Just when we thought it was safe to move on, ex-President Clinton and ex-House Speaker Gingrich are with us again, pulling us back to their personal dramas, and their mid-’90s cultural wars. Emmett Tyrrell cruelly links them to Dominque Strauss-Kahn, Socialist-Rikers Island, as sorry examples of boomer entitlement:
“All are about the same age. All have similar, shall we say, recreations. … They come from what is called the 1960s generation. Now they are gone.”
Comparing the Americans to the Felon from France may be overdoing it, but Bill and Newt were always like siblings, or twins. Both had single, teenage mothers; fathers who died before they were born, or who vanished soon after; difficult stepfathers; embarrassing siblings; and great ambitions for power, glory and recognition as intellects in settings in which these ambitions were not often found.
It was not hard for George Bush I and II, Al Gore, and the Kennedy brothers to see themselves being president; this was the level on which the adults in their orbits were functioning.
The adults around Clinton and Gingrich were not millionaires, ambassadors to England or China, or holders of high public office. The fact that both Newt and Bill imagined this world, and pushed steadily toward it, is entirely worthy.
That they wanted the respect of the world as thinkers and doers is even more praiseworthy still. Their problem was that there are four components — brains, vision, communications skills and a mysterious fourth, which combines judgment, wisdom and balance — that go to make up political greatness, and of these each men had just two.
Both had brains; Newt had vision; Bill had communications skills; while to say that both were lacking in judgment, balance and wisdom understates things by a power of 12.
They were both so gifted with the things with which they were gifted that they reached great power at fairly young ages, but so flawed in the areas in which they were lacking that each would screw up things in fairly short order, being deposed by colleague or being impeached.
Both had a genius for hypocrisy closely connected to self-immolation: Newt flailing Bill for having had an affair with a female subordinate (while he himself had been doing the same thing in private); Bill running on fumes from Anita Hill’s charges of harassment against Clarence Thomas, when he had a Kathleen Willey to come in his future, and a Paula Jones not too far in his past.
Newt gave Republicans control of the House after 40 long years in the wilderness, and was an easy mark for Clinton to demonize as he triangulated his way to his own re-election.
Bill was the first Democrat to win two terms in the White House since Franklin D. Roosevelt, and gave George W. Bush an opening to run against his legacy and successor, thereby costing Gore an election that had been his to lose. They reformed welfare and balanced the budget, and were time bombs poised to go off in the face of their parties. Last week, they did it again.
Just as their parties squared off about Medicare, they tossed off two sound bites that were biting, concise and potentially lethal — to their successors and partisans.
“Bill Clinton gives the Republicans the perfect attack ad … just as Newt Gingrich gave Democrats their perfect one a week earlier,” Jim Geraghty tells us.
“The two men are more psychologically similar … than either would like to admit.”
The Gold Dust Twins await their first dual biography. And this story is not over yet.
Examiner Columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to TheWeekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
