Naked Ambition: The Clinton legacy laid bare

National Review, Oct 27, 2003 by Richard Lowry

For Bill Clinton, his exit from office in January 2001 was a national disaster. Not long ago, at Sen. Tom Harkin's steak fry in Iowa, Clinton lamented: "We went from surplus to deficit, from job gain to job loss, from a reduction in poverty to an increase in poverty, from a reduction in people without health insurance to an increase of people without health insurance." He added, for good measure, "Instead of uniting the world, we alienated it." Everything Clinton said was technically true, but served the cause of a larger lie-the implicit argument that all the good things were attributable to his miraculously proficient governance.

Instead, Clinton was fortunate to preside over a period of remarkable good times. What was good about the 1990s-chiefly the economy and the waning of social crises such as welfare dependence and crime-had almost nothing to do with Clinton policies. And as he was ready to leave office, the trend-lines on the economy began to turn the other way. Clinton's unique contribution in office was to flip-flop and maneuver his way to substanceless political popularity, and to leave grave foreign-policy crises festering for his successor, from North Korea, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to Iraq and al-Qaeda.

Clinton's sterling "legacy" is built on spin, lies, and misunderstandings. His defenders invest so much in puffing it up not just to have a club with which to beat George W. Bush, but to provide a basis for the eventual Hillary for President campaign. Bill Clinton's legacy is essential to Bill and Hillary's ongoing political project, and correctly understanding that legacy is essential to resisting it.

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The common thread to Clinton's time in office is smallness, of him personally and of his politics. Clinton's malleability and his fear of risk kept him-after the crash of Hillary's health-care plan-from proposing or thinking anything grand. Clinton shrank liberalism and the presidency. His 1992 campaign didn't lead to a liberal revival. Instead, liberalism atrophied, often able to check conservative reforms but not an independent creative force in its own right. It was a liberalism largely shorn of its idealism and of its ambition.

And Clinton became comfortable in the presidency only as the job dwindled to an exalted governorship or school superintendency. He kept busy by working on what didn't matter-it was safe and popular. So Clinton managed to be an activist-speaking and proposing a lot-while never straying far from the status quo.

Clinton represented the presidency in its post-heroic phase, and his successes were often selfish, not translating to his party at large, which lost ground in Congress and in the states during his time in office. Clinton was the Navel-Gazer-in-Chief, the president as Narcissus, his truest political principle devotion to himself. In the end, his political formula-a kind of deficit-hawk progressivism-was highly personalized, the key to popular governance in late-1990s America if you were a Democrat named William Jefferson Clinton.

Several of his influences linger on. His speeches weren't memorable, but with slogans like "100,000 new cops on the street" he affected the nature of sound bites forever. He blunted the edge of ideological politics for both Democrats and Republicans, which is a good thing if you consider "partisanship" an inherent evil, but not if you prefer politics to be a frank battle of ideas. And he introduced a cloying sentimentality into American political life, which had a hand in creating the "compassionate conservatism" of George W. Bush.

In short, Bill Clinton introduced much that is small, fuzzy, or ridiculous in contemporary American politics. Clinton was the intermission between one epic era in American politics, defined by the Cold War, and another, defined by the War on Terror. During this interval, there was mush, trivia, and wishful thinking.

The sympathetic gloss on the Clinton presidency is that it was a substantive success despite Clinton's personal failings. It was really the opposite. The administration was a personal success, for both Bill and Hillary. Bill attained global celebrityhood, while Hillary graduated into the U.S. Senate.

It was substantively that Clinton failed, on his own terms and by any reasonable standard. On his own terms, because he won office with two heartfelt priorities, creating massive new government "investments" and a New Deal-style government health-care system, the first of which was largely abandoned and the second of which went down to ignominious defeat. Thereafter, Clinton slithered to political survival and success, with small-bore, feel-good initiatives enshrined in his vacuous 1996 reelection campaign. The Clinton of 1992 would have scoffed at the exigencies of the Clinton of 1996, conducting a press- release presidency as he declared "the era of big government over."

Clinton's substantive failings were, in turn, connected to his personal failings. Clinton had important strengths. He was hyper-intelligent, empathetic, and had an amazing capacity for endurance. But his other personal traits crucially influenced his political character too: his indecision, his selfishness, his timidity, his inconstancy, and his self-pity.