BILL CLINTON'S EXIT INTERVIEWS

The Outgoing President Enters His Final Spin Cycle

One of the great, though largely unacknowledged, benefits of Campaign
2000's bizarre, attenuated endgame is that it has soaked up time that would
have otherwise been given over to media summations of Bill Clinton's
presidential legacy.

Given an ordinary election, the weeks between November 7 and the
inauguration would have been filled with mostly nostalgic appraisals of the
Man from Hope's tenure as the nation's chief executive. (It is one of the
sad truths of American journalism that the press almost inevitably goes
soft whenever a major figure, however controversial or reviled, exits the
public stage or dies; indeed, we can only await the reverential encomia
that Sens. Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms will receive when they finally
shuffle off their mortal coils.) Instead, we have had mostly silence on the
topic.

Whether the contested election has cancelled or merely pushed this
discussion back a few months remains to be seen, but at least one partisan
has been doing his best to make sure that the Clinton legacy is understood
in its fullest, most nuanced glory. That person is, unsurprisingly, none
other than Bill Clinton himself. His early efforts leave something to be
desired, especially when it comes to the public humility, however
self-evidently phony, that Americans esteem in their leaders. For instance,
we've learned recently that Clinton only grudgingly accepted a
constitutionally mandated retirement, musing that "maybe they should limit
it to two 'consecutive' terms" and that he thinks he would have easily won
a third White House race given the opportunity and the current competition.
Such braggadocio, even when it's accurate, is not exactly the quickest way
to win hearts and minds.

Clinton, a master tactician, realizes that burnishing his reputation will
require the sort of permanent campaign he brought to his eight years in the
Oval Office. (Luckily for him, as the empty-nest spouse of a freshman
senator he'll have plenty of time on his hands. Then again, given the
diversions he pursued even while maintaining a full schedule as president,
idle hours may be his most serious challenge yet.)

Such understanding may explain his renewed public affection for the sage of
San Clemente, Richard Nixon, who Clinton says once counseled him that "a
lot of life is just hanging on." Notes Clinton of the man who conducted
secret wars and cover-ups, "He lived what I thought was a fundamentally
constructive life.I thought he paid a high price for what he did."

In two recent, high-profile interviews, one in Esquire and one in Rolling
Stone, the outgoing president has outlined the general strategy for his
final spin cycle. Characteristically, he seems to be relying on equal
measures of self-pity and mendacity to secure his place in history. There's
no question that Clinton has a number of achievements worth crowing about
- -he was that rare bird, a candidate elected to two full terms, and he
presided over a meaningful reform of welfare policy and a balanced budget.
Federal spending in 1999 was 18.7 percent of gross domestic product, the
lowest it had been since 1974. (The flip side is that 1999 revenues came in
at 20 percent of GDP, the highest peace-time level ever.) However, he seems
more interested in taking credit for a largely undocumented sea change in
American attitudes toward government.

This comes through in the Esquire interview, which was conducted in late
August and appeared just days before the November election. At the time of
its release, the interview drew attention less for its content and more for
the provocative magazine cover that announced it: Clinton sits splay-legged
on a stool, hands on knees, smiling for the adoring camera as if it were
Monica Lewinsky carrying a pizza and a tin of Altoids.

But the interview is memorable too, if only for its subject's audacity. "I
entered the environment which was unprecedented, where the other party
decided that from the moment I took my hand off the Bible, taking the oath
of office, they would try to delegitimize me," he says, casting his White
House years as a triumphant tale of David vs. Goliath (that the Republicans
were in the minority in both houses of Congress in 1993 complicates this
more than a little). "I think the connection between what we do in
Washington and to how people live is closer than it has ever been because
of the way we conducted the business of government," says Clinton, who adds
that his administration cut "through a lot of the meanness and antipathy
toward the government per se that existed.It's much harder to, at least
overtly, practice the politics of division than it was. The president is
supposed to be a unifying force, not just in rhetoric but in fact."

These are, to put it mildly, curious claims for perhaps the most divisive
politician in recent decades, one whose basic response to any and all
perceived adversaries was to attack their moral standing and integrity
(just ask Billy Dale, the slandered former head of the White House Travel
Office). It's not clear what Clinton is talking about when he calls himself
a unifier, given that he failed to win a majority of votes in either of his
elections. And, according to the Gallup Poll, the percentage of Americans
with "a great deal" and "quite a lot" of confidence in the presidency has
not increased during the Clinton years. In March 1993, the figure stood at
43 percent; in June 2000, the most recent date for which Gallup reports, it
stood at 42 percent. Over the same time frame, Congress has consistently
garnered ratings in the 20s on the same measure. So much for renewing faith
in government.

More to the point, such claims obscure one of Clinton's great signature
flourishes, which is to undercut his own authority and administration
policies depending on the situation and the audience. Clinton is in fine
form on this score in the Rolling Stone interview, which was conducted
shortly before the election and which appears in the Dec. 28, 2000-Jan. 4,
2001 issue. When asked whether he considered his acquittal in the Senate
trial a sign that Americans had grown more comfortable with liberal sexual
mores, Clinton responds, "Not really. People strongly disagreed with what I
did. I did, too."

The president similarly disowns his "don't ask, don't tell" policy
regarding gays in the military as a plot foisted on him by crafty
Republicans, especially then-Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole. Forget that
Clinton had campaigned on the eminently defensible idea that gays should be
allowed to serve openly in the armed forces and had pledged to issue an
executive order allowing it. Here, he casts his own policy, which he once
touted as an "honorable compromise" and a sign of his progressive bona
fides, as a nefarious plot designed to create a "controversy that would
consume the early days of [his] presidency."

Precisely why Clinton never revisited the issue during his tenure is left
unexplained, as is his seemingly inconsistent stance on gay marriage. (He's
against it, even as he asserts, correctly, that gays should have equal
rights.) We are left with a man seemingly as dumbfounded by his own
administration's policy as we are.

Then there are these tidbits about marijuana: "I think that most small
amounts of marijuana have been decriminalized in most places and should be.
I think that what we really need - one of the things that I ran out of time
before I could do [it] is a re-examination of our entire policy on
imprisonment."

Such eminently sensible attitudes are close to earthshaking: a president of
the United States openly endorsing the decriminalization of pot and a
fundamental restructuring of criminal penalties for drug offenses! We're
only left to wonder where Clinton was during the past eight years, as state
and federal marijuana arrests continued to climb, as did the number of
prisoners doing time for nonviolent drug offenses. Or where the president
might have been in 1996, when both Attorney General Janet Reno and drug
czar Barry McCaffrey threatened doctors in Arizona and California with
license removal and jail if they dared prescribe medical marijuana in
accordance with new state laws there. Could this be the same guy who canned
Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders in part because she dared suggest that drug
legalization was worth studying?

Examples of this sort, in which Clinton responds to his own actions and
policies as a puzzled outsider, can be multiplied endlessly. For instance,
in the Rolling Stone interview, he implies that it was the Republican
Congress that insisted on only "narrowing," rather than eliminating,
"unconscionable" disparities between crack and powdered cocaine. In fact,
the administration sought the same goal, even proposing to lower the amount
of powdered coke necessary to trigger a five-year mandatory minimum sentence.

Let one more instance stand in for the rest: In September, the president
expressed shock and disappointment at the way the government denied Los
Alamos' Wen Ho Lee due process during the scientist's nine months of
solitary confinement. "[The case] should be disturbing to the American
people," Clinton told reporters after Lee was released. "We ought not to
keep people in jail without bail unless there's some real profound reason."

Indeed, what should be especially disturbing is a chief executive who
admitted that he "always had reservations" about denying Lee bail but did
nothing about the way his Justice Department pursued the case. More
disturbing still: Three weeks after the president made his comments, he
headlined a fundraiser in New Mexico for congressional hopeful John Kelly,
the lead prosecutor in the Lee case.

This willingness to separate himself from his own administration may in the
end be Clinton's truly novel contribution to presidential politics; if this
gesture does not exactly originate with Clinton, he is surely its master
practitioner. (In the end, even Nixon, in his own fashion, copped to what
his plumbers had been up to.) It is a powerful way of both taking and
dodging responsibility for any given action or policy. It simultaneously
blunts criticism and presumes assent. It casts manifest failings in
political nerve as occasions for sympathy. It is, in short, a brilliant
Machiavellian ploy.

"Whether I changed the presidency depends upon how other people conduct
it," Clinton muses in his Esquire interview. Here's hoping that this is one
change the next president shuns.