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Clinton rehab
Slick Willie to cuddly Tigger Plus, liberals and nihilists
by Dan Kennedy
by Dan Kennedy
It was nearly two years ago when the Times Magazine buried Clinton with a devastating psychosocial analysis by Michael Kelly that portrayed the president as a weak, corrupt, pathological liar all the more dangerous for his desire to do good. Kelly provided a kind of Unified Field Theory for the unease, dislike, and even hatred people felt toward Clinton at the time. "Clinton means what he says when he says it, but tomorrow he will mean what he says when he says the opposite," wrote Kelly, who's now with the New Yorker. "He is the existential President, living with absolute sincerity in the passing moment." The disasters of that autumn -- the final defeat of the Clinton health-care plan, and the triumph of Newt Gingrich -- seemed to flow organically from the flaws that Kelly explicated.
So Limbaugh must have found Purdum's article a bitter disappointment. It certainly came across that way when he recited from it during his radio commentary on May 20.
"Clinton tries so hard to be liked that he inevitably disappoints even his friends," read the rotund right-winger in a tone so supercilious that he sounded exactly like the guy who impersonates him on Imus in the Morning. "He is essentially sunny yet capable of black cloudbursts of thundering rage. He is a splendid salesman and tireless storyteller but confesses that he has failed to sell his Administration's story. He lacks a single feature that is technically handsome yet exudes physical attraction."
Limbaugh paused, then asked sotto voce: "I wonder if they shared a cigarette afterward?"
Nice line. But for Limbaugh and his fellow conservatives, the problem isn't that the damned liberal media are once again preparing to foist Bill Clinton upon an unwilling populace. It's that the media, like the public, have caught on to the remarkable change in Clinton's presidency.
The Clinton so memorably dissected by Kelly spent his first two years in the White House proposing a dizzying array of contradictory policies and stabbing his nominees in the back. The Clinton who Purdum captured two years later, by contrast, is the centrist New Democrat of the 1992 campaign, protecting Medicare and Social Security from the depredations of radical Republicans and demonstrating a positively Reaganesque predilection for sweeping, if vague, themes. Kelly's Clinton had favorability ratings somewhere in the Nixon-Carter range. Purdum's Clinton may not be wildly popular, but he holds a commanding lead in his bid for re-election.
In 1994, Washington Post reporter William Powers praised Kelly's "bold, decisive" writing, but expressed some misgivings about his "conjectural mind-reading." Even so, Powers looks back on the Clinton profile in admiration, telling the Phoenix that Kelly "had some really resonant insights about the president." Powers notes that Kelly's Clinton comes across much like the fictional president in the anonymously published novel Primary Colors, which Kelly (and a host of others) is suspected of writing.
Purdum's article is quite different, grounded much more in what Clinton has and hasn't done than in the inner workings of the presidential mind.
Like Kelly, Purdum is unsparing in his assessment of Clinton's flaws. The most serious, in Purdum's opinion, is that he's more effective at defining himself as an opponent of unpopular Republican policies than as an advocate for his own programs.
But rather than paint the dark figure who emerges from the Kelly profile, Purdum compares Clinton to Tigger, from Winnie-the-Pooh, "whose braggadocio makes him the reigning expert at whatever is under discussion, from swimming to tree climbing." And he calls Clinton "[o]ne of the biggest, most talented, intelligent, open, colorful characters ever to inhabit the Oval Office."
Well, who could vote against someone like that, even if he "can also be an undisciplined, fumbling, obtuse, defensive, self-justifying rogue"? As the song says, "a tigger's a wonderful thing."
"The Kelly piece was certainly far more vicious, but Kelly is vicious. That's his style," says New York University journalism professor Jay Rosen, a prominent media critic. "Purdum's piece was more of a classic on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand kind of journalism."
But there's more to the difference between the two pieces than the mere fact that Clinton's stock has risen since July 29, 1994, when Kelly's profile appeared. Kelly relied heavily on interviews with Clinton's old cronies and enemies from Arkansas. He did not interview the president or his wife, nor did he talk to high members of the administration, at least not on the record.
By contrast, Purdum's story is anchored by lengthy interviews with both Bill and Hillary Rodham Clinton, and even with their reclusive Rasputin, the switch-hitting political consultant Dick Morris. Which raises a question: did Purdum get that kind of access because the Clintons, who've become notoriously media-shy, decided it was time to start living dangerously again? Or did they have a reasonable expectation that they'd be treated kindly? Certainly the latter can't be ruled out.
Purdum, you see, is the boyfriend of former White House press secretary Dee Dee Myers. Although Myers and Clinton had a falling-out professionally, the president is said to have remained on friendly terms with his ex-flack. Although Purdum clearly is innocent of any overt conflict of interest, the whole situation is cozy enough to make one a little queasy.
It's also questionable whether the Times would have run as daring a piece as Kelly's during a presidential-election year. "I assume not," says Rosen. Indeed, Purdum's careful weighing of the president's strengths and weaknesses seems designed as almost a public re-introduction to Clinton at the start of the presidential campaign. It was probably no accident that a major Bob Dole profile, by Elizabeth Kolbert, appeared on the front page of that day's Times.
But give the Times Magazine credit. The paper's news pages rarely offer much insight into our political leaders' motives and thought processes. The opinion pages reflect the anti-Clinton animus of editorial-page editor Howell Raines and columnists Maureen Dowd and William Safire.
So who is the real Bill Clinton? Kelly's or Purdum's? Probably both -- and neither. Clinton is too big and sprawling to be contained in any magazine profile, no matter how wide-ranging. If Clinton wins this November, Purdum's article will offer a good guide to how he did it, and what he must do to have a successful second term. And if he loses, Kelly's piece will be an excellent place to start in assessing what went wrong.
"I can tell you that the president now has every issue of the American Prospect," Reich said. "In fact, if you come to White House, I'll show you where he keeps them."
These are heady times for the Prospect, founded six years ago by Robert Kuttner, a liberal writer whose column appears regularly in the Boston Globe, and Paul Starr, a Pulitzer Prize-winning sociologist at Princeton University. The self-styled "Journal for the Liberal Imagination" recently received a $300,000 grant from the MacArthur Foundation and $2 million from the Schumann Foundation, which is headed by Bill Moyers. The newly flush magazine switched from quarterly to bimonthly publication earlier this year, and Kuttner already has his eye on making it a monthly in another year or two.
The Prospect is also launching a direct-mail campaign aimed at doubling its circulation, from about 15,000 to 30,000, and has put together a vibrant World-Wide Web site, the Electronic Policy Network, that includes a number of progressive and reform-oriented organizations (http://epn.org).
As Reich's remarks suggest, though, co-editors Kuttner and Starr are more interested in influencing policymakers than in running up impressive circulation numbers. Kuttner describes his readership as "partly political activists, partly policy types, partly academics, and some general readers, too."
The current issue of the Prospect, a fat, 96-page offering, features among other things a series of articles on why privatizing health care, schools, and Social Security is a bad idea; a post-mortem on Clinton's failed welfare-reform initiative, by ex-White House welfare czar David Ellwood; an analysis by economists Barry Bluestone and Teresa Ghilarducci on why we need a higher minimum wage and the earned-income tax credit; a critique by James Morone of William Bennett, James Q. Wilson, and other conservative virtuecrats; and an essay in which social critic Todd Gitlin argues that the conservatism favored by Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey, with its emphasis on individual liberties, owes much to the '60s-style libertarianism they so vilify.
"We're an idea magazine," says executive editor Jonathan Cohn, the top-ranking full-timer (Kuttner and Starr are both part-time). "We're not trying just to make fun and interesting comments. We want to matter." (Cohn's contribution to the current issue is a smart piece of media criticism in which he blasts TV news operations for running regular exposés of petty government waste while shying away from corporate corruption.)
The magazine has served as a forum over the years for an impressive array of liberal intellectuals such as Arthur Schlesinger Jr., John Kenneth Galbraith, Lester Thurow, and Robert Putnam, who's helped define a continuing obsession of the Prospect -- the importance of civic engagement, or "social capital" -- by tracing the decline of voluntary associations such as bowling leagues.
But the magazine's emphasis on policy often makes for less than scintillating reading. Many of the articles read like briefing papers for government officials, with little to interest those without a direct stake in the issues involved. Perhaps the magazine would benefit if it were less dependent on grant and foundation money and more reliant on the discipline of the marketplace.
Then again, the Prospect is clearly a specialty magazine. Asked to identify an analogue on the right, Kuttner points not to well-known journals such as National Review or the Weekly Standard, but instead to Policy Review, a rather obscure, 30,000-circulation bimonthly published by the conservative Heritage Foundation.
Indeed, the two publications have a wary respect for each other. "I think the American Prospect is the best magazine of serious liberal thought in the country," says Policy Review editor Adam Meyerson. "I think it's a sign of the death of liberalism intellectually that more people aren't paying attention to it. Because they ought to be."
But now, thanks to parent magazine Wired's own promotional efforts, what was once fuzzy has come into focus. A full-page ad for Netizen proclaims: "It's about politics in a revolutionary context -- one that questions whether politics itself isn't obsolete in the digital age."
That isn't cynicism. It's nihilism, a silly indulgence of the sort favored by elitists for whom the non-virtual world, with all its intractable problems, has ceased to matter.