Admit It; He’s Not Perfect, But He’s a Great President

Once again, Bill Clinton delivered a stunning State of the Union speech, and there was much credit for him to claim. He has presided over an unprecedented period of American renewal. Inheriting a nation obsessed with an inferiority complex as to its role in a new world order, he is preparing to leave a country more confident about its economic future than it has ever been. There is no longer any talk about having to learn Japanese, ban immigration or sacrifice our labor standards in order to survive in the emerging world economy. And there are serious prospects for an enduring peace in the tinderbox of the Mideast.

His message was bold and justified in its optimism and yet, while the public once again beams with approval, his media and political establishment critics seem bizarrely embittered by his and the nation’s obvious success which, as he laid out with impressive statistics, is impossible to deny.

The last two Republican presidents left this nation with a debt greater than that of all presidents in U.S. history combined. The servicing of that debt was a horrible burden preventing the federal government from supporting the research, education, social services and infrastructure investments that a modern nation requires. In his first years, Clinton sacrificed his party’s control of Congress in order to push through a controversial tax reform needed to cut back the debt. The loud-mouthed Republican House leader who said that this couldn’t be done now has left government in disgrace, and yet Clinton, who took such abuse for his economic program, still is denied the fair measure of his success.

C’mon. Clinton has been a great president. Why is it so hard for the pundits to give this man his due? His is the envy of the baby boomers toward one of their own who is simply superior at playing the power games they were raised to master. They, whose personal lives tend to be as messy as any, seem frustrated that the president’s is intact, despite the slings of scandal. His wife and daughter, poised for future success, show obvious love and respect for this man. And the somber predictions of a pathetic lame duck president forced to resign or living his last days in the White House in shame now seem absurdly wrong. Last week, the president bounced from his star performance before Congress to an adoring crowd in Quincy, Ill., and on to address a meeting of respectful international leaders in Switzerland, carrying a message of renewal and hope for the world that was eminently believable.

Except to his Republican detractors, who, like many in the media, seem inherently incapable of being fair to him. Oddly, the anger of the most reasonable in the GOP seems fueled by the fact that Clinton has co-opted the saner elements of their program. While soundly thrashing the forces of the ultra-right, which still has a death-grip on the GOP by insisting on a dangerous mixture of false moralizing and divisive politics, Clinton has emerged as the savior of the rational political center. Clinton, a moderate in what was once a bipartisan tradition, far more closely approximates the policies and stance of a Dwight D. Eisenhower than do the still vituperative GOP congressional leadership and most of that party’s candidates for president.

Clinton is certainly a disappointment to those who thought he might prove an inspired liberal. His domestic agenda has been less progressively ambitious than that of Richard Nixon who, it should be remembered, favored a federally guaranteed minimum income. Clinton, unfortunately, leaves the legacy of his so-called welfare reform, which made the poor, and not poverty, the enemy. We judge success in what remains of the war on poverty by the number of people pushed off welfare without our having the slightest concern about their fate. That is truly shameful, given that 70% of them were children. What happened to them is anyone’s guess.

So, too, has Clinton been a failure in his professed commitment to overhaul the nation’s health system. More people are without health insurance than ever before, a national disgrace. But here, as with programs to aid the poor, does anyone really think the Republicans would do better? After all, it was the congressional GOP who gutted Hillary Clinton’s health care proposals and who continue to fight desperately against even the most limited proposals to increase the minimum wage.

Clinton is no liberal crusader, but he is an extremely effective, if opportunistic, man of the center who pulled the country back from the fringes of political madness, erased the deficit and reasserted the U.S. role as a world peacemaker. That is enough to justify calling him a great, if imperfect, president.