Clinton, Loved and Loathed

Presidential chroniclers have been wrestling for some time with the paradoxes that define Bill Clinton’s character and record in office. That pursuit will likely go on for generations. The 42nd president steps down on Saturday with the highest end-of-term approval rating of any modern president, higher even than such popular leaders as Dwight D. Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan. But he also returns to private life bearing the stigma of exceptional public disdain for the disgrace he invited through his reckless self-indulgence and flagrant dishonesty.

Clinton was among the hardest working of presidents and one of the brightest. He was instrumental in reorienting a Democratic Party that had won the presidency just once in the past six elections, in reshaping government and in steering the nation into new post-Cold War relationships with both allies and longtime antagonists. Yet the first paragraph in any summary of his career will inevitably recall his impeachment by the House and trial by the Senate, only the second president to face that ordeal.

Clinton was not charged with treason or any of the other “high crimes” the Constitution’s authors had in mind. Instead he was called to answer to allegations of perjury and obstruction of justice stemming from his sexual relationship with a young White House intern.

Conservatives who have always despised Clinton as unprincipled and immoral found in the Monica Lewinsky affair further vindication for their distrust and loathing. Clinton had made the White House his own Temptation Island, and had readily given in to the temptation. Others, rightly in our view, saw the squalid affair as a contemptible act of self-destructive folly, but not of a magnitude to justify Clinton’s removal from office.

Clinton was acquitted by the Senate in 1999, but he had disgraced himself, insulted his office and embarrassed the country. The office survives, the nation has got over its embarrassment. The disgrace endures.

Even Clinton’s enemies concede he has been the most gifted politician of this generation, with an extraordinary ability to charm, empathize and surmount defeats that would have crushed others. What he has lacked, besides discipline in controlling his personal appetites, is the courage to lead when the political risks of doing so seemed to him too high. A notable example was his appointment, with much fanfare, of bipartisan commissions to propose reforming Social Security and Medicare. The panels’ recommendations for assuring the integrity of the nation’s two most important social programs were sound, but unavoidably controversial. Clinton simply ignored them.

He did have the ability to learn from his political failures, to adjust pragmatically to the reality that for most of his two terms placed him in often bitter contention with Republican-dominated Congresses.

Conservative critics--joined by some liberals--accused Clinton of having no principles, only a poll-driven compulsion to align himself with any position that was popular. The left in his own party complained that he had abandoned traditional Democratic values for a wishy-washy centrism. Yet the most notable successes of his presidency came precisely because he understood that only by moving toward the center could things that had to be done get done.

His push for the North American Free Trade Agreement put him at odds with much of his party’s base, as did his positions on welfare reform and spending cuts to reduce the deficit and eventually balance the budget. Republicans complain, with some justice, that major credit for these initiatives should go to them. But it was Clinton’s cooperation, and his decision to buck many in his own party, that brought them to fruition.

The departing president was woefully slow to involve himself in foreign policy, and it wasn’t until his second term that global events and perhaps a newly found interest led him to face up to that responsibility. The problem areas and challenges to U.S. interests that he inherited--involving China, Russia, North Korea, the Persian Gulf, the Middle East, the Balkans--he now passes on to his successor. They are problems still, though perhaps, as in the Balkans, in a little better state than when they became his to worry about.

Clinton was by no means a failure as president, but he also fell well short of being the success that his intelligence and political skills might have made possible. He came to the presidency already under an ethical cloud, dogged by critics who had all but demonized him as epitomizing the worst of 1960s counter-culturalism. Thanks to his excesses he became his enemies’ greatest ally and very nearly the instrument of his own destruction.