The Age of Clinton by Gil Troy

Author:Gil Troy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781466868731
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

The Good Father, Reelected

Clinton felt vindicated by his reelection triumph, becoming the first two-term Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt. Exit polls showed Clinton making gains from 1992 with liberal Republicans, liberal independents, and moderate independents. Dole appeared to be a captive of the far right without Reagan’s charm. Americans were optimistic about the future, most concerned with the economy.

Clinton’s comeback since 1994 was impressive. Yet he won only 49.2 percent of the popular vote, and only four of eleven Southern states, with Ross Perot’s candidacy and anger about campaign finance in the final weeks depriving him of that long-sought popular majority. The Republicans gained in the Senate and still controlled the House. His wife remained popular with just under half the electorate.

Democrats’ Kennedyesque high hopes for him and his own grand ambitions constantly dwarfed Clinton’s presidential record. Despite his scaled-down policies, Clinton aspired to be a presidential superhero like Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt. He regretted that no major war or economic upheaval would prove his greatness. His backup was Theodore Roosevelt’s peaceful but momentous presidency, helping Americans adjust to modernity.

Frustrated Republicans resented this political huckster for stealing their souls, and best lines. “We’re the ones who are pro-family, pro-community, pro-spirituality,” the Republican pollster Frank Luntz fumed. Beyond the power calculus, the media sensationalism, the conservative fiefdoms, the fraying Capitol Hill relations, the hatred ran deep. Attitudes about sexual discipline alienated Clinton’s Adversarial elite from their rivals. His shape-shifting and center-seeking combined with his personal sloppiness kept Americans mired in the post-Sixties’ sex wars.

At a time when the national conversation lamented America’s “character-starved culture,” only 41 percent of the electorate considered the president honest and trustworthy. However, 58 percent of the electorate, and 69 percent of Clinton voters, considered “issues” more important than “character.” Just as their behaviors often deviated from the moral standards they endorsed, many Americans distinguished between this president’s private life and his public calls for morality, sobriety, and respect for women. Clinton benefited from a renewed appreciation of the culture of appearances in which public morality obscured private indiscretions, and a weariness with a culture of exposure that mixed private libertinism with a lurid, cynical public Victorianism.

Clinton later called the gap between his popularity and his popular vote totals “a sober reminder of the power of cultural issues like guns, gays, and abortion.” When Clinton slipped on these radioactive issues, he had trouble governing. He was most successful when engaged in traditional presidential actions such as building coalitions, passing laws, waging war, seeking peace.

Clinton’s foibles made it easy to caricature his Good Father cultural Band-Aids as poll-driven ruses, artful retreats from big issues. But these positions were not just survey-induced, artificially sweetened Dick Morris specials. Clinton had been thinking about opportunity, responsibility, family, community, faith, crime-fighting for years.

Clinton’s Republican-sounding cultural crusade had a deeply Democratic twist. In Rent, Jonathan Larson played with conventional polarities by evoking the godliness in what first looked like a burlesque of the profane. Theatergoers cried as his AIDS-stricken drag queen, “Angel,” became one.

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