The Natural The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton by Joe Klein Doubleday, 230 pp., $22.95 PERHAPS the only thing worse than a really bad love affair is a love affair that isn’t quite bad enough–that strings one along with hopes, promises much while delivering little, and ends in confusion and heartache. That is the romance between Bill Clinton and the New Democrats, which is guttering out now in final exhaustion, having gone through numerous cycles of rapture, betrayal, rapprochement, and rage. In “The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton,” Joe Klein, a New Democrat and veteran student of Clinton (under his own name and as “Anonymous,” the author of the novel “Primary Colors”), looks back in something like anger, mixed with nostalgia and longing. Was this really love? Could it have been different? The affair began in the late 1980s, when moderate Democrats, tired of losing, decided to update the liberal credo with centrist reform. They had a political organization, the Democratic Leadership Council. They had their own think tank, the Progressive Policy Institute. All they needed was a candidate–and into their ken swam the governor of Arkansas: canny, young, charming, and eloquent. Klein melted: “Awe was inspired by Clinton’s intelligence, . . . his encyclopedic knowledge of policy questions–his perseverance, and his ability to charm.” He seemed too good to be true, and so he was. Even in those early days, Klein could sense the low-rent proclivities that warn of large problems. Clinton had huge “high-cholesterol” hungers for everything carnal: “Jogging for miles with his pale thighs jiggling, he still tended to a raw pink fleshiness. He was famously addicted to junk food.” And to human contact. In “The Natural,” Klein describes one night in New Hampshire when Clinton goes from table to table in each Manchester eatery, pressing the flesh and making eye contact, ending up with Klein in a bowling alley long after midnight, where, in his hunger for physical nearness, he leans on the reporter for warmth. But it was not the flesh that endeared Clinton to his new suitors; it was his mind. “Oh, could he talk policy!” Klein explains. And on and on he would go, into every detail of every new program: “The school choice program in East Harlem . . . competitive bidding for sanitation projects in Phoenix . . . the terrific for-profit welfare-to-work program in New York.” This was wonk heaven, and when, at a 1989 meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton uttered the magic three words–“opportunity, responsibility, community”–Joe Klein and the DLC swooned. But the ink was not dry on the marriage license before Clinton began straying. He played around with the far left, with the unions, with the diversity mongers–with his own wife, for that matter, whom Klein sees as the serpent in paradise. (The Hillary Clinton figure in Klein’s novel is a sympathetic character; the Hillary Clinton in his non-fiction is not.) Not only did Bill stray, but he squandered the family’s political capital on social issues and state-sponsored health care. Bill was warned, and warned again, but he refused to listen. And at long last, in the 1994 midterm elections, the roof fell in, with a Republican victory in the House and the Senate. This catastrophe brought about reconciliation: Clinton promised to reform, and at the 1996 Democratic convention he gave his New Democrat supporters the present they had always wanted: welfare reform. But sin soon reasserted itself. An intern came bearing a pizza, and Clinton was soon snacking on both. He survived the scandal, but only by disgracing the whole New Democrat family and putting the party in hock to the paleoliberals, from whom he had been supposed to rescue the party. To pay his debt, he dropped the Democratic Leadership Council agenda, including a well-thought-out plan to save Medicare, and junked his last chance for historic achievement. He exited on a great bender of pardons that appalled even his most die-hard supporters–who are left wondering quite what to say about it all. Trying to explain these mad passions in “The Natural,” Klein trots out some time-honored lines. Bill Clinton was misunderstood. The world was against him. He was an all-right provider. Some men, like Newt Gingrich, were worse. But in the process, Klein makes him seem too splendid, too brilliant, too popular. The truth is, Clinton was not a great politician. Great politicians do not lose both houses of Congress. Nor do they have to act primarily on the other party’s agenda. Nor do they wind up impeached. At the same time, Klein is too hard on the Republican Congress, which he describes as “excessively hateful,” and on Newt Gingrich, whose reign he describes as “wholly disastrous.” The Republican Congress was sometimes extreme, frequently tone deaf, now and then clueless, and at times its own worst enemy. But it also swept away years of sclerosis and smugness, and it took up a great many interesting theories, some of which sprang from the same reform impulse that had moved the New Democrats. Nor did Bill Clinton defeat it so much as co-opt it, sand down its rough edges, and battle it to a draw. He won reelection in 1996 by doing a U-turn to run on his opponents’ issues. In the end, it is the Republican sweep of the 1994 midterm elections that stands as the critical moment of the decade. It isn’t even clear that impeachment is a battle which Bill Clinton “won.” The Republicans did not “suffer grievously” in the 1998 midterm elections. They lost five seats but held their majority. And by 2000, the tide had turned against Clinton to the point that he was a drag on the ticket. Mr. Charm had so ticked off Mr. and Mrs. Middle America that polls showed that voters were, by 40 to 17 percent, less likely to vote for Al Gore if Bill Clinton stumped with him. Oddly enough, Klein seems aware of most of Clinton’s failings. The picture he draws is of a willful, whining, childish, petulant man–self-absorbed nearly to the point of psychosis, given to putting his personal gain ahead of the national interest, and lacking in “decency or graciousness” in human relations and personal life. So it is all the more peculiar that Klein lets Clinton get away with claiming that Republicans hated him because they never expected to see another Democrat become president or that he was fighting to save the United States Constitution when he repeatedly lied under oath. (Clinton is said to have believed it was all right to lie to the Paula Jones lawyers, as they had no right to ask him such questions. But the time to have thought this was before he signed the bill that made such questions legal. Clinton, his wife, and their feminist backers never objected to invasions of privacy that hurt interests other than their own.) Oddly enough, “The Natural” never uses words like “perjury,” “contempt of court,” “obstruction of justice,” and “serial lying” to explain why Clinton was disliked–which leaves Klein exhausting himself in the effort to shift all the onus for Clinton’s troubles away from Clinton himself. One explanation Klein offers is that Clinton–like Eisenhower, Cleveland, and Nixon–was a “third-way” president, one who adopted the themes of the opposite party and was therefore distrusted and labeled a “degenerate.” (Eisenhower was unpopular?) Another explanation is still more peculiar: Clinton was a “scapegoat,” a ritual sacrifice, “a compendium of all that his accusers found most embarrassing, troubling, and loathsome about themselves.” In his last defense of his old friend Bill Clinton, Klein argues that the president was a flawed but nonetheless great figure: “One imagines that other leaders…like Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy–were as selfish and needy and self-destructively strange as Bill Clinton proved himself.” (Actually, one doesn’t imagine this: If they had been self-destructive, we would have seen them destroying themselves.) Klein says of “Primary Colors,” his novel about Clinton, “I saw it as a defense of larger than life politicians–who inevitably have mythic weaknesses entangled in their obvious strengths.” But the strange thing about Clinton in retrospect is how small he seems: small in scope and accomplishments, small in visions and sins. Klein stresses Clinton’s role in helping the working poor prosper, largely through budget negotiations with Congress. “It was in these negotiations–quietly, in dribs and drabs, with remarkable persistence that Clinton would get many of his most important programs enacted . . . the quiet seriousness of the effort was the precise opposite of the president’s feckless image . . . persistence of the most high-minded sort.” Perhaps. But on the truly big things, he was small-minded, unwilling to put them above his own interest or unable to see what they meant. As Klein admits, he not only did not try to save Medicare and Social Security, but he sabotaged efforts to do so, and by his demagoguery made such efforts more difficult in the future. His misreading of the terrorist menace grows daily more evident. His old friend Tony Blair has accused him of “dithering,” adding that “delays in taking action . . . despite the clear warnings of the United States Embassy bombings . . . allowed al Qaeda to prosper and plot the September 11 attacks.” Clinton did not, as Klein thinks, “see the world clearly,” which is the one thing big presidents do. Joe Klein was once a first-rate political analyst. But Klein today resembles nothing so much as the woman in an abusive love affair–in which repeated cycles of mistreatment and promise of reform have eroded the judgment and will. Therapists deal with this sort of thing often. As president, Clinton mortified his supporters, dropped the ball on key issues, put a Republican into the White House by giving George W. Bush his opening to make a strong case for change in a time of prosperity, and left the New Democrats no stronger than they were when he came in. Yet Klein cannot stop himself from making excuses, trying to turn Bill Clinton into a figure of consequence, a great wounded lion, and a victim of circumstance. Among the circumstances Klein thinks hurt the country and Clinton is the fact that he faced no real crises (except the ones he created) that might have revealed the virtues Klein still thinks are lurking inside him. On the strength of the record, it seems unlikely. Most people would say he’s been tested enough. A writer in Alexandria, Virginia, Noemie Emery is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
