In Europe, Bill Is Quite The Character

Europeans assume that Bill Clinton is headed for a lopsided win in next Tuesday’s election. But however impressive his triumph, it won’t do much for his personal standing over here.

One British newspaper last week called America’s chief of state a fast-talking “salesman who has swallowed his own snake oil.”

And that is about the nicest thing that is being said about him in these parts.

Of course, U.S. politicians need not be unduly concerned by what the rest of the world thinks of them, especially at election time. But it is hard to recall a president who has been held in such low esteem in Europe by officials and the public alike.

Richard Nixon was viewed with distaste by many Europeans. Ronald Reagan was deplored as a firebrand who might bring on a nuclear war. But that was before either of them entered the White House. Afterward, opinions changed.

Clinton is the first presidential incumbent in my memory to be so widely bashed in the European press.

So much so that the likelihood he will beat Bob Dole by a landslide is interpreted here not so much as proof of his skill as a campaigner, as it is a sign of America’s political decline.

A Conservative Party member of Parliament whom I interviewed last week about matters pertaining to his own country told me flatly that “no political system that re-elects someone like Clinton can be considered healthy.”

Then, belatedly remembering he was speaking to an American, he apologized profusely and asked his remark be forgotten. The British have changed a lot over the years, but they’re still exquisitely polite.

However, the Tory MP expressed a generally held view here. Discussing Clinton’s likely election, the London Sunday Times warned that “there is a danger to democracy when the public is too easily seduced by manipulative insincerity,” at which, it contended, Clinton excels.

The president’s shoddy - there is really no other word for it - image is all the more striking since even his fiercest critics acknowledge his administration has been highly successful in restoring the American economy.

Some of them attribute the economic record of the past four years mainly to luck or to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. But even the most cynical agree that good fortune is the mark of every top-flight politician.

So the low regard in which the president is held here has to be ascribed to a distinctly unflattering assessment of his character. The European, especially the British, media have been assiduous in reporting the allegations of corruption and other misdoings by him and his wife.

The London Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper almost always sympathetic to America and American political leaders, declared editorially that Clinton “does not deserve re-election” because of what it called his “distressing moral record.”

The Sunday Telegraph, the paper that labeled him a snake-oil salesman, charged that “Bill Clinton the man has gradually been devoured by Bill Clinton the act.”