Bill Clinton, WTO Booster

by Molly Ivins

How long has it been since you heard Clinton make a whole speech? I've been catching him on the tube in snippets for so long that I'd forgotten just how effortlessly persuasive he actually is. There he stood, the No. 1 Free-Trader in the Whole World, facing all the opposition. By the time he finished, he was on their side and they were on his side. He is a superb politician.

Anyone volunteering a kind word for Clinton nowadays has to issue the obligatory disclaimer. In my case, it's easy, since I barely agree with him 50 percent of the time.

He's not my kind of Democrat and never has been. But at least I have the sense to recognize the man's merits, whatever his failings.

He is an amazingly skilled pol at the top of his game. I know -- everybody hates politicians so much that to say someone is a great one is a form of cussin' him out. Nevertheless, I do admire real political skill, and Clinton has it in spades.

I'm not sure I've ever seen anyone better. Maybe Lyndon Johnson on a roll, or Bob Bullock in good health. Too bad that Clinton had to spend most of his presidency on defense. I would have liked to see him quarterback a Democratic Congress for the sheer interest of the exercise.

Don't ask me to explain what went wrong between Clinton and the Washington press corps. I've never understood it. I don't want to drag anyone through the Late Unpleasantness again, but as near as I can tell, about half the D.C. press corps is totally wiggy on the subject of Clinton. Otherwise rational people -- like Chris Matthews, Chris Hitchens, George Will, there's an army of them -- are so obsessed by Clinton's moral failings that they cannot see his performance, what he actually does with the job.

I'm sorry that Clinton is so flawed. That's truly a shame. As Mr. Shakespeare said, "... and the elements, So mixed in him.'' But I still don't see why that prevents people who presume to have some grasp of objectivity from seeing what's right in front of them.

Clinton is such a master that he has played a Republican Congress to a dead standstill for six years now -- and often with no cards at all in his hand (mostly due to his own stupidity during the Late Unpleasantness).

And what a set of Republicans. It's not as though he's had to deal with constructive citizens who happen to differ with him on the issues -- your Robert Tafts, your Bob Doles, your Margaret Smiths or such as that. Newt Gingrich and the Republican Revolution -- God save us.

Lord knows, the Republicans have saved Bill Clinton. Time after time after time, they are so blinded by their hatred of Clinton that they do themselves in. I'm sure it's a mercy, but it's also a peculiar phenomenon.

I've already said my piece on the Clinton-haters. I suspect it has something to do with sex or sexual envy, which always makes people irrational. But there has already been far too much parlor psychoanalysis and idiot psychobabble about Clinton. When the content-analysis mavens at the schools of communication go through coverage of the Clinton administration, my bet is that they find a lot more psychobabble than they do actual reporting on what he's done:

• A seven-year economic boom (and some of the credit for that should go to George Bush the elder), marred by a terrible maldistribution of wealth, mostly caused by stupid tax policies. If Clinton had had a better Congress, it wouldn't be such a problem.

• Some nice peace work here and there -- Northern Ireland, the Middle East.

• One bozo military adventure. Clinton's bombing of the drug factory in Sudan ranks right up there with the time that Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada to save us all from some Cuban construction workers. Kosovo is a disaster, but Kosovo was going to be a disaster no matter what we did.

• Almost certainly should have done better with Russia; there was an awful lot of capitalist hubris in this country after the Cold War ended.

• Some very graceful and deft diplomatic work. The Republicans keep complaining that Clinton apologizes for our foreign policy mistakes when he goes abroad. We had a lot of mistakes to apologize for. What, you thought the Greek junta was a swell bunch?

• A big failure on health-care reform, though I still think that lobby money is what really killed that bill. But note the interesting way that Clinton works as a pol. He really is an incrementalist. He got a full children's health insurance program through a Republican Congress (much credit to Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch). He signed a lousy welfare reform bill and then quietly went back and fixed many of the worst provisions in it. The guy just keeps chipping away.

Given the amount of personal abuse the man has taken, his resilience is just extraordinary. Apparently, he really does get up every day and start over.

We've never seen him get mad in public as the president, and I have often wanted to congratulate his late mother on his manners. Would that Trent Lott's momma had done half that well. Given the circumstances of his presidency, Clinton deserves a medal just for being generally cheerful.

On the sleaze factor, I don't know that one can blame Clinton so much as the whole system of campaign financing. By 1996, the floodgates were wide open; it was ally-ally-in free on the money.

The Republicans didn't look any better. Who can forget the immortal testimony of Haley Barbour that while sitting on the deck of a junk in Hong Kong harbor, he had no idea he was being offered foreign money?

This administration's indictment count is still well under the glorious benchmarks set by Nixon and Reagan. (Although I think we're going to have to put Nixon in a permanent separate category. Did you read the transcripts of the tapes they just released? What a despicable human. In the long history of rationalization, have you ever seen anything more bizarre than someone as intelligent as William Safire carrying on about the moral leprosy of Clinton while still defending Nixon?)

Whatever Clinton's mistakes, they don't seem to have stemmed from malice. I may be wrong, but I don't see much mean in him.

Whoever wins the election next year, I give him six weeks and one good screw-up before someone in Washington has the simple honesty to say, "You know, Clinton coulda handled that with his eyes shut.''