The Mr. Bill Show Goes On

If the free market accurately determines value, then Bill Clinton is very valuable indeed. The exact amount of Clinton’s deal with the Alfred A. Knopf publishing house to write his memoir is unclear, but it is more than $10 million, more than the pope or Sen. Hillary Clinton landed for their book deals. The pope can grant absolution, something Clinton was sorely in need of for a while, especially from Hillary. But it’s Clinton who epitomizes the turn to celebrity politicians.

Like a long-running soap opera, the Clinton series came to a thudding halt in the 2000 election, when viewers decided that the anointed successor, Al Gore, wouldn’t be able to keep up the excitement. The series was canceled by the Supreme Court, which functioned as a kind of imperious Arbitron ratings board.

Now, while Gore thinks deep thoughts in Europe, Clinton has bounced back. No one should be surprised. Clinton is a classic baby boomer: energetic, motivated and self-promotional. After a few missteps, Clinton seems to have hit his post-White House stride, beginning with putting his office in Harlem. The memoir will allow him to make the case that, for all the fireworks, his presidency was about something more substantial than sexual peccadilloes. In making that case, however, he is likely to be so compelling and informative that he’ll show us the president we never had.

How will he do it? Look for lots about growing up in Arkansas, his mother and race relations. Clinton will have to explain where his driving ambition came from. What about the Arkansas boy at Georgetown U., then cavorting in Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship and that curious trip to Moscow? Perhaps an admission that, yes, he inhaled? And what in his past would have prompted him to the later indiscretions that, like it or not, he’ll have explain, if not try to justify?

Clinton will also have to cover his embrace of the Republican agenda. He can plausibly argue that, in the wake of the 1994 Republican congressional landslide, he had no choice but to accede to Newt Gingrich’s demands for welfare reform. But there always seemed something a little preemptive about Clinton’s concessions to the GOP. The contrast with George W. Bush, who makes maximum demands first, then settles for less, is striking.

A kind of human vacuum cleaner of information and facts, Clinton bought into the view that the world was fundamentally changed in the 1990s by the technological revolution. China was supposed to be democratized by capitalism, the Middle East conflicts tamed by the promise of prosperity.

Clinton was more than an internationalist; he was a globalizer. Contrast that with Bush’s constricted vision of the world in which the United States thumbs its nose at friend and foe alike.

As the economy slides, nostalgia for Clinton grows. Even the Republican opposition must be feeling the pinch. Clinton was a growth industry for the cabal of talk-show hosts and institutes that arose to fight him. Hurry up, Bill! The show must go on.