Is this an entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Contest?
Early on the morning of August 19, 1946, I was born under a clear sky after a violent summer storm to a widowed mother in the Julia Chester Hospital in Hope, a town of about six thousand in southwest Arkansas, thirty-three miles east of the Texas border at Texarkana.
Or is it the first sentence of William Jefferson Clinton's autobiography?
I haven't bothered to read the ensuing sentences, so I don't know whether My Life maintains this acme of literary craftsmanship for all of its 957 pages. But I do know that tens or hundreds of thousands of liberals have parted with cash for a book that most reviewers have evaluated as turgid and commonplace. Why?
The Clinton Presidency was not an exciting or crucial period in our country's history. It was peaceful and prosperous: the Twenties without jazz, flappers, Prohibition or a literary renaissance. And Bill Clinton was an interesting President only because he fit the era so perfectly: self-indulgent, sentimental, oblivious to dangers developing on the periphery of a comfortable world. Judging by the reviews, his autobiography continues in the same vein. Nonetheless, lots of his countrymen are eager to read - or at least own - it.
The explanation, I suppose, is simple hero worship, abundantly in evidence in one of the rare favorable reviews, Larry McMurtry's for the New York Times (headlined "Confessions of a Policy Wonk", though the reviewer says barely a word about any issue of public importance). To a significant portion of the public, Clinton is a secular demi-god, and his memoirs are less words to read than a relic to cherish.
Only three 20th Century Presidents have received comparable adulation: Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan. Kennedy was an anomaly, canonized by his shocking death. Roosevelt and Reagan had immense accomplishments to their credit (or detriment, if one disagreed with their policies). But what is Bill Clinton that fervent liberals should glorify him?
Whether or not Clinton was, by some standard, a "good" or "great" President, he didn't do anything that would predictably set liberal hearts beating more rapidly. The significant elements of his domestic record were the adoption of NAFTA (a Reagan initiative primarily supported by Republicans in Congress), welfare reform (a conservative goal that Clinton vetoed twice before signing under the pressure of the 1996 election campaign) and a steady reduction in government spending as a percentage of GDP (not a traditional Democratic priority). Abroad he was successful in Kosovo, where he ignored the United Nations and waged a Rumsfeldian high-tech war, and failed in North Korea and the Middle East, where he followed the traditional liberal program of accommodating diplomacy. His overall record may be defensible, but the defense has to be minimalist. To paraphrase Will Rogers: He did nothing, and nothing was what needed to be done.
The only reason for liberals to adore Clinton is that a lot of conservatives despised him. Fundamentally, I think, they love him for the enemies he has made. In the liberal world view, conservatism is not a set of alternative opinions about how best to organize society and govern the country; it is an intrinsically evil, conspiratorial force, motivated by equal parts of greed, religious mania and fanatic imperialism. He whom the demons annoy must be a saint. The overlap between buyers of My Life and people who think that Fahenheit 9/11 is sober and plausible is undoubtedly extremely large.
It doesn't matter that this demonization is irrational even from a liberal point of view. If the most retrograde policies favored by a combination of National Review, The Weekly Standard, Commentary and the Wall Street Journal's editorial page were all to be enacted, the country would return to the status quo circa 1970. I was alive and an adult then, and, while I may not be acutely observant, I did not notice that American society was in those days conspicuously oppressive. We were not living under the right-wing Christian regime for which the "Taliban wing of the Republican Party" allegedly yearns. A reasonable liberal ought not to be horrified by the prospect of a conservative resurgence, just as reasonable conservatives don't denounce the Clinton Administration as a socialist juggernaut. Unfortunately, reasonable liberals don't set the tone of contemporary liberal politics.
As I have argued before, the United States in the early 21st Century resembles the Roman Republic of the 1st Century B.C. in one ominous respect: the factional hatred that potentially could tear it apart without any aid from external enemies. The motives for Clinton worship are unhappily consistent with that fear.