I haven't read Bill Clinton's book yet, so I should say up front that I have no trouble imagining that it's sprawling, unfocused, not rigorously edited (few editors, even the estimable Robert Gottlieb, are going to get too bossy with a former president), superfluous and soggy in places, and, yes, even self-serving (which we know would make it dramatically different from other presidential memoirs, wouldn't it, now?).
But I don't even need to have read it to know this much, which anyone could have predicted from the moment Clinton signed the deal: that its release would do little more than provide one more opportunity for conservatives to trash Clinton, and, more tellingly, for the liberal baby boomers of the cultural elite to use Clinton as the vehicle to work out their anxieties about themselves and their own generational shortcomings and contradictions.
The conservative response is, of course, boringly predictable, and deserving of examination only insofar as it's worth monitoring some of the insane statements that will once again erupt from certain mouths (thank goodness we now have David Brock's
www.mediamatters.org
to keep track of these things, and a special tip of the hat to Brock's suffering employees who actually have to listen to Rush Limbaugh and watch Bill O'Reilly and transcribe their ravings). Bob Novak got these particular media matters off to a blazing start on Meet the Press Sunday when he said that "people died" because of Whitewater.
The culturally elite baby-boomer response, however, does deserve some consideration. It, too, is predictable in its own way; the self-righteous irritation on display in Michiko Kakutani's review of My Life in Sunday's Times is in tone and spirit exactly the same as that expressed down the years by Tim Russert and Chris Matthews, of a piece with the feral anguish that oozed out of the editorials penned during the Clinton presidency by former Times-man Howell Raines. But where conservative hatred of Clinton is easily explained, liberal anxiety about him is deep and weird and dark; it will never be resolved, and so it will never -- ever -- end.
The anxiety has its roots in one central idea -- the notion that elite baby boomers collectively are, secretly, a little ashamed. They're embarrassed that they had it so easy growing up; that they did not, as their parents might typically have reminded them, have to fight a war (although their poor and working-class brethren did, which only made the guilt worse) or suffer a Great Depression; that they came of age when everything, to a late 1960s college kid, seemed beautiful and loose and free. They held, for a young generation, an unusual amount of power in the larger culture. (And no sexually transmitted diseases! And what a soundtrack to live one's life to!). And they had sacrificed nothing for any of it.
The notion of sacrifice doesn't mean much to a 22-year-old. But add two decades, and kids and mortgages and intimations of mortality, and reflections on sacrifice, like those creaks in the knee joints the morning after a particularly vigorous tennis game, start to become more insistent: a growing sense of guilt and internal conflict about having had it too, to use a piece of greatest-generation argot, jake. And those two decades were, in fact, the decades between the early 1970s and the early 1990s -- that is, between the time Clinton and his cohorts finished their studies and the time Clinton was elected.
At first, the liberal boomer journalists embraced Clinton; finally, one of theirs had made it to the Oval Office. But then came the right-wing onslaught. Nothing quite like it had ever happened before; liberal boomer journalists didn't know how to assess it. Most, I think, were simply naive about its scope, viciousness, and extra-legality. Some played along for ratings, for scoops, to be one of the cool kids. But they played along for a deeper reason, too: Psychologically, they were more than ready to buy into a narrative about Clinton's lassitude because somewhere deep down, they believed it to be the fundamental and true story of their generation. Of themselves.
The right, out of hatred and fear of Clinton's prodigious political skills, created a narrative that placed his immorality at the center of events; far too many liberal boomer writers accepted that narrative -- and once accepted, a narrative such as this is almost impossible to dislodge. I don't know Kakutani's politics one way or the other, although one doubts that the lead book critic of The New York Times is a card-carrying member of the National Rifle Association or the Family Research Council. But I do know that the review in question meets virtually every criteria of the posture I've just described.
Is it "self-serving" and "turgid" of Clinton to state hiscase against Ken Starr? Granted, I haven't read it, and for all I know the passages might be poorly written. But the prose style isn't what matters here; it could have been as incandescent as Zola's or Carlyle's, and the criticism would have been exactly the same. Bill Clinton wronged us. There is no defense. The reviewer gives away the game with that lazy dig in the final paragraph citing "lies... about real estate." What lies about real estate? Both Clintons were exonerated, as Joe Klein pointed out on Meet the Press; in fact, they were exonerated several times over.
Did Clinton write anything in this book about: Kosovo, or the 1993 stimulus package, or globalization? How 21 million jobs were created during his tenure? About race relations in America or about the government shutdown of 1995-96? His ideas about the history and future fate of liberal politics in America? I suspect that, in 957 pages, he must have. But one would never know it from reading this review that the Times felt moved to give front-page placement.
Instead, we get a lament about lies and sex -- and a simultaneous gripe that it all seems now to come "from another galaxy, far, far away." This is a popular cliche -- that after September 11, the Clinton wars seem so old, so trivial. But that galaxy is hardly so far, far away at all. The defining political story of recent American history is the transmogrification of the Republican Party from a variegated pea-patch of different interests into a regimented, disciplined, vanguardist, hard-right political operation. Anyone who can't see the thread connecting the non-stop smear campaign against the Clintons, the electoral fight in Florida that helped wrest control of the White House, the tarring after 9-11 of President Bush's foes as unpatriotic, and the use by this administration and its media propagandists of every available excuse to start the little war its central figures had begun planning back in 1992 (before the Clinton presidency got in the way) hasn't been paying much attention to that story. 9-11 did not, as they say, change everything; it intensified everything. The players have changed here and there, but the propaganda machine that drove us into Baghdad is essentially the same one that cut its teeth down in Little Rock.
As Kakutani was reading the memoir and sitting down to write, the 9-11 commission -- headed by a Republican, with a staff run by a Republican who used to work for Condi Rice, no less -- declared the Bush administration's second-most important rationale for war, the supposed Iraq–al-Qaeda connection, null and void (the first, Saddam-make-New York-go-boom, was nullified some time ago). Such a development might be expected to have given a critic a little perspective on the question of the consequences of executive deception. Unfortunately, we don't speak so much today of consequences. Instead, we speak, incessantly, of perceptions. And the mainstream perception of Bill Clinton -- created by the right wing, reinforced by a liberal elite with a historical inferiority complex that made it uniquely susceptible to the right's argument -- is set in stone. Clinton is not blameless, of course. And it may be that he wrote a mediocre book. But he and his presidency, both the bad and good aspects of it, deserve far more than boomer sniping -- a posture that explains a lot about who's really being self-indulgent.
Michael Tomasky is executive editor of The American Prospect. His column appears each week in the online edition.
