US Presidents, Day 42: Clinton

[gorkay]

All judgments of his presidency are provisional and speculative because of my thirty-year rule (you can't fairly judge a president until he's been out of office for about thirty years), but:

I would rate him as our best president since Truman, very effective in both domestic and foreign policy, a great communicator, a man who sincerely cared about people and their problems and tried to do something about them. A lot of the criticism about him is incredibly naive: he's ambitious (who gets to be president without a lot of ambition), he's duplicitous (hardly the only president in history who could be accused of such), he tailors his so-called beliefs to fit public opinion (ditto), his wife tells him what to think (Ronald Reagan's wife didn't?), he's ruthless to his political enemies (more ruthless than Richard Nixon?). And that's leaving out the sillier and/or more libelous accusations.

Politically, he's a very important figure, because he showed the Democrats that it was still possible for them to win the presidency, and showed them how, in the face of predictions from friend and foe alike that they were doomed to lose every four years in the foreseeable future. Personally, he's a man of great strengths and great flaws. It's to his discredit that he allowed the flaws to become the issue that they did, and to harm his ability to advocate and implement policies that could have helped a lot of people. It's to his credit that he has acknowledged this and tried to atone for it. As an ex-president, he is doing more good in the world than any since Jimmy Carter, and his bipartisan dealings with ex-President Bush are setting a good example in this age of ideological polarization.