The Bill Show

It's been almost a century since America had an ex-President who occupied such commanding ground. Bill Clinton is full of energy, full of ambition, full of other things. What Clinton will do next is an always interesting question, the more so now, when there is so little left that he hasn't done. A man who's devoted his life to scaling a height has run out of summit. Will he descend like Moses? Fall like Teddy Roosevelt? Jump? Be pushed? Or will Bill Clinton keep climbing past the peak, in the manner of a cartoon character, on into the air?

He delivered fifty-nine paid lectures in just his first year out of office, plus numerous free talks.

What is the market price for a Clinton speech nowadays? I can't imagine he can be charging what he used to, as time moves on and he becomes more and more irrelavent.

My friends who listen to AM talk radio say I am not the first to suggest that he made a pact with Satan. But I don't think Bill did that. A pact with Hillary, yes—

great article - how did O'Rourke stomach so many Clinton speeches

There could be a more concrete reason for Bill's appeal to black voters. I felt as if I'd been at this gala before, forty or forty-five years ago. The women wore important hats and serious dresses. The men's dinner jackets were shaped at the shoulders and nipped at the waists. Their dress shirts and bow ties were splendid in color and form. This was very different from going to, for instance, a political-wife-in-a-sack and bag-o-tuxedo event on Capitol Hill. But it was not very different from going to a party with a family full of harps. My uncle Mikey-Mike, my cousin Slats, my Aunt Bridget, and her husband, Louie, who once ran the local pinball rackets in Toledo, had more "flava," as they say today, than their egg-salad-sandwich-with-the-crusts-cut-off neighbors. Grandpa J.J. was one generation away from illiteracy and, I suspect, not as distant as that from running booze during Prohibition. But by 1960 O'Rourkes had marched up the social stairs into the world of "some white Rotary Club." Like contemporary middle-class African-Americans, Irish-Americans had to find a palatable way to edge to the right. Casting ballots for Bill Clinton allowed blacks to vote Republican without throwing up.

Priceless...

Clinton began, for some reason, with a statement that could stand as an obituary for all executive political power and certainly for his own.

"When times are good and the money is rolling in, you can almost have a lobotomy and be ... " ~~governor~~ [PRESIDENT! and I'm living proof of this!!].

It's absolutely priceless.

I wanted to post this from the Atlantic back when it was published, but it was not available on the website. For certain articles, they wait a month to set it up with a URL. I'd almost given up hope.

I hadn't really read O'Rourke before but this was good.
'Clinton explained matters to the audience: "Why were they building bombs? It's the only way anyone pays attention to them." '
And that's why he throws (verbal) bombs- so that he can stand at the edge of the spotlight and not feel like the largest living irrelevency.

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