Clinton triumphs once again

Bill CLINTON bestrode the worlds of American politics and publishing like a colossus this week.

This may be an election year, but since it began Sunday with an interview on “60 Minutes,” the publicity campaign for Clinton’s long-awaited memoir has all but driven the incumbent president and his presumptive Democratic opponent off the national sound stage. On Tuesday, its official publication date, “My Life” sold 400,000 copies -- roughly twice the total rolled up by the previous nonfiction record-holder, “Living History” by Hillary Clinton. A 6 1/2-hour audio recording of the former president reading an abridged version of his 957-page autobiography sold 35,000 copies that first day. His publisher, Random House’s Knopf Group, already has shipped 1.5 million copies of the book and has ordered a second printing of 750,000. Hillary Clinton’s memoir, as a point of reference, has sold 3 million hard-cover volumes worldwide and half a million paperbacks.

And, despite nearly four years’ absence from the White House, the Clintons have lost none of their ability to evoke antagonism, admiration and a variety of ambiguous sentiments somewhere in between -- sometimes expressed in the same paper.

In a front page review in the New York Times, for example, Pulitzer Prize-winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani called the book “sloppy, self-indulgent and often eye-crossingly dull -- the sound of one man prattling away, not for the reader, but for himself and some distant recording angel. In many ways, the book is a mirror of Mr. Clinton’s presidency: lack of discipline leading to squandered opportunities; high expectations, undermined by self-indulgence and scattered concentration.”

However, in another review from a forthcoming edition of the paper’s Sunday Book Review posted on line, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Larry McMurtry muses on Clinton’s reported $10-million advance: “That somehow a long, dense book by the world’s premier policy wonk should be worth that much money is amusing and brings us back to Clinton’s long coyote-and-roadrunner race with the press. The very press that wanted to discredit him and perhaps even run him out of town instead made him a celebrity, a far more expensive thing than a mere president.”

The Wall Street Journal’s online commentary service posted this appraisal by the conservative British historian Paul Johnson: “Presenting a just estimate of the Clinton presidency will pose perhaps insoluble problems to historians. The printed record of his doings, misdoings and omissions is unarguably deplorable from start to finish. Yet he was reelected without difficulty, and some would argue that, had it been constitutionally possible for him to run for a third term he would have been elected again. It is a fact that historians will have to take into account, for it is central to the success he enjoyed that William Jefferson Clinton was a formidable personality, at least in one sense: Face-to-face, it was almost impossible to dislike him. Indeed it was difficult not to like him very much.”

‘A great story’

How to explain this eruption of commerce and passion over a literary genre whose product usually -- and mercifully -- proceeds to the remainder table immediately after publication of the obligatory magazine extract?

For one thing, the Clintons remain outsized characters in a period dominated by men and women who, despite the gravity of their challenges, appear small and bickering. “Bill Clinton is a great story and has been for a very long time,” said veteran journalist and publisher Peter Osnos, founder of Public Affairs Press. “He ... grew up in America’s real-life Dogpatch and, somehow, pulled it together to become president of the United States. He’s a high-low character and we Americans love high-low characters.”

There is also the emotional tug of not-so-distant memory. Clinton’s peaceful and prosperous presidency now seems a kind of golden interregnum, a sort of Indian summer between the end of the Cold War and onset of the War on Terror.

“The biggest event of his presidency was a soap opera,” said Osnos, “and people are bound to be nostalgic for that, especially when the security issues are as convulsive as they are now. It’s like what people used to say about Italian politics: The situation is hopeless but not serious. With Clinton, the situation was fascinating but not serious.”

Then, there’s what people like to call the Bill and Hill Show. As president and first lady, they always were more than the sum of their parts. As a married couple, their relationship probably has elicited more comment, analysis and speculation in more forums than any in American history.

In fact, Clinton himself believes that part of the media obsession with their marriage derives from the unconventional fact that he and Hillary, despite their problems, have remained together in an era in which differences over fabric swatches send couples scurrying to divorce court.

John Kerry’s status as a divorced and remarried candidate, for example, is almost entirely unremarked upon.

“Character is important in a president,” Clinton writes, “but as the contrasting examples of FDR and Richard Nixon show, marital perfection is not necessarily a good measure of presidential character. Moreover, that wasn’t really the standard. In 1992, if you had violated your marriage vows, gotten divorced and remarried, the infidelity wasn’t considered disqualifying or even newsworthy, while couples who stayed married were fair game, as if divorce was always the more authentic choice. Given the complexity of people’s lives and the importance of both parents in raising children, that’s probably not the right standard.”

The personal touch

Interestingly, the former president’s memoir never seems more sincerely felt than when he writes of the tenderness he felt for his abusive, alcoholic stepfather and affection he continues to hold for Hillary’s family, all of whom accompanied the couple on their honeymoon.

The lonely boy from a chaotic, slightly disreputable low-rent family appears to have taken more than a bride when he married into the close-knit, warmly supportive, resolutely bourgeois Rodham clan. With Clinton, the personal always trumps the political.

At the heart of the Clintons’ undiminished appeal is a kind of chicken-and-egg riddle that came most sharply into focus when the former president appeared on Oprah Winfrey’s syndicated television show this week: Has the chat show sensibility with all of its turbulent banality, its faux fellowship and market-driven rancor completely infiltrated our politics? Or have our canniest politicians simply appropriated a broad new platform?

Watching Bill and Oprah effortlessly slide from his diet and exercise regimens to familial dysfunction to marital fidelity to mild points on policy was something to see. Native language or learned, Bill Clinton speaks fluent daytime television.

These days, our successful public men and women intuit something they would be loath to admit, even if it were consciously realized. This is an increasingly atomized and narcissistic society, one in which media provide the connections that kin, class and conviction used to make.

Tip O’Neill’s famous dictum that “all politics is local” has been overthrown. Today, all politics is personal.