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Ferris Bueller in Exile


November 29, 2001

One of the remarkable side-effects of September 11 is the sudden eclipse of Bill Clinton. He has gone the way of the Spice Girls. Even the Clinton-haters of yesteryear have lost interest in him.

Who ever dreamed that this celebrity president would so soon become a distant memory? Less than a year ago he left the White House in a final blaze of infamy — remember Marc Rich, and all that? — and it seemed he would continue to upstage his successor indefinitely. Even his decision to establish an office in Harlem was front-page news. His wife’s election to the U.S. Senate promised to keep him in the limelight. And even after two terms as president, he was still a relatively young elder statesman. For an ex-president, he appeared to have quite a future.

Yet Clinton left nothing anyone, of any political persuasion, would call a major achievement. His “legacy” was never defined. The most newsworthy event of his presidency was his impeachment over an unprecedented sexual scandal. His salient personal trait was flagrant dishonesty.

The 9/11 terrorist attack, moreover, has put Clinton’s presidency in a whole new light, and he is being judged by unexpected new standards. Hawks blame him for negligence in confronting foreign enemies; doves blame him for making enemies with his sporadic bombings in the Middle East. Either way, he looks worse in retrospect.

Rush Limbaugh, who feasts on Clinton’s sins, talks as if the terrorist attacks themselves were Clinton’s legacy. That’s stretching a point, but the gravity of those attacks does make Clinton seem especially frivolous. We feel he somehow should have seen them coming. He did nothing to prepare us for the more serious world we now find ourselves in. He gave us eight years of Ferris Bueller, and now we face Godzilla.

Looking back, it’s clear that Clinton missed all the omens: the bombings of the World Trade Center, American embassies, a military barracks, the USS Cole. Of course most of us also dismissed these as minor events rather [Breaker quote: The eclipse of Bill Clinton than portents, but we expect a president, with all the intelligence at his disposal, to have some special insight. The real world wasn’t quite real to Clinton; it was just a stage on which he could enact his theatrical gestures and bow to the applause.

For all his shortcomings, George W. Bush imparts the feeling that the United States is under adult supervision again. He is the same age as Clinton, and he’s another Baby Boomer who avoided Vietnam, but he seems to take his responsibilities seriously. He lacks Clinton’s star quality as well as his political adroitness; but by the same token he has none of Clinton’s clever egotism.

Maybe we shouldn’t assess presidents in such terms, but the fact is that we do. We can hardly help it. During Clinton’s first year in office, Time magazine ran a memorable cover story on him as “The Incredible Shrinking President.” Today he is the Incredibly Shrunken Ex-President. History has already trivialized him.

And he knows it. He has reportedly said he wishes fate had presented him with such a challenge as Bush is confronting. He must be the only American who wishes it.

Clinton hoped to be remembered as a Great President. So do they all, but it’s typical of him to see the 9/11 attacks as an opportunity for personal glory — just another theatrical moment, in which someone else has unfortunately been cast in the leading role, depriving Clinton of the chance to play Churchill or Roosevelt. He naturally assumes he would have risen to the occasion.

The truth is that Clinton lacked the one quality for which Churchill and Roosevelt are remembered, rightly or wrongly, as great statesmen: the ability to speak memorably. He was always glib, but never eloquent. He could justify himself plausibly; he could never stir the blood. Contrary to Senator Bob Kerrey, Clinton was not “a very good liar.” Very good liars are never known to their contemporaries as liars. Clinton was a liar who pressed his luck far too often. The truly great liars are those whose lies survive them, to be memorized by schoolchildren.

There isn’t much justice in this sorry world, but it’s some consolation that Clinton’s reputation is doomed to keep dwindling. The rest of his life will be a sort of exile.

Joseph Sobran

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