Speech Showed the Best Side of Clinton

Let’s face it, if Bill Clinton weren’t under vicious attack, we wouldn’t feel the need to defend him. I mean the guy just isn’t that controversial, or even interesting. What we have here is a cross between Jack Kennedy and Dwight Eisenhower, a good-looking stud who is ever smilingly just right of center.

Clinton’s weapon is that he is a great lover of the minutiae of government. This is a policy wonk who gets more excited by the details of legislation than, if we can believe the Starr report, by sex. Policy papers he does not push away before reaching the end.

Still, you have to love him, if only because he’s not nuts. These days, sensible is sexy. Clinton is apple pie, and his opponents come on like curdled milk in the coffee. It’s only in the context of our crazy right-wing-dominated politics that it seems downright heroic for an American president to rise in defense of public education and Social Security.

What were the Republicans thinking during the State of the Union address when they sat there in stony silence, refusing to applaud Clinton’s attacks on tobacco companies and gun manufacturers? Are they really in favor of cancer and bullet wounds? Clinton has co-opted their “family values” label and applied it to health and safety. The right to life these days has to do with access to long-term medical care, and for that, Clinton has yet another slice of his seemingly endless budget surplus. The surplus will save us from old age, global warming and Russian nuclear weapons. It probably even cures acne and constipation.

He is for everything--the family farm, mothers at home, mothers at work and Dominicans who play baseball. He wants to include China but exclude Cuba, which is understandable since the pro-Chiang Kai-shek vote probably would not tip the balance in a single state these days.

The damnable thing is that I smiled throughout his performance, cheering him on. What am I supposed to do, root for Strom Thurmond, Henry Hyde and Trent Lott? Those guys make Richard Nixon seem like a moderate statesman. They belong in a wax museum. Clinton is alive and progressive, while they are the walking dead.

Yes, he lies. Not just about Monica Lewinsky, which as far as I can tell was a pathetic example of minimizing the salacious implications of safe sex. He lies, stupefyingly so, about the success of welfare reform, without any supporting evidence. Wish it were true that when mothers of the very young are forced off welfare, their lives improve, but the evidence, even in these the best of times, does not prove it so. Days before Clinton spoke, the state of Wisconsin, with one of the lowest unemployment rates in the nation, nonetheless conceded that people who were forced off welfare were 50% less likely to be able to adequately feed their families. And without child care, which Clinton concedes is sorely lacking, what happens to the 6-week-old infants whose mothers are forced to work for the minimum wage at the local burger joint?

Despite such distortions, most of the time, Clinton speaks the truth. Raising the minimum wage is good for the economy and the working poor. Getting the Senate to finally ratify a ban on nuclear testing is an essential step for world peace. He has taken steps to ensure that the Y2K problem will be fixed. The American economy is the best in the world, and Clinton deserves the popularity this has brought him.

Why don’t the other guys get it? The Republicans have lost the rhythm of rule, forgetting that Americans want to be assured that adults are minding the store. When it comes to public policy, as opposed to his personal life, Clinton is the grown-up among a bunch of kids.

This policy stuff can be complicated and boring; it’s impressive how Clinton can focus like no other. Just when we are inclined to nod off, he points that finger into the midst of an intractable controversy and pulls out a delectable plum of a compromise. Teachers will be held accountable, but they will also be paid more. Not a bad deal.

It’s not a matter of Teflon but rather of savvy. No one, in either camp, has his ability to summarize the situation, draw up a battle plan and see it through. Clinton is so efficient, articulate and competent, his attention to detail so excruciating, his execution so robotically close to perfect that he would be scary but for the occasional escapades that clearly mark him as human.