Posted on 06/26/2004 8:20:05 PM PDT by Libloather
CLINTON'S PRESIDENCY: WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN
Sat Jun 26, 8:00 PM ET
By Cynthia Tucker
Bill Clinton hopes to be acquitted by history. Fortunately for him, though, no subject of history is ever around to hear its verdict.
Scholars will probably wonder what drove legions of conservatives to hate Clinton with such fury that they wasted years and spent a king's ransom trying to drive him from office. They will no doubt note that Clinton accomplished much despite the "vast right-wing conspiracy": He righted the nation's finances after decades of dangerous deficits. He drove the initiative that stopped a pogrom in Bosnia.
And, quite contrary to conventional wisdom, Clinton contained Saddam Hussein. After the U.S. invasion, President Bush sent weapons inspector David Kay to lead the search for weapons of mass destruction. When he found none, Kay credited the combination of hard-nosed U.N. inspections through the mid-1990s and Clinton's bombing campaign against Iraqi targets in 1998 with eliminating Saddam's stockpiles of WMDs and most of his capacity to produce chemical weapons.
Still, as these first drafts of history are written, it seems unlikely historians will tag Clinton with greatness. Perhaps history itself -- which did not call upon Clinton to found a new nation, or save the union, or confront global tyranny -- robbed the 42nd president of the opportunity for pre-eminence.
But historians may well find that Clinton robbed himself. The fallout from his sordid dalliance with Monica Lewinsky distracted the president from doing that which could have made him great and, in many ways, it reduced his presidency to a foolish caricature.
Clinton's hubris allowed his foes to overwhelm him and hijack the national agenda. His second term might have been devoted to profound problems -- the racial divide, the shrinking middle class, Islamic terrorists. But it was wasted on scandal.
Look at what Clinton might have accomplished. His instincts on race were just right, targeting both racism and black self-destruction. He protected affirmative action; but he also gave a brilliant speech at a black church in Memphis in 1993, challenging activists on black crime, family dissolution and academic failure. Ultimately, however, the racial initiative of his second term came to naught.
A decade of unparalleled prosperity, ushered in by his economic policies, gave him the political capital to tackle the growing divide between rich and poor. He might have dreamed up strategies that would have helped American workers withstand the tidal forces of globalization. He did not.
And then there is the matter of Osama bin Laden and his network of jihadists, al-Qaida. In his autobiography, "My Life," Clinton writes of a difficult period in 1998 when he was trying to salvage his marriage while also confronting al-Qaida attacks on U.S. embassies. On vacation with Hillary, he said, "I spent the first couple of days alternating between begging forgiveness and planning the strikes on al-Qaida."
That about says it all, doesn't it? Even Clinton, with his legendary ability to "compartmentalize," couldn't possibly have concentrated fully on the threat. He was not only distracted, but he was also boxed in by the scandal. Any attempt to deal more harshly with bin Laden would have been derided by political foes accusing him of trying to divert the public's attention.
In "My Life," Clinton owns up to his sins, admitting that "what I had done with Monica Lewinsky was immoral and foolish." But he also spends a vast treasury of words to prove that a cabal of ultraconservatives was determined to wreck his presidency. He's right. They were.
But they weren't elected president. He was. If he genuinely believed that they didn't have the best interests of the nation at heart, he had a moral responsibility to outmaneuver them. Instead, he gave them the ammunition they needed to impeach him.
That's no one's fault but Bill Clinton's.
I have pounding my liberal friends with this.
They say big oil is evil and I say the 'toon gave us bigger oil.
If the oil mergers had occurred during GHWB's tour, the Libs would still be howling.
read later bump
-Thanks A Lot Slick Willie-
Good [more accurate] book title!
Slick Willie is Loser and Slacker, doing just enough to get by without taking any substantial risk what so ever!
...except when it came to fulfilling his perverted sexual appetite. Even his girlfriend calls him a Jerk and a Liar!
Cindy for once gets it right: Its all Bubba's fault. She's the rare liberal who acknowledges that when you strip everything away about the last Democratic President, he's scum.
Welcome to Free Republic!
You know, ol' Cynthia Tucker normally makes me puke, but she does have the germ of a point in this essay. Like a Horatio Alger story, Bill Clinton had potential for great accomplishments - he basically came from nowhere and, with help from a few influential people, was able to rise to the presidency. Like a character from Greek tragedy, his stunted, sociopathic personality, together with his dismal choice of a "wife", will make him a pariah in history. Saddest of all is the fact that while Bill let "little Bill" do his thinking for him, the country was set up for 9/11.
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