Reviewing John Harris's The Survivor*, Alan Ehrahalt makes a point worth taking on :
Roosevelt made enormous and sometimes reckless changes in the Americangovernment and economy, and when his critics loathed him for it, heloathed them back. ''They are unanimous in their hate for me'' he saidof them in his 1936 re-election campaign, ''and I welcome theirhatred.'' Clinton, on the other hand, was a centrist who undertook nodramatic transformations of society or government and, what was more,showed himself to be an instinctive conciliator who believed incompromise almost to a fault.
Ehrahalt is comparing, here, the deep-seated hatred for Clinton with the only "recent" president loathed enough to be used as precedent -- and you have to go back 75 years to find one Moreover, he's right. In 1992, a Democrat who eschewed liberalism beat a Republican who violated conservatism. Republicans should have been bouncing off the walls. Not only did their ideological betrayor find defeat, thus serving as a head-on-pike example for future tax-raising Republicans, but the Democrat who did win was shifting the party right! Once Clinton entered office, he failed on some minor thing (gays in the military), some big things (health care), and succeeded on a variety of conservative-friendly ventures (NAFTA, welfare reform, deficit reduction). Nothing truly liberal squeezed through, the welfare state did not grow, the government, in fact, shrank, and the country was generally run from between the poles.
So why, exactly, did the right hate Clinton with the fire of a thousand suns? Boomer ethics has been the refrain, they hated his sexual appetite, his generational difference. But what then of Newt Gingrich, also an eggheaded boomer who switched wives like they had a shelf date? Hell, compared to him, Clinton's marriage was a picture of rock-solid stability. Was it that Clinton was too good? Too eloquent, too smart, too attractive, too successful?
