THE SOLIPSIST-IN-CHIEF
KRAUTHAMMER, CHARLES
THE SOLIPSIST-IN-CHIEF By Charles Krauthammer It was a remark of dazzling, if unintended, self-revelation. But its perversity being subtle, it went entirely unnoticed. It does not deserve such...
...Lines between self and other, between Clinton and country, had always been blurred...
...The country was living off the accumulated capital of a half-century of astonishing diplomatic and economic success...
...All presidents are ambitious or they never would be president...
...Personal survival is everything, and he’ll take the country through anything— through seven months of surreal dissimulation, for example—to ensure it...
...This American president, however, covets theirs...
...The mission of Bill Clinton’s life has always been to escape irrelevance...
...So I feel good about that...
...He feels good because for him national interest pales beside personal interest...
...But now Clinton feels good about his chat about this colossal foreign-policy failure...
...Just days before, Saddam Hussein had announced the termination of that very U.N...
...For Bill Clinton, a phone call from Brazil is an emblem of his prestige, his standing “in relation to the rest of the world...
...It explains his lifelong dream of the White House: Being the most bountiful trough on the planet, it is the Holy Grail for the creature that is forever feeding...
...Americans may find it hard to look him in the eye, but foreign leaders are still happy to talk to him on the phone...
...He is a head of state who has been singularly destructive of American policy toward Iraq...
...Nixon, by contrast, did not...
...BUT OUR GOOD PRESIDENTS, EVEN OUR MEDIOCRE PRESIDENTS, DID NOT CONDUCT THEIR PRESIDENCIES SOLELY TO VALIDATE THEIR OWN WORTH...
...The Chirac phone call was heartening to Clinton because it served as a prop for his collapsing presidency...
...He has refused to back any American action to force Iraqi compliance, has sought to embarrass the United States when it threatened to do so, and has pushed openly for an end to restraints on Saddam...
...Indeed, they recall his immortal protest at an April 1995 press conference, when he was still reeling from his crushing defeat in the 1994 congressional elections: “I am not irrelevant...
...And what does it see...
...Another, he runs about giving speeches, raising money, and going through the motions of governing...
...Ronald Reagan was ambitious to enact an agenda and spread an ideology...
...White House officials,” explained ABC’s Chris Bury, “insist the president finds it therapeutic to focus on his job...
...Having called the American bluff, he shattered the system of constraints placed on him after the Gulf War to keep him from developing the most terrible weapons on earth...
...Indeed, the one president of our time who comes the closest in psychological hunger to Clinton is Nixon...
...Greece and Turkey are nearing a showdown over Cyprus...
...Nixon’s narcissism was nervous and transparent...
...It makes his life a maw for the instant and shallow gratification delivered by people he barely knows...
...He has been Charles Krauthammer is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD ALL PRESIDENTS ARE AMBITIOUS...
...Yet more proof that he is not what he appears: a political corpse...
...Now they have disappeared entirely...
...He cited the following evidence: “I had a good talk with President Chirac of France, who called me a couple of days ago to talk about some of our common concerns and the U.N...
...We should add: solipsism...
...But our good presidents, even our mediocre presidents, did not become president or conduct their presidencies solely to validate their own worth...
...On yet another, he feels good about a phone call from France about a policy failure that endangers the United States...
...It feels good to talk with a head of state...
...As Clinton has seen himself exposed, as he’s watched his spiral descent into mortified irrelevance, his solipsism has acquired a desperation...
...And in that desperation lies national danger...
...This is l’?tat c’est moi, writ small...
...It is now the mission of his dying presidency...
...They give Clinton the feeling of relevance...
...The Balkans are seething...
...Ambition is universal in politicians...
...Some day, some way, I guarantee you, he’ll use the arsenal...
...So I feel very good about where I am in relation to the rest of the world...
...America is caught in his psychodrama...
...The world’s “indispensable nation” can no longer be led by a man incapable of seeing, or feeling, anything beyond himself...
...A man who feels good to be relevant...
...inspection system...
...With the enemies of the United States still in stunned retreat from their defeats in the Cold War and the Gulf War, and with the economy humming, there was no obvious harm in having an entirely personalized presidency...
...So he feels good...
...A call from the president of a serious country about a dramatic world event shows, does it not, that Clinton still counts among world leaders, that his hollow presidency still has some life...
...North Korea has just attempted the launching of an orbiting satellite, which means that it is working on three-stage rockets, and three-stage rockets can reach anywhere on earth, including the United States...
...Now, under normal circumstances with less deranged presidents, such giants of the world stage as Mexico, Brazil, and Canada covet the attention of the American president...
...The luxury of having a narcissist-in-chief can be tolerated when there really is no need for anyone at the helm...
...Not this president...
...to seek in recognition, “political viability,” honor and applause, validation of his worth, his very existence...
...The articles of impeachment drawn up against William Jefferson Clinton will list lying under oath and obstruction of justice...
...The world looks to America...
...It explains his unnatural love for the rope line, his thirst for approval and applause, his indiscriminate desire for the adulation of audience and acolyte...
...And it does not stop with France...
...to transcend the provincial anonymity of his Arkansas boyhood...
...Feel good...
...inspection system in Iraq and other things...
...But now the charm is gone...
...But insatiable need is not...
...All that’s left is the hunger, and we stand aghast at the sheer volume of his personal need...
...Clinton’s need for such validation is endless and constant...
...Jimmy Carter’s agenda was not political but moral: His ambition, both internationally with human rights and domestically with personal probity, was to bring a new uprightness to American political life...
...You might expect the president of the United States to feel bad about that...
...But Jacques Chirac is not just any head of state...
...George Bush lacked those polestars, but he saw himself as an aristocratic steward whose role it was to guide America through great crises, such as the breakup of the Soviet empire and the invasion of Kuwait...
...One day, he observes that perhaps his troubles will help heal the nation...
...Clinton’s is masked by the charm and cool of a sociopath...
...It does not deserve such obscurity...
...And in the end, that insecurity, that need to have and use the office to prove himself and to show them—the elites, the snobs, the Kennedys—was his undoing...
...Why, just “yesterday, as it happens,” said Clinton, “I got calls from the presidents of Mexico, Brazil, and the prime minister of Canada, all thanking me for what I said on Monday [re: the world economy] and saying they wanted to be a part of it...
...And, oh yes, the world economy is teetering...
...Eisenhower and Truman, of course, were men who knew who they were long before they became president...
...These calls are the diplomatic equivalent of phone sex: It’s not the message that counts but the feeling conveyed...
...staunchly supportive of Saddam in the Security Council...
...For Nixon, too, the presidency was a way of validating his worth...
...The Middle East will erupt next May when a Palestinian state is unilaterally declared...
...Clinton stands naked...
...Until now, having a therapeutic presidency hardly mattered...
...Under normal circumstances, the president of Brazil is grateful for a mere mention...
...To prove himself relevant has been the mission of his life...
...During his press conference with Vaclav Havel on September 16, Bill Clinton was trying to demonstrate his engagement in world affairs...
...Very small...
...Saddam has broken out...
...He explained why it was firm American policy to force Saddam, if necessary, to comply with the inspection regime: “What if he fails to comply, and we fail to act...
...In February, Clinton had himself warned in a speech to the nation of the perils of such an Iraqi breakout: “Iraq still has stockpiles of chemical and biological munitions, a small force of Scud-type missiles, and the capacity to restart quickly its production program and build many, many more weapons...
...Phone call small...
...But now there is...
...Indeed, for him national interest does not extend beyond personal interest...
...he’ll kill for a state visit...
...In seeking to thwart the United States in the Gulf, Saddam has had no better friend than Chirac...
Vol. 4 • September 1998 • No. 3
