Peace, Prosperity, And Scandal
How apropos that you're reading about Bill Clinton's legacy in cyberspace.
Nearly eight years ago, when the man from "a place called Hope" was sworn in as the nation's first baby boomer and first post-Cold War president, much of today's Internet had yet to be born, including this Web site.
"The 1990's will be seen as the Age of the Digital Revolution," says Prof. Douglas Brinkley of the University of New Orleans, a presidential historian and a CBS News Consultant.
"When Clinton took office, e-mail was a novelty; now, a billion e-mails ricochet around the world an hour. The information high-tech world order took root - and the Clinton administration did much to encourage a lot of the new technologies in this era," Brinkley says.
Then there's that other "I" word: impeachment. The second president in American history to be impeached, Mr. Clinton saw more than a year of his second term engulfed by a personal and political scandal that began with his affair with onetime White House intern Monica Lewinsky.
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"Forever in history, the opening graph in his - whether it's an obituary or a textbook - will be that he was impeached, that he lied to the American people, that he is not a role model per se in the way that we've put presidents like Washington and Jefferson and Lincoln on pedestals - and that no mother or father in America is telling their children, 'I want you to grow up and be like Bill Clinton,'" says Brinkley.
Even so, l'affaire Lewinsky was about more than sex, lies and audiotape. Bill Strauss, an author on American generations, places this political and legal struggle as one more battlefield between opposing cultural camps of boomers in a long-running fight that dates backs to the 1960's.
"The impeachment debate was a culture wars debate. It split the country into these two halves more geographicallthan had existed before," says Strauss, also a co-founder of the Capitol Steps, a musical political satire group in Washington, D.C.
Too Centrist By Half?size>color>
On the peace-and-prosperity front, the numbers are beyond spin and are in Mr. Clinton's favor: America's economy enjoyed its longest peacetime expansion during his two terms in office.
Clearly, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan and Republican Congresses with their fiscally tight attitude played their parts. And yes, the American people deserve the lion's share of the kudos, including higher productivity as a result of the dot-com boom. Still, Mr. Clinton set the tone by focusing on the economy "like a laser beam" and moving his Democratic Party toward the center from day one.
"He has ended the traditional definition of liberalism as we knew it, and I think what Clinton has done is associate the liberal tradition with capitalism, with the marketplace," historian Joseph Ellis told CBS News' Sunday Morning. "It's a recognition that you must engage the entrepreneurial energies of the public in order to generate the kind of wealth that can then spread out and assist people at all levels."
Topping the list of Clinton accomplishments: balancing the federal budget and enshrining trade at the heart of U.S. foreign policy, including the passage of NAFTA. Also in the legacy mix: welfare reform, an anti-crime package, the Brady gun control law, NATO expansion, curbing Big Tobacco, family and medical leave, as well as preserving vast tracts of land for future generations. Murkier is Clinton's record handling international flashpoints, from the Balkans and Asia to Russia, the Middle East, and Northern Ireland.
"The rest of the world looks upon America as a very self-indulgent country that has one set of rules for itself and another set of rules for the rest of the world - and that keeps tossing its culture to the rest of the world, whether they want it or not. It's both fun and annoying to them, but you could look at that and there's almost a parable for Clinton in that that's a lot of what he's represented to the world," says author Strauss.
Whatever the final score, a laundry list of accomplishments does not etch a president's face on Mount Rushmore. Brinkley sees Mr. Clinton as a competent and centrist custodian, rather than an innovator.
"On the one hand, he won the presidency, he won re-election. He warded off the Republican right" in Congress during the 1995 government shutdown and by co-opting the more mainstream chunks of the GOP agenda, Brinkley notes. "He was able to tackle many of the big trade and economic issues he promised he would. On another hand, nobody really knows what Bill Clinton stands for on anything."
"Too often, it seemed like Bill Clinton was governing by poll-taking - reading the newest public opinion polls and pulse-tking - which is a very smart way of governing. It meant he was centrist president who leaves office with a 65 percent approval rating," Brinkley adds.
Health-care reform during the first Clinton term was meant to chart a bold direction, but ultimately it was a policy and political failure for both the president and first lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, who spearheaded the administration's effort. Another early miscue: gays in the military, an issue that ended in the "don't ask, don't tell" debacle. And the first Democrat who would be elected to two full terms since FDR also presided over his party's loss of Congress for the first time in four decades.
"The Constitution gives me relevance," the president said after the 1994 midterm elections that elevated Republican Newt Gingrich to House speaker and the GOP's "Contract With America" to prominence. "The power of our ideas gives me relevance."
With or without a friendly Congress, as a man regarded by friend and foe as "the greatest politician of his generation," Mr. Clinton failed in paradigm-shifting politics when he tried. But Ellis, who recently wrote a book on revolutionary leaders says Mr. Clinton - full name, William Jefferson Clinton - shares something with one of his earliest and greatest predecessors: Thomas Jefferson.
"Their ability to move so adroitly from one position to another position in a way that would seem to be hypocrisy but which for them is obvious sincerity - that's the one thing that's on the one hand troubling to a lot of people," says Ellis of the two men. "That's also the thing that makes them so effective as politicians."
Still, in the long term, Mr. Clinton faces the rap of not trying when he could have, warns Brinkley.
"Great leaders make their times. And it is a bit unfair - he tried with health care and got shot down and he had a lot of difficulty working with Congress - but a masterful politician knows how to deal with Congress. A masterful politician is not quite as polarizing a character. A masterful politician would have known how to lead America into a post-Cold War era," he says.
"You don't do it by constantly having (one-time pollster) Dick Morris feed you raw poll data and say, 'That's what I think. That's where the American people are. That's what I think.' You're never gonna get bold, great leadership out of that. What you can get is good governance, and I think Clinton did accomplish that."
Offering a kinder take, Ellis points to Mr. Clinton's "Comeback Kid" resilience in the political arena.
"I think that as we go on in the 21st century, we're going to look back on Clinton and say, 'My god, we didn't quite realize at the time how extraordinarily talented this particular president really was.'"
Yet to say Mr. Clinton was purely a victim of political circumstance - be it from a hostile Congress, the lack of a major foreign or domesticrisis on his watch, or an independent counsel and a right-wing chorus that he might liken to Inspector Javert - simply won't wash.
Consider Theodore Roosevelt, the youngest man ever to become president. When the energetic T.R. entered the Oval Office after the assassination of William McKinley a century ago, he had no mandate, either.
"People thought he was a bit wacko. The Republicans, his own party, didn't care for him. The Democrats didn't care for him," Brinkley says of the first President Roosevelt. "And he exerted a bold and innovative leadership that forever transformed not only the executive mansion - which he renamed 'The White House' - but ushered in the entire Progressive Era of massive reform, of trust-busting, of conservation measures unforeseen and thought of in that time."
It's The Culture, Stupid!size>color>
In stark contrast, scandal was a hallmark of the Clinton presidency.
Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate and campaign finance all made it on to that marquee, but there's no contest for Exhibit A: the Lewinsky affair. Mr. Clinton's false testimony and public statements about his relationship with the one-time White House intern led to his impeachment by the House in 1998 and his acquittal by the Senate the following year.
At this point, the top "pull quote" of the Clinton years is a tossup between "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." and "It depends on what the meaning of 'is' is." On the cutting room floor: "The era of big government is over."
"The woman was young enough to be his daughter. But much worse than that - I think people have forgiven that - was the instinctive refusal to face up to it with the lying and the ducking," writer Andrew Sullivan of The New Republic told CBS News' Sunday Morning.
"I think he will be remembered for impeachment," Sullivan adds. As for Mr. Clinton's character, he says, "I think he has none. And when you know that your president is that cynical about the truth, you can't help but think that he's demeaned the office permanently."
Perhaps Bill Clinton's shadow may loom largest over our culture, in much the same way that it can be said that his fellow baby boomers do.
"There is something about this generation that causes them not to see themselves the way other people do. That applies to leaders like Clinton or Newt Gingrich or George W. Bush or Al Gore in the same way that it applies to people in the culture," says Strauss.
But to blame all baby boomers for every lie, half-truth, distortion, and indiscretion by Mr. Clinton, the first president from their generation, is overkill, Brinkley cautions.
"That means because you're the first baby boomer that means you have oral sex under the Oval Office desk? That's not a generational thing, that's a character flaw. You jus can't throw all of it on to generations. There is a bit of a charlatan in Bill Clinton, a bit of an amiable rake, which is his Achilles' heel," he says.
"This is a man who had the eyeballs of the world on him, who knew better than anybody after Gennifer Flowers, out of all of the other flare-ups that he had, yet continued on his path of midnight rambling, sexual deviant side and could not put that under control," Brinkley adds.
And so, the Lewinsky saga saw the collision of Mr. Clinton's tragic personal flaws with the culture war politics of his generation. Never mind Vietnam, civil rights, abortion, or gun control. Forget about sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Here, the personal was political - the "politics of personal destruction" - more than ever before, and faster than ever before.
"One of the great ironies is, he oversaw this new information age, and it's the information age that helped destroy a lot of his presidency. It was our ability to read the DNA on Monica's dress or to be able to know what books Monica checked out from Kramerbooks," says Brinkley. "The readily available information that a president truly lives in a glass house, Bill Clinton oversaw that information age and also it boomeranged on him. So he's an ironic and tragic figure in those regards."
No Internet, no Matt Drudge. No 24-7 cable channels, no readymade outlet for all things Clinton, O.J., etc. Ad infinitum coverage, ad nauseum.
Strauss contends the ripple effects of the ongoing Boomer culture clash extend to the recent protracted battle for the White House between Al Gore, Mr. Clinton's vice president, and George W. Bush, son of the man Mr. Clinton beat in 1992.
"In a lot of ways, this culture war ended in a tie," he says. "And the tensions between the two sides of boomers - the heartland values vs. the coastal, Hollywood-New York kind of values - is still a very serious thing in this country, and it's one that is likely to fuel division through the peak years of boomer leadership. We haven't heard the end of it by any means."
On the show-biz scale, Mr. Clinton was, at his best and his worst, a walking wealth of material.
Look at his affinity with Hollywood, from hanging out with and raising money from the entertainment glitterati to playing the sax on Arsenio Hall or answering the "boxers or briefs" question on MTV. Late-night comedy - from Letterman to Leno, from Conan O'Brien to Saturday Night Live, from Politically Incorrect to The Daily Show, and more - all thrived on Mr. Clinton's star quality in the spotlight, his craving for the limelight, and, of course, his misfortunes.
"This man has been funny. He also himself has drawn less of a distinction between being a leader and being an entertainer. He's blurred that line ... Bill Clinton goes forward as a stand-up comic, and as an entertainer," says Strauss.
What remains to be seen is hether our first "infotainment president" makes the real job more difficult for his successors down the road.
"There is this tendency of Boomers to pass through a phase of life and to grab everything they possibly can from it and then leave it something of a shambles when they leave," says Strauss. "There's a real risk that this is happening here. And I'm seeing interviews with Clinton talking about how, whatever one can say about his presidency, he had a lot of fun. That is not the purpose of a presidency. It may have been his purpose, or at least part of his purpose."
Be it scandal or show-biz or both, that purpose might have been out of place for the highest office in the land.
"It's an exulted spot where honor and duty have to be hand in hand. Bill Clinton was very good on duty. He did his duty well - he was no slacker in the Oval Office. But he never understood the sense of honor - and you need that combination of both to be a truly effective president," Brinkley says.
Up To The Kidssize>color>
In the historical legacy sweepstakes, Mr. Clinton hopes rest with those Americans that he and his wife, now a U.S. senator from New York and the first first lady ever elected to office, have often trumpeted in their rhetoric: "the children."
Historians may bicker until the end of time, but the generation that came of age during his presidency will have the most definitive say about it. Today's high-school kids and college students will be the last living link to the Clinton era. Their books, their movies, their music will lay the foundation of the enduring memory of the man for posterity.
"That's why, if I were Bill Clinton concerned about how schoolchildren would read about me 150 years from now, I would very much try to make my peace with today's high-school kids and tomorrow's college kids, because they do have an opinion of him that is checkered at best," says Strauss.
That challenge holds peril as well as promise for Mr. Clinton.
"He may need to tell this generation more forthrightly than he has that he acknowledges the final responsibility for what he did, which is not just 'I did it, I take responsibility, and then I turn my back and walk out of the room,' but that there are deeper historical responsiblities," says Strauss. "And one of the consequences is today's kids are behaving better, and he's pleased that they are."
As the youngest ex-president since Teddy Roosevelt, no one can say Bill Clinton will suffer from a lack of time on his hands to cross that bridge to the 21st century.