So what now for the 42nd president of the United States? Will Bill Clinton become, in the political world, the equivalent of those TV actors who had a top-rated series once upon a time and are now reduced to doing cameos on quiz shows? He has been around for so long that it is difficult to imagine his ever going away.
He did not go away, certainly, after leaving office. He needed to stay “relevant” for the first couple of years because he was, in the words of his spouse, “dead broke,” and had bills to pay, his and hers. So there was the inevitable book. And there were the speeches. It didn’t take long for him to become, first, solvent, then rich, and then hog rich.
But with Bill Clinton, it was never about the money. His appetites were always more visceral. The hunt for dollars could never be as thrilling as the hunt for votes, power, and celebrity . . . among other things.
There was his wife’s political ambition and the intriguing possibility that he might make it back to the White House as her . . . what? First gentleman? First dude? Didn’t make any difference what you called it, he would be back. He wanted it badly. So badly that he lost control and said uncharacteristically tone-deaf things that hurt her when she was campaigning against Barack Obama in 2008. Among other indelicate statements, he called Obama’s line on his opposition to the Iraq war “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen,” and charged that the Obama campaign “played the race card on me.” Them’s fighting words.
But Clinton knows when to fold ’em. He was a good soldier and played his part in getting Obama reelected. He gave a boffo nominating speech for him at the 2012 Democratic convention. He was still in the game, and there was Hillary’s second try in 2016 to think about. Not to mention those high-dollar speeches and the running of the Clinton Foundation.
Then came the 2016 campaign, the last hurrah as it looks now, where he redeployed the phrase “change maker” from the race against Obama and helped beat back the Bernie Sanders challenge. He gave a convention speech that bordered on mawkish (but what the hell, it was a political convention), bringing up the time his wife’s water broke before the birth of their daughter. Then he turned on the rhetorical jets. “Hillary will make us stronger together,” he said. “You know it, because she spent a lifetime doing it. I hope you will do it. I hope you will elect her. Those of us who have more yesterdays than tomorrows tend to think more about our children and grandchildren.”
But he was wrong-footed now and then on the campaign trail. He sneered about the opposition of the “coal people” in West Virginia—the very voters he explicitly appealed to, back when he was campaigning for himself. And he sometimes wandered off message, as when he said of Obamacare, which his wife was promising to defend, “You’ve got this crazy system where all of a sudden 25 million more people have health care and then the people who are out there busting it, sometimes 60 hours a week, wind up with their premiums doubled and their coverage cut in half. It’s the craziest thing in the world.”
It became necessary to “walk that back,” as they say.
Of course once the election was over, and the season of recriminations had begun, there were stories about how he had attempted to get the campaign to pay more attention to the neglected and disaffected white voters who were the instrument of his wife’s defeat. It would have been a hard sell, especially after Bernie Sanders had so effectively painted Hillary Clinton as Wall Street’s best friend. And even if she had learned the words, she would never have mastered the music, which came naturally to him.
So she lost. And in the postmortems all this came out, along with some lingering speculation about the visit Bill had paid to Attorney General Loretta Lynch when their separate jets were parked at the same airport in late June. Because of that meeting, she recused herself from the task of deciding whether Mrs. Clinton should be indicted over her mishandling of classified information, once the FBI had concluded its investigation into her use of a private email server while she was secretary of state. She would defer, Lynch said, to the recommendation of the FBI director. That did not go well.
“James Comey cost her the election,” Bill Clinton said to the editor of a local newspaper, during a chance meeting at a local bookstore a few days after the voting. If so, he had himself to blame. But Bill Clinton has never done well with the shouldering of blame and is ungracious in defeat. He remained defiant throughout the Monica Lewinsky ordeal. In that bookstore conversation, the local editor asked Clinton if he thought Trump was “smart.”
“He doesn’t know much,” Clinton said. “One thing he does know is how to get angry white men to vote for him.”
It can’t be easy for any ex-president, the exile from the stage. The world of politics and celebrity has been to Bill Clinton as the oceans are to a great shark. If he stops swimming, the shark dies. But there will be another big fish swimming the same waters, and Barack Obama is now a far brighter and newer star than Clinton, with minimal ethical baggage and no lost elections on his résumé. He will be in much hotter demand than a man who has been out of the White House for 16 years.
And as the Obama operation shifts from campaigning to legacy-buffing, Clinton’s place in history will be, inevitably, diminished. Those long-ago Clinton years were a time of relative peace and undeniable prosperity. He had the wind at his back with the digital revolution coming on, the baby boomers hitting their peak earning years, and the end of the Cold War diminishing the need for large-scale defense spending.
But all that now seems forgettable. If his wife had won in her quest to become the first woman president, the legacy would have been secure. It would have been conclusively established that the country yearned for a return to those times when the NASDAQ hit a new high every day and the federal budget was in surplus. Now, those almost seem like outlier years.
Even the leaders we remember tend to get boiled down to a catchphrase or two. Think of FDR’s “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Or John F. Kennedy’s “Ask not what your country can do for you.” For Ronald Reagan, we all remember “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.”
And for Bill Clinton? What else but “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.”
At the inauguration of Donald Trump, one imagines his mind wandering on stage, thinking something he hasn’t thought in a long time: “Now what?”
Hard to imagine that he will cope well with irrelevance.
Geoffrey Norman, a writer in Vermont, is a frequent contributor to The Weekly Standard.
