In a recent essay in the New York Times Book Review Alan Ehrenhalt, executive editor of Governing magazine and author of ”The United States of Ambition’,’ asked Why do people hate Bill Clinton?
Millions of Americans despise Bill Clinton. They have done so since he became a presence in national politics in the early 1990’s, and they continue to do so today, more than four years after his retirement from public office.
The passion of the Clinton haters is a phenomenon without equal in recent American politics. It is not based on any specific policies that Clinton promoted or implemented during his years in office. It is almost entirely personal. In its persistence and intensity, it goes far beyond anything that comparable numbers of people have felt about Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan or either of the presidents Bush. It surpasses even the liberals’ longstanding detestation of Richard Nixon. The only political obsession comparable to it in the past century is the hatred that a significant minority of Americans felt for Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
In this respect the phenomenon is all the more puzzling. Roosevelt made enormous and sometimes reckless changes in the American government and economy, and when his critics loathed him for it, he loathed them back. ”They are unanimous in their hate for me” he said of them in his 1936 re-election campaign, ”and I welcome their hatred.” Clinton, on the other hand, was a centrist who undertook no dramatic transformations of society or government and, what was more, showed himself to be an instinctive conciliator who believed in compromise almost to a fault.
Mr. Erhrenhalt needs to get a clue.
Anyone who thinks that Bill Clinton is hated more by the right than George Bush 43 is hated by the left has either been asleep since 2001 or is such a Bush hater himself that he’s lost all perspective in gauging the depth of feeling generated by the left against the President.
I don’t recall too many right wingers comparing Clinton to Hitler, or openly calling for his assassination, or accusing him falsely of being behind a plot to rig voting machines to steal an election, or any of a number of stupid, ignorant, hateful themes that have vomited forth from leftists for the last five years.
And Mr. Ehrenhalt calling Mr. Clinton a “centrist” is like me calling a my pet cat Snowball a rhinoceros - it sounds good but it simply isn’t so.
Be that as it may, Richard Jensen who runs Conservative net, a forum for conservative and libertarian scholars, asked a few of his contributors to respond to Mr. Ehrenhalt’s ludicrous description of Clinton as well as answering his question.
David Horowitz (Editor of Frontpage Magazine)
This is an interesting review, but I strongly demur from the view that Clinton hatred exceeds Bush hatred by any measure. Conservatives are more disgusted by Clinton; but they are not so blinded by their negative feelings that they don’t appreciate Clinton’s achievements, the centrism of his policy (when he wasn’t surrendering his better judgment to interest groups), his brilliance as a politician. By contrast so-called liberals and leftists have a hatred of Bush that is so intense it reduces their view of him to absurdities — he’s a moron, a liar and evil. None of these are remotely related to any truth of the man or his presidency and the passion of belief in them is so strong that obscures any appreciation for his achievements in the war on terror and foreign policy generally which far surpass anything Clinton was able to do.
Mr. Horwitz obviously never traversed the fever swamps of the right because Clinton indeed is thought of by many as a liar and evil. And my own belief is that Clinton’s “brilliance” as a politician is due to the total lack of anyone with charisma who opposed him on the right. Once Bush41 was out of the way, the Republicans had no one of any stature to oppose him. Newt Gingrich was too cerebral. Bob Dole was….well, a highly decorated war hero but a tired old warhorse by ‘96. In short, even a dim bulb casts some light compared to no bulb at all.
Larry Schweikart (Professor of History, Dayton University)
As one who despised Clinton for what he did to the office of the presidency—in my view, every bit as dangerous and abusive as Nixon—it was always clear that Clinton would, in the end, do what the public wanted. (That was not so clear about She-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named). I didn’t “hate” Clinton so much as pitied him—the product of an alcohol-abusive family that learned how to please everyone, that wanted everyone to like him, thus one who developed no core beliefs of his own (exactly what Stephanopolous, I think, said).
The notion of “getting” Clinton was less an opposition to his policies, which, as David points out, were at times “conservative” (balanced budgets, NAFTA), but more a dogmatic demand that the law be followed because not to follow it would invite further, more egregious violations from Clinton and his wife. Thankfully, the impeachment neutered him, killed Al Gore’s chances, and destroyed his “legacy.” Bush hatred, though, as I have said here on numerous occasions, is essentially religious in nature. Most of all, the Bush-haters fear Bush’s certainty of purpose which is given him by God. “No one can be that sure of himself,” they mourn. Well, yes, one can.
Even before Monica, there was a sense that the Oval Office was an unclean place; that the White House was not only for sale to the highest campaign contributors but that the reverence that most President’s show toward the traditions of the office was simply missing from the Clinton mafia. The venality and malfeasance of his aides, his cabinet officials, his wife, and eventually himself was so pervasive that at times it seemed as if a criminal conspiracy had taken over the country.
It wasn’t a conspiracy of course. It was amorality of thought, word, and deed. When Senator Bob Kerry said in a January 1996 article in Esquire magazine that “”Clinton’s an unusually good liar. Unusually good. Do you realize that?” most conservatives shrugged their shoulders. Clinton wasn’t just a liar. He was a pathological fibber, the broncobuster of prevarication, the Muhamad Ali of equivocation. He lied so often, so consistently, and so well that the American people eventually threw up their hands and decided it was just something that all politicians did. That may be true to a certain extent, but the length and breadth of Clinton’s lies exceeded anything done by any other politician in recent memory.
And the good professor is spot on with his analysis of the Bush haters being livid at our President’s certitude. Having spent their entire lives trying to tear down the verities by which western civilization has thrived for nearly 500 years, it must really stick in their throat that they can’t discredit the simple faith of the man.
Paul Gottfried ( Professor of Humanities at Elizabethtown College and author of, most recently, Multiculturalism and the Politics of Guilt)
Republicans and movement conservatives disliked Clinton because they were genuinely turned off by his personal immorality and even more by the casuistry in which feminist groups engaged in order to justify his predatory sex life. I for one found Clinton to be a shabby clown and the embattled feminists who went to his aid seemed to have about as much credibility as the Communists who defended the Soviet-Nazi Pact.
But, unlike David and Larry, I’m not sure that the attacks on Bush are more personal and more biting than those that Republicans unleashed against Clinton. What bothers me is exactly the opposite, namely that the savaging of W is being done pro forma. It is the way the liberal media and academics and Democrats treat Republican presidents, even those who equivocate on affirmative action and become ultraliberals in dealing with illegal immigration.
The savaging of the President “pro-forma” is an excellent way to describe the put down of every Republican President by the left since the end of WW II. Michael Barone commented on this in a recent article:
But beneath the hubbub, we can see the playing out of another, less reported story: the collapse of the attempts by liberal Democrats and their sympathizers in the mainstream media–the New York Times, etc., etc.–to delegitimize yet another Republican administration.
This project has been ongoing for more than 30 years. Richard Nixon, by obstructing investigation of the Watergate burglary, unwittingly colluded in the successful attempt to besmirch his administration. Less than two years after carrying 49 states, he was compelled to resign. The attempt to delegitimize the Reagan administration seemed at the time reasonably successful. Reagan was widely dismissed as a lightweight ideologue, and the rejection of his nomination of Robert Bork to the Supreme Court in 1987 contributed to the impression that his years in office were, to take the title of a book by a first-rate journalist, “the Reagan detour.” As time went on, as the Berlin Wall fell and Bill Clinton proclaimed that the era of big government was over, it became clear that Reagan was a successful transformational president–something the mainstream media grudgingly admitted when he died in 2004 after a decade out of public view.
Barone didn’t mention Eisenhower whose Presidency heralded one of the most prosperous and innovative times in the history of human civilization. Portraying Ike as a grinning idiot was easy for the left because of the way the President mangled the English language. But he was decisive and forward looking in his administration - something the left never gave him credit for.
Yes, there was passionate hatred of Clinton. But it was Republicans and Republican ideas that gave him his greatest legislative victories in welfare reform, NAFTA, and balanced budgets. The fact that he shamelessly stole those ideas and embraced them as his own is what maddened those of us who could see that embrace for what it was; not born out of principal but out of opportunism. That too, is a form of dishonesty. And when you get right down to it, that’s why so many of us hate Clinton to this day; his inability to have an honest set of principals that when you look at the man, you know he believes in.
Bill Clinton would have been an afterthought in history if Ross Perot had not run in 1992. And if the Republicans had been able to field a more attractive candidate in 1996, Clinton would have gone down to a humiliating defeat (he got less than 50% of the vote in both elections).
I will always see him as an interlude President - a between the wars President. He was enabled by a populace who simply wanted to be left alone in the period between the end of the cold war and the start of the War on Terror. And he will be little more than a minor, curious footnote in history volumes discussing the end of the 20th century.