One of two things explains this. Either this hick from Arkansas decided he was going to soak the taxpayers for every bit of far flung travel he could squeeze out of his eight years in office, or he saw this perk of his presidency as a chance to campaign for the UN Secretary General job.
this hick from Arkansas decided he was going to soak the taxpayers for every bit of far flung travel he could squeeze out of his eight years in office, or he saw this perk of his presidency as a chance to campaign for the UN Secretary General job.
A combination of both, with a whole lot of spin and damage-control thrown in.
From "Dereliction of Duty:"
In the military, spin doesn't very often triumph over substance, because the blunt edge of force -- the reality of risk and potential casualties -- cuts through spin pretty damn fast. But in the Clinton White House, the attitude was that spin could triumph over everything -- and electorally for the Clintons, if not in the reality of foreign policy, it did.
And even when it came to foreign policy, President Clinton appeared to assume that the image of a the well-traveled statesman would make up for a lack of actual foreign policy achievement. No president in our nation's history traveled more than Bill Clinton. In part, this was because he was trying to escape the scandals that followed him in Washington. But it was also because President Clinton was intent on leaving his own foreign policy legacy, just as every Democratic president had done since Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Defining that legacy, I saw, was a conundrum for him. But the search for it took him around the world. President Clinton made 133 trips to seventy-four foreign nations or entities, a number never before approached by previous presidents. During his eight years as president, Clinton made more foreign visits than Presidents Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon combined. In his two terms, Clinton visited almost as many nations as Presidents Carter, Reagan and George H.W. Bush combined....
President Clinton's biggest travel year was 1998, the same year he was hit with the Monica Lewinsky scandal and impeachment. His foreign travel in 1998 accounts for one-fifth of his total travel over the eight years.
In short, according to Patterson, Clinton had no foreign policy, was incapable of making decisions, practiced CNN diplomacy (whatever made the news was where he turned his attention), ignored terrorism, despised the military and treated it as just another political tool while ravaging our national defense capabilities.
Good book -- short but devastating.
Post #9.
Both are true.