meet the new bill, same as the old bill
Theories have arisen as to why Bill Clinton has behaved ineptly and inanely, offending blacks and misstating facts and angrily denying having plainly made those misstatements of fact.
His wife has taken to sending him to small towns, like the Republicans did to conceal Dan Quayle in 1988.
One suggestion is medical. It’s that heart surgery weakened Our Boy Bill.
Another is that he got out of political practice while traveling the world to give big-dollar speeches filled with hollow platitudes and beheld by rapt, adoring audiences. When you are the toast of the global community, the little matter of an intra-party political contest in South Carolina or Nevada can seem positively beneath you. So you take it lightly, like a heavily favored football team. The next thing you know it’s half-time and you’ve fumbled more than you’ve scored.
I buy the rustiness theory, but not the medical one. And I offer two other thoughts.
The first is that Clinton always has been prone this way, famously undisciplined, given to untruth, hypersensitivity and temper, ever in need of a Hillary Clinton or a Betsey Wright to put her foot down and save him from his wild-hair instincts. But now Betsey is fighting the death penalty from the shores of Beaver Lake and Hillary also is otherwise busy. So he’s out there as a political lion without his tamer.
It has ever been so. He blew his first gubernatorial term amid fits of headline-making pique. He blew his first national political chance with a ponderously awful speech at a Democratic national convention. He once announced for re-election as governor by saying he really didn’t have any desire to run. He got so mad at me that he sent me notes that his staff was horrified to learn about.
As president, he got so furious at Brit Hume (understandably) that his staff had to collar him. He waved his finger and said he didn’t have sex with that woman. He went to Texas and said he was wrong to have raised taxes so much on rich people, which cut the legs out from under Democrats in Congress who had bitten the bullet for him, and who would soon lose their majority in disastrous mid-term elections.
Meet the new Bill, same as the old Bill.