The pool shark - Pres Clinton - NR Guide to the 1996 Election

National Review, Oct 14, 1996 by Richard Brookheiser

CONSERVATIVES hold the key to understanding Bill Clinton, but they mostly look for it in the wrong places.

One wrong place is Clinton the Monster, the philanderer and crook (and that's just what his kindest critics say of him). If you want details, consult the New York Times best-seller list, which has been featuring Clintonian books of vices for months. They appear under Non-Fiction, which is generally correct. But as a definition of the man, and the candidate, the scandal label misses the mark. At the most practical level, no serious charge will be brought, much less proven, against the President before Election Day. Even if all the speculations were true (Mena airport, Vince Foster, the works), they would not be the worst derelictions of a modern American statesman. Stealing the 1960 election was a more serious public offense -- if that is what John Kennedy did. Finally, the Clinton scandals are not coterminous with the man, any more than Watergate equaled Richard Nixon.

If Clinton is not defined by Arkansas land deeds, neither is he defined by thirty-year-old love beads. Foes of Clinton as a Sixties re-tread, and of the Sixties generally, are as attached to the period as David Dellinger, getting arrested at his second Chicago convention at the age of 81. For good or ill, they all want the decade to live forever. The Sixties cast a powerful spell, and the young Bill Clinton did a number of things, some ludicrous, some shameful, under its influence. But time moves on; so has he.

One of the least attractive features of baby-boomers thirty years ago was their cocksureness, and this is more relevant to Bill Clinton because he presides over an Administration of know-it-alls. Is he one himself? He talks a good game, and he loves to talk. But the brimstone whiff of pride is not there. In the crunch, he often blinks or buckles. A captain of his soul should be sturdier.

The best way into Bill Clinton -- the conservative's way -- is to compare him with Ronald Reagan: not as an ideological figure, but as a personality. It is one reason Clinton, coming out of Chicago, had a lead in the polls about as big as Reagan had coming out of Dallas in 1984.

The resemblance is clearest in their campaigning. Reagan was a better speechmaker, obviously. But working a crowd, or one on one, the two men converge. Talking to Clinton, like talking to Reagan, is to experience a quality of attention that is like stepping in front of a headlight. One minute you're in the crowd, outside the beam; then, he turns to you, and it locks on. Bush and Carter were too diffident, and too awkward, to produce such an effect. Nixon and Johnson worked hard, but no one ever called them love bombers. With Reagan and Clinton, for the time you have their regard, however brief, you seem to have it all.

One reason surely is that they are both sons of drunkards. The alcoholism of Roger Clinton, Bill's stepfather, and the family traumas it caused -- the rages, the blows, the final confrontation when Bill had become a teenager big enough to lay down the law --are a prominent part of the Clinton biography. Clinton's 12-step frankness about his past was one of the things that made Joe Klein fall in love with him, back before Klein had become Anonymous, and when Gov. Clinton still was. Reagan never pushed his father Jack's drunkenness front and center, but he did write about it in the opening pages of his 1965 memoir, Where's the Rest of Me?, in a story that is like one of the grim scenes in It's a Wonderful Life. One night when Jack came home drunk, he collapsed on the porch, "dead to the world . . . his hair soaked with melting snow." Young Ron had to pull him inside. "I could feel no resentment," the older Reagan added, characteristically. He must have felt resentful; he chose not to (the note of Reagan optimism).

Children of alcoholics develop early warning systems of sensitivity. When the prospects for quiet and love, or distress and misery, can be signaled by a turn in a parent's manner, a slur in his speech, kids make it their business to be attentive. They apply this skill, unconsciously and automatically, to other people (who knows when they might go off like bombs?). This sense can accompany the whole range of personality types -- depressed, detached, self-possessed. But when a child with an alcoholic parent has any capacity or desire to be genial, his human antennae make him unusually good at it.

Even this shared aspect of Reagan's and Clinton's lives shows great differences. Roger Clinton was violent; Jack Reagan was not. Nelle Reagan was a steady presence for her son. Virginia Kelley, Bill Clinton's mother, had likable qualities, but steadiness was not one of them (five marriages, two to Roger). Reagan and Clinton can both make near-instantaneous contact with people. Clinton has a stronger need to get a positive reaction from them. When he had to, Ronald Reagan could serenely shrug off Tip O'Neill, Sam Donaldson, Communism. Bill Clinton stays entangled.

Clinton's skill at pleasing and his desire to please inform his performance as a public man. "What energizes Bill Clinton is going out and meeting with the American people," Al Gore said in Chicago of Clinton's pre-convention train trip. Right he was. Off the campaign trail, Clinton is still the pleaser, hearing people out, adjusting his course among a multitude that he wants to leave smiling. "He's the most adept of bank-shot artists I've ever seen," said Jesse Jackson, comparing his political maneuvers to a game of pool. Don't complain, Reverend. You're one of the balls, and Bill Clinton wants to hit them all.