"The Clinton Years' on Public TV

PBS, not your network for breaking news, devoted four hours last week to the life and times of America's formerly most famous couple, Bill and Hillary Clinton.

The Clintons made marriage itself the subject of "their" presidency. Their tenure was memorable, as Bill lamented, neither for a war nor a depression (although his policies would help set up both for his successor). But it was fated from the beginning to distill itself into a single tag line: "I did not have sex with that woman."

Scandal aside, though, what is there now to say about the Clinton presidency?

The PBS documentary dutifully slogs through Clinton's Arkansas boyhood, when his future political career was sealed by his presidential handshake with JFK. The camera caught this moment, as it did the ropeline moment with Monica Lewinsky 30-some years later. (You catch the same glint of starstruck idealism and shrewd calculation in both their eyes.)

But the story begins with the eye contact between Bill and Hillary at Yale. Typically, at least as the tale is told, Hillary made the first move, telling Bill that if they kept on staring at each other they might as well introduce themselves.

The ultimate yokel

After Yale, Hillary landed a job in Washington and, as the script implies, was ready to begin her own ascent before deciding to throw it all over to join her "hick" (as Bill is described) in Arkansas. Her friends were appalled, but Hillary saw the diamond in the rough— the script entertains not the least doubt that Clinton was destined for the presidency, and that his political gifts were meant to be complemented by Hillary's intellectual ones.

It was only a matter of time before the savviest pol of his generation and the brainiest gal ever to grace the White House would persuade that ultimate yokel, the American voting public, to give them their due.

Clinton is described as being without serious political challenge for the Democratic nomination in 1992, but in fact the road opened up for him only after the front-runner, New York Governor Mario Cuomo, dropped out of the race. Why Cuomo did so remains one of the untold stories of American politics, although rumors abounded of a skeleton in his closet. Skeletons didn't faze Clinton, as he demonstrated in dealing with his first major bimbo eruption, Jennifer Flowers.

The pattern was set here for the psychodrama of the presidency itself: the repentant sinner and the aggressively forgiving wife. Many a heartland couple had doubtless stood where Bill and Hillary did; the difference was that Hillary played the traditional role with a feminist twist, and her line on the occasion— "I'm not Tammy Wynette, standing by my man"— became her signature quote. Forgiveness, she silently assured women, was not submission; the pound of flesh would be exacted.

"'Political genius' myth

This approach wouldn't have played, however, without Bill's resilience as a philanderer. Although people for some reason still speak with awe of his political gifts, what he really had was the charm of the born seducer. In Ronald Reagan, we'd elected an entertainer as president for the first time; now we would have the first entertainment presidency itself.

The tabloid tone continues as PBS moves through Clinton's first term, dutifully chronicling the disasters in Somalia, Rwanda and Bosnia, the health care debacle, the Republican sweep of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, and the infamous 1995 shutdown of the federal government.

As one who lived in some amazement through those events, I find the idea of Bill Clinton as a political genius beyond risible. Few presidents have ever trashed a first term more thoroughly.

Saved by Gingrich

Clinton recovered only when his personal savior, Newt Gingrich, overreached, and when he began plying the dark arts of Dick Morris, who is featured as a talking head in the documentary without being identified as the father of triangulation. Morris argued, essentially, that the political narrative of America crafted by a succession of Republican presidents— that liberal government was the source of the nation's woes— was intractable, and that Clinton could survive only by co-opting as much as possible of GOP agenda.

This advice, translated into (among other things) a welfare reform act that, by the calculation of Clinton's own team, threw a million children into poverty, was duly adopted and so religiously followed that Bob Dole, the actual Republican standard-bearer, was heard to complain during the 1996 presidential campaign that Clinton had stolen his playbook.

None of this is discussed in The Clinton Years, although brief mention is made that the welfare reform bill irked a couple of (unnamed) officials into resignation. (Couldn't Marian Wright Edelman be found?)

Bush's unfinished business

In reality, the "New Democrat" Clinton had already made his obeisances to Wall Street by enacting NAFTA, the major unfinished legislation of the first Bush administration, and by carrying out its mandate to cut the budget deficit bequeathed by the Reagan and Bush years at the expense of social programs. Clinton's new Treasury secretary, Robert Rubin, is interviewed here as a wise elder, but no mention is made in the documentary of his role in these matters, arguably the most crucial legacy of the Clinton years. In fact, no mention is made of the repeal of the Glass-Steagall Act at all.

Re-elected and, once again the "Comeback Kid" (a self-description the filmmakers happily adopt as their own leitmotif), Clinton runs almost at once into the Lewinsky scandal, to which the film devotes a full 40 minutes. We are back on familiar turf, with Clinton entrapped by the overlapping scandal of his alleged encounter with Paula Jones.

The question of why Clinton lied for a full eight months about Lewinsky is finessed by a couple of loyalists: Obviously, husbands do lie, and the breach of presidential privacy was a far greater offense than a casual affair, however inappropriate.

Chelsea to the rescue

Clinton's second term would be defined and largely consumed by the Lewinsky scandal and by the quasi-farcical impeachment with which, if you'll pardon the pun, it climaxed. Once again, the event is cast as a family drama, with daughter Chelsea literally holding the estranged Clintons together when the truth is finally revealed.

Perhaps the saddest line in the four hours of film is Clinton's proffered excuse for the Lewinsky affair: that when he came to the White House he had to shut himself down physically. What more rueful and revealing a confession could be given of the intimate state of America's most famous political marriage?

The Clinton Years wants to elicit our sympathy for the Comeback Kid and his Queen, even in their travesty rags— at times it seems scripted by their own speechwriters— but it's also an opening salvo for a Clinton restoration in 2016. It can be no accident that the film ends with Hillary's triumphant election to the Senate in November 2000. Cattily, it remarks that she won her seat even as Al Gore was losing his bid to succeed Clinton as president. Cannily, it omits the fact that Gore carried New York State by a far larger margin than she did.

The next time PBS airs a political infomercial, it should label it as such.♦


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