Our Boy Bill

Darn. Drat. Doggone it. I’ll go further: Rats. In other words, I am severely disappointed.

My heart leaped up when I heard that Bill Clinton might get his own TV talk show. At last the man seemed to have found his calling! But it turned out to be a flash in the pan. No such show is in the offing. The genius of America’s greatest talker will have to find other outlets.

I was especially curious to see how our young former president would address the obvious challenge of the opening monologue. For several years now, it has become a fixed convention of talk shows that the host must begin with five or ten minutes of off-color Clinton gags. How would Clinton himself handle that one? “Hey — did you hear the one about ... me?”

And then there would be the guests. We would have seen the master in action, feeding his line to pretty Hollywood starlets. There would be other guests too: zookeepers would bring exotic animals, and Bill would react with mock horror when they relieved themselves on his desk or shoe; a serious note would be lent by interviews with officials of the International Monetary Fund; and Don Rickles would add a note of mirth with rapid-fire insults to the good-natured ex-president.

The theme song? Possibly “Let Me Entertain You,” with that bump-and-grind sound; or, more sentimentally, “Thanks for the Memories.”

Sidekick? Al Gore, of course; picking up where Tommy Newsome left off. Al would be Tommy without the excitement.

Come on, admit it. You miss Bill too. Even if you hate him. Or maybe especially if you hate him. His successor is a bore who has to stop and breathe hard before finishing a sentence, if he manages a complete sentence at all; he must be the only guy in the history of the Ivy League who had to major in remedial English. But Bill’s gift of gab was a wonder of nature. His syntax was as complex as an Olympic skating maneuver, and no matter how many times he twirled in midair he always landed on his feet.

It would be stretching a point to say Bill made us proud of our country, but at least you never feared that he was being outsmarted by foreign heads of state. Most presidents, alone in a room with some European prime minister, look badly outnumbered; not Bill. He would probably emerge from the meeting wearing the distinguished visitor’s watch.

Someone has quipped that Bill is like a joint creation of Mark Twain and William Faulkner. It could be added, without unfairness, that he was at the opposite pole from poor Hamlet, tormented by ethical dilemmas. As his youthful hero Jack Kennedy once observed, “Life is unfair,” and Bill, far from being demoralized by this grim truth, quickly learned to make it work in his favor. While carrying a Bible, for good measure.

Conservatives charge that Bill demeaned the presidency. Well, it was high time somebody did! Bill treated politics with all the respect it deserved, which is why he was so successful. He didn’t clutter it up with dignity or nobility; he showed us all the tricks Machiavelli forgot to mention. Even when he was exposed, he got away with everything, and he managed to amuse us while he was at it. Constitutionally obligated to see that the laws were faithfully executed, he only just stayed a step ahead of the law himself! It was a riot, not unprecedented in Southern politics, but new on the national scale.

What a cast of characters he brought into our national life! Aside from Al Gore, his straight man, and his stern wife Hillary, who comically underlined his mischief, he introduced us to Jocelyn Elders, Janet Reno, James Carville, Madeleine Albright, Donna Shalala, Ron Brown, Hugh Rodham, George Stephanopoulos, Dick Morris, Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky, Harold Ickes, Kathleen Willey, Marc and Denise Rich, the MacDougals, the Thomasons, and many, many more. Yet amid all these colorful personages, there was never any doubt who was the star of the show.

And that star quality deserves a show — a talk show. After all, one of Bill’s great achievements has been to enliven the talk shows as no other president could have done. A pity this great national resource is going to waste.

Joseph Sobran