Clinton on Campaign Trail--as a Peacemaker

Always and ever the candidate, seeking another hand to shake, another elbow to squeeze, another chance to flash the big grin, Bill Clinton was in full campaign mode.

He walked down from the speaker’s platform, took a few steps and leaned deeply into the crush of people, grabbing outstretched hands. Three thousand miles from home, the president of the United States was working the crowd in an Irish border town, where the “Tommy the Bikes” cycling shop window bore the inscription, “Welcome Bill.”

With no more campaigns to lead in his own country, the lame-duck president last week was still doing what he loves most, trying to woo every constituent in sight. It was quintessential Clinton, who was clearly drawing energy from the noisy crowd.

In an event-packed trip beginning Tuesday and ending Thursday, Clinton managed to visit with the prime minister and president of Ireland in Dublin, take tea with the Queen of England at the palace in London, stay overnight with his good friend and British Prime Minster Tony Blair, squeeze in some pub-hopping and shopping, make a speech on globalization at a British university and--most important--turn his persuasive powers on the Protestant and Roman Catholic politicians trying to hold together a delicate peace in Northern Ireland.

Even as his presidency dwindles to a handful of days, Clinton is running hard in one last campaign. The prize: to secure his legacy as a peacemaker.

All the qualities that brought Clinton to the presidency--his energy, his ambition, his political salesmanship--won’t allow him to fade quietly into history.

On Saturday, back in the United States, Clinton turned his attention to an even more troubled region, telephoning Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat to discuss the violent clashes between Israelis and Palestinians. Middle East peace negotiators may come to Washington this week to try to revive the shattered peace process.

But earlier in the week, Ireland seemed just the right place to pursue a final foreign policy triumph.

Although he is a lame duck at home, Clinton still represents the American eagle to many people in Ireland. Even the impeachment scandal has not dimmed his luster in the eyes of the Irish, who have a long history of appreciating charming bad boys in their politics.

Both in the Irish Republic and in the northern province that is part of the United Kingdom, people acknowledged that it took an outsider like Clinton to break through the barriers of mistrust, suspicion and hatred between Catholics and Protestants. “What Clinton brings to us is that can-do approach,” said David Irvine, a once-jailed former paramilitary leader for the Protestants who now heads a political party in the Northern Ireland Assembly.

With peace, teenagers go out at night and parents don’t worry whether they will come home safely, said Irvine. “There is an appreciation for the other side on both sides. There are increasing expressions of sectarianism [again], but there are fewer cheerleaders for them. . . . We used to kill each other more often.”

John Hanlon, a Catholic whose brother-in-law was killed by the Irish Republican Army, apparently for having stumbled upon some illegal activity, praised the president as a peacemaker. Clinton is “a very sincere man--he’s a great man,” said Hanlon, who vowed that peace must be preserved. “It can’t go back to the way it was. We owe it to our children.”

Dangerous issues still remain: how to get the Irish Republican Army to give up its guns permanently; how to improve the police force in Northern Ireland, which has been dominated by Protestants and feared by Catholics; and how to reduce the British military presence in Northern Ireland.

But Clinton is hopeful that his third and final presidential visit to Ireland--he came in 1995 and again in 1998--would help cement a permanent peace.

In private meetings during his trip, he pressed Protestant and Catholic leaders to cooperate. In public, he was a cheerleader for the peace process, saying that people on both sides are ahead of the politicians and will never accept a return to the violence of years past. More than 3,500 people have died by acts of violence during the 30 years known as the Troubles.

The Good Friday peace accord in 1998, a pact Clinton helped to broker, produced an agreement to share power for the first time between the feuding sectarian groups.

Clinton, like other traveling presidents, enjoys special prestige abroad, an advantage he exploited in helping bring peace to Northern Ireland. He represents the full weight of America, the world’s dominant military and economic power.

In both Ireland and Britain, Clinton was greeted warmly, with no sign of the cynicism that accompanies most Americans’ view of their political leaders.

“He’s charismatic, isn’t he?” said Margaret Lancaster, a city council member from Coventry, where Clinton delivered a speech at Warwick University asking rich nations to help poor countries. “He’s still got it. He’s still the man,” proclaimed Rajvir Bahey, a 17-year-old high school student who came to watch Clinton’s speech at Warwick.

In a speech at the Guinness brewery in Dublin, Clinton wondered aloud why he had felt compelled to get involved in the contentious Irish imbroglio.

First, he noted that an Irish architect, James Hoban, had designed the White House, beating Thomas Jefferson in a competition.

Or, perhaps his activism was prompted by seeing on the Oval Office mantel a plant given to President Kennedy by the Irish ambassador. “Maybe I got the political equivalent of poison ivy,” he joked.

Or maybe it was his Irish roots, since Clinton’s mother’s people, the Cassidys, had been traced to an area “literally right on the border” between north and south. “And in my family, all the Catholics and Protestants intermarried, so maybe I was somehow genetically prepared for the work I had to do,” he said, drawing even more laughter.