Character At Issue Pro-Con Is Character A Real Concern Or An Excuse For Mud-Slinging?

It just never does come easy for Bill Clinton, does it? He lost money in a bad real estate deal in 1978, and they’re going to hang that around his neck ‘til kingdom come.

I have to add that Clinton has brought much of his trouble on himself, and the reason I have to add that is because a law was passed about four years ago; you may not know this, but the law forbids any journalist from ever saying anything either sympathetic to or admiring about Clinton without immediately adding, “But …” and then sticking in at least a little knife. We all obey this law religiously because anyone who breaks it will have his press pass removed or, worse, lose his cynicism stripes and stand convicted of being a sucker for spin.

It’s especially important that no journalist ever give Clinton credit for an ounce of sincerity because, you see, we know him to be a Politician to the Bone. So is everybody else we cover, but we have to be especially cynical about the ones who are good at it.

It’s true that Clinton has spent pretty much his whole life working to become president. Isn’t that an awful thing? We in the media never forget it. He had to work hard at it, too: alcoholic stepfather, mom a piece of work, all the education from scholarships. The only “real” job he ever had was teaching constitutional law; aside from that, it’s been politics all the way, and we all know how despicable that makes him, don’t we? I mean, all the guy ever wanted to do was public service, so he stays in his home state at $50 K a year instead of taking his Yale law degree to some big-money state and making a zillion dollars doing mergers and acquisitions. That sure means we should all look at him with contempt, right?

The trouble with being president is that the only thing you can do once you get there is the best you can. And I for one think they all do. Even Lyndon B. Johnson, who led us so deep into the Big Muddy that we’re not out yet; even Richard M. Nixon, that poor paranoid expletive-deleted - I think they did the best they could.

And I’d say that Clinton’s best is not bad at all. He had a good run his first two years - cut the deficit in half before the Republicans took over, saying a balanced budget was the be-all and end-all of government. Clinton blew health-care reform, but the money out to beat him on that was like nothing ever seen before in American politics. And for the last year and a half, he’s staved off the worst of Newt Gingrich’s nutty “revolution,” which is just a take-from-the-poor-and-give-to-the-rich scheme.

What amazes me is the level of vituperative hatred aimed at Bill and Hillary Clinton. A lot of people hated Johnson because of Vietnam and civil rights; a lot of people hated Nixon, I think, because he was so full of hate himself. But what this reminds me of is John F. Kennedy.

Most people have forgotten it, but there was a substantial amount of intense, almost insane hatred of Kennedy. I always thought it was a class thing; in addition to being born on third, Kennedy embodied that aristocratic ideal of making excellence look easy. You’re supposed to get a First at Oxford and play championship cricket all without appearing to work for it. With guys like Nixon, the sweat always shows.

But it doesn’t seem to me that Clinton ever plays the aristocrat; he was proud of his mom, whom many of our snobbier citizens took for something close to trailer trash.

Slippery is a word often applied to Clinton, and I wonder if it’s because he’s bicultural in the odd way that educated Southerners often are. If you go to Georgetown, Oxford and Yale, you pretty much learn to walk the walk and talk the talk common in those places. But that doesn’t mean you wouldn’t really prefer to be eating barbecue in some joint back in the Piney Woods where no one cares which fork you use - or if you use one at all. It’s not a matter of being two-faced; it’s just being comfortable in two different worlds.

Clinton is an Arkansan, which an amazing number of sophisticated Washington reporters still think means being barefoot with a piece of straw in your mouth. Believe it or not, when George Bush was elected, there was a spate of alarmed articles about how “The Texans Are Coming,” as though a bunch of barbarians were about to be unleashed to spit and cuss in the genteel precincts of D.C.

I think that Clinton’s most salient traits as a politician are that he’s a listener, he’s a learner and he’s a deal-maker. When I hear talk about how “dirty” he is or about how he is, as one irate caller said, “the most corrupt man ever to occupy the White House,” I’m at a loss to explain where the hate comes from.

MEMO: For opposing view, see Cal Thomas’ column under same headline.