrets to the them for campaign contributions. The Republicans, cowards that they are, wanted nothing to do with that one. I still say that Jimmy Carter was the worst president in history, but there are some things about Clinton that are very troubling indeed.
Peggy Noonan's description of Hillary would suit Bill, too; squat and grasping.
You are right.....the 90's economy was a sham.
X42(I) signed "welfre reform" only after it was passed with veto-proof margins in both the House and Senate. Fred should know this. The Rs would have loved to have rammed this into X42(I) on a veto override. It doesn't matter what Dickie "advised."
Good point! Humanitarian indeed.
Bump this great piece.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.