Primary boomer From Eugene McCarthy to Bill Clinton
Baumann, Paul
PAUL BAUNANN
PRIMARY BOOMER
Bill Clinton as scapegoat
The tall, gray-haired man walking purposefully down the hall at Commonweal's old Dutch Street offices looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn't...
...The strength of Clinton's commitment to the poor remained, and can be seen in the way he went on to fight successfully to amend aspects of the welfare reform act, increase funding for Head Start, and vastly expand earned income tax credits for the working poor...
...Skillin, as I recall, was out of the office, so McCarthy, with some time to kill and a few unsolicited manuscripts to foist on us, sat and talked for about an hour...
...In 1968 novelist Norman Mailer described a certain aspect of "incorruptibility" in that face as being as hard "as the cold stone floor of a monastery in the North Woods at five in the morning...
...As a reporter for the New Yorker, Klein went on to cover Clinton in the White House, and his knowledge of the political and policy struggles of those eight years is comprehensive and illuminating...
...Interesting, if true...
...On the "character" issue, Klein is no apologist for Clinton's deplorable behavior or for his lying...
...We listened...
...McCarthy, who did terrific impressions of Lyndon Johnson and Edmund Muskie as well, left us with the sense that Clinton was a phenomenon worth watching...
...There is nothing resembling the stone-cold floor of a monastery in Bill Clinton's face...
...It was almost impossible to believe a word he said after that...
...Bill Clinton, who possesses a very different sort of face, had just been elected president, and McCarthy expressed guarded admiration for Clinton's vaunted political skills and considerable skepticism regarding everything else about him...
...According to Klein "the 1997 budget deal provided $70 billion, over five years, to families with incomes of less than $30,000...
...At the time, he was vehemently opposed to limits on political contributions and a severe critic of the much heralded reforms that overturned the old congressional seniority system...
...Not graced with a challenge to which he could rally the nation, Clinton ended up playing the role of the classic scapegoat...
...Klein argues persuasively that Clinton made the right decision, both politically and morally, about welfare, a system that was doing more harm than good...
...Clinton's doggedness in fighting for such concessions from the Republicans demonstrated his real convictions...
...But I'd still watch out for that handshake.hat handshake...
...This portrait, from its honest bewilderment over Bill and Hillary's marriage to the shrewd analysis of how Clinton's "libidinous" personality fed off the crowds he was so eager to please, has the feel of reality...
...PAUL BAUNANN PRIMARY BOOMER Bill Clinton as scapegoat The tall, gray-haired man walking purposefully down the hall at Commonweal's old Dutch Street offices looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn't until he was within a few feet of me that I recognized the famous face...
...In reaching for the archetypal image of the scapegoat, Klein turns to the controversial theologian Rene Gi-rard: "He has the capacity to relieve the burden of guilt from a society," Girard speculates about the bizarre spectacle of Clinton's impeachment and humiliation...
...This seems a basic human impulse...
...It is the way tension is relieved and change takes place...
...McCarthy's radical opposition to the war in Vietnam, it is important to remember, was based on conservative constitutional and moral principles...
...In fact, he mischievously demonstrated Clinton's patented handshake, in which the notoriously touchy-feely politician looked you in the eye, grasped your hand with both of his, and then slid one hand up your arm above the elbow until he had you locked in his embrace...
...McCarthy is a great storyteller, and an idiosyncratic thinker, a curious mix of New Deal pol, Catholic natural law philosopher, and libertarian...
...There is a need to consume scapegoats...
...On that score, where most commentators write Clinton off as a politician who tailored every decision to the latest poll, Klein gives him high marks for "conducting a serious, substantive presidency...
...Clinton's decision to sign the bill ending welfare as a federal entitlement program, which so bitterly alienated his liberal supporters, is a good example of what Klein calls the New Democrats' "Third Way...
...He was punished disproportionately for his lurid little crimes because he had come to embody the culture-shaking offenses of his boomer peers, including the secret vices of his antagonists...
...But Klein deserves credit for trying to make sense of Clinton as a whole, as a man whose strengths and real achievements were inseparable from his weaknesses and failures...
...Our unexpected guest was Eugene McCarthy, the poet, former senator, courageous antiwar presidential candidate, political gadfly, and longtime Commonweal contributor...
...Ideologically, Klein shares Clinton's "New Democrat" agenda...
...Like his entire generation, Clinton remained pampered, untested, and indulged...
...Personally, I gave up on Clinton after he lied so blatantly about the reasons for late-term abortions when he vetoed the partial-birth abortion ban...
...McCarthy's hilarious imitation of Clinton on the make came to mind when I read Joe Klein's The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton (Doubleday, $22.95,230 pp...
...Klein is perhaps best known as "Anonymous," the author of Primary Colors, his thinly disguised 1996 novel about Clinton's run for the presidency...
...McCarthy was in the city pursuing some arcane cause, and he had dropped by to say hello to an old friend, Edward Skillin, Commonweal's publisher...
...In short, New Democrats, recognizing the disparity between the views of the party's core constituencies and the nation as a whole, hoped to find ways to pursue "liberal ends through conservative means...
...Clinton never became a great president, Klein argues, because he never confronted a challenge commensurate with his talent...
Vol. 129 • May 2002 • No. 9
