The problem with the Clintons

In a different world, with different Clintons — the idealized ones, not the real ones — Hill and Bill might have given more serious thought to their current endeavor. If she’s elected, her husband would not only be the first first gentleman, but a former president carrying the influence and power of that position.

George Washington was painfully aware that everything he did set a precedent, so he endeavored to set them with care and character. Bill Clinton set off in his usual fashion, the smartest man in the room, too smart for his own good. The Southern intellectual who forgot the redneck’s last words: "Hey, y’all, watch this!" With the Clintonian combination of recklessness and carelessness, he alone may have cost his wife the nomination by alienating so many in the South Carolina primary.

The Founders of this Republic frowned on anything smacking of the dynastic. And even when sons have followed fathers — twice — it hasn’t worked out well. Not for nothing did George H.W. Bush jokingly call his son "Quincy." The Clintons propose something far closer to real dynasty. He will be there, like his wife before him, as buy-one-get-two co-president. And, as usual, they seemed to be unaware of the magnitude of their ambition, and the care with which it needed to be presented to the nation.

Yet this may be one of the lesser problems with Hillary Clinton.

The danger of a return to the 1990s, a catch-phrase of the anti-Clinton forces, is not polarization and Monica. The nation will be polarized whomever wins — the stakes of the future are that high, the world views more profoundly split than anytime in my lifetime. And Bill may well find fresh trouble with his front-runner, but what else is new?

The largest dangers are two-fold. First, historians will someday gain the necessary distance to see the Clinton presidency largely as a failure. Worse, it might have been the last chance to right the course of American self-government before the nation spiraled into a bankrupt, decadent corporate state with worker-bees distracted by electronic gizmos and cheap trinkets from China.

The stumbling began immediately, picking a needless fight over gays in the military, and dragging out a health-care plan concocted in Cheney like secrecy that gave anti-reform forces plenty of time to build a firewall. The plan was complicated enough to please a kommissar. No one seemed to consider the simple idea of extending Medicare to all. The twin disasters allowed a well-armed and -financed right to take Congress and the ’90s were off and running.

Bill Clinton never again tried anything but the small and cosmetic, at a time when large calamities were gathering, among them global warming, energy shortages and terrorism. Clinton failed to use the bully pulpit even when faced with GOP stonewalling.

Clinton pushed for NAFTA (and my hands aren’t clean, either — I supported it as a columnist) and other trade liberalizations without thinking through the consequences. He presided over deregulation that ultimately cost millions of well-paid jobs with benefits and pensions. He approved media deregulation that further deprived a free people of the news essential for self-government. He and Alan Greenspan pumped up the first of the giant bubbles that seem to be the only way now to keep the debt-strapped, hollowed-out American economy going. And all the while, the elite kept getting more powerful, more able to counter the will of democratic action.

This matters for Hillary Clinton because she was not sitting home baking cookies. She was in the thick of policymaking, especially on health care. Forget W’s record. I’d love to hear the corporate media ask Hillary about her husband’s record and where she would part company with him.

The second problem is that the times are at odds with Clintonian half-measures, all the policy-wonk blather she does so well that at the end of the day doesn’t much turn the ship of state. The challenges are too big. Her Senate record shows much of this tacking with the status quo.

I’m not fully sold on Obama. But his skill as a rhetorician alone is not to be underestimated, particularly in the service of a good cause. Reagan simply went over the heads of Congress and the media.

What’s not reported — it conflicts with the media storyline — is that Obama is a baby boomer, too. Our first baby boomer president was a case study of wasted potential. The second has been a disaster of the first magnitude. He displayed every bad tendency of my g-g-g-eneration.

We won’t get fooled again.

I hope.