Dickens on the Potomac

Watching Barack Obama’s foreign policy flopping like a Minnesota perch on a White Bear Lake dock this week (as every other week since January 20, 2009) and enduring yet another dose of his wife’s hortative obsession with the size of the collective American bootay—to say nothing of the occasionally slipping-out utterances, when their true natures get the better of them, of the racism-tinged resentment they harbor for many of us, their fellow citizens—I shake my head in wonder for the zillionth time: How did this arrogant overrated swaggerer out of nowhere and his angry bigoted wife wind up running the country? And will the two of them excite as much fond nostalgia, when they’re exiled back to their Hyde Park digs and their black-liberation-theology church, as the Clintons and the Kennedys have done?

There’s still a certain pleasure—maybe it’s a touch unseemly, but whatever—in the memory of Ma and Pa Clinton struggling to hold things together during the dark hours of his impeachment. The astounding rapacity, the infantile self-indulgence, the voracious appetite for things lowdown and dirty that had cruised with him like balanus balanoides from Hope to Little Rock to the White House and allowed him to permit himself to sully the presidency and then lie about it, baldly, made Mr. Clinton a figure of contempt: “I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. . . . These allegations are false.” No, wait, I mean, “Indeed, I did have a relationship with Miss Lewinsky that was not appropriate. In fact, it was wrong.” Uh huh. His wife—in her incarnation as Arkansas’s first lady and then America’s—with her smug piety and frosty acquisitiveness, was as alienating as her husband was weak: Cattle futures? Sharp banking practices? “Shoulda, coulda, woulda.”  Mr. Clinton’s Oval Office romp? “This is—the great story here for anybody willing to find it and write about it and explain it is this vast right-wing conspiracy that has been conspiring against my husband since the day he announced for president.” Exactly.

Did they remind us of the Kennedys? Yes, though probably not in quite the way they’d hoped and expected to do so. The private bargains of the two couples were not our business, but the violation of the office of the presidency most certainly was. Both men needed wives sharp-tongued and virtuous, but liked their squeezes soft and raunchy. Mr. Clinton was hard at it with Miss Lewinsky in 1995 and 1996, but he’d already been outmanned by his declared idol, JFK: Marilyn Monroe vs. Gennifer Flowers, Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky? Any questions? And could a U. S. president—never mind his wife’s Frenchified elegant cultivation and the Camelot-as-imagined-by-Broadway-lyricists occupied by his retinue—get any cruder or more sordid than sharing a mistress with Chicago mob bosses? Had he been exposed then, would JFK have lied to Americans about it? We can’t know, owing to Lee Harvey Oswald and the corrupt Kennedy-worshipping of the White House press corps, Ted Sorensen, Arthur Schlesinger, and the rest of his obsequious retainers. But it’s fair to surmise he would have done as much to salvage his presidency as his Papa had done to get it for him. And really, was there ever a president’s father more vulgar or avaricious—or more prepared to flout convention and the law to get his son elected president—than Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr.? Or complicit biographers more eager to beatify their subject? Or, for that matter, a pair of brothers more shamelessly willing to profit from proximity, pre- and especially post-mortem, to their sibling? Only in Shakespeare—or Dickens.

There was no trace of Shakespeare, or Boston ward-heeling, or bootlegging, or vote-stealing, or Las Vegas crime-syndicating in the Clinton orbit, but Dickensian crudity there was in ample supply. That, if it occasionally seemed at odds with Bill’s rockin’-rollin’ technocraticism and Hillary’s holier-than-thou sexual-revolution priggishness—and their joint 1960s-born sense of entitlement—shimmered in the sub-tropical oleaginous Little Rock air, permeating their skins for nearly two decades before they arrived in Washington and unpacked the first generation of draft-dodging baby-boomers onto the White House lawn to grow there like Topsy.

What Mr. Clinton did have that Mr. Kennedy hadn’t was time to unfold himself in full as a liberal-world-orderist; but no matter—he was as disappointing on this score, even occasionally to himself, as JFK had showed promise he would be during the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Khrushchev spanking, to name an obvious few. Mrs. Shoulda-Coulda-Woulda’s husband sat on his hands as the Rwandan genocide took place (“I blew it”), watched the (first) al Qaeda bombing of the World Trade Center, the U.S. embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, and the U.S.S. Cole, without responding, tried desperately to curry favor with the blood-stained Yasser Arafat, hosting the terrorist at the White House thirteen times—more often than any other foreign . . . leader, if “leader” be the word for what that creature was—in a hopeless attempt to secure the chimerical Middle East Peace. And all the while engaging in, then lying about, then defending his “not appropriate” relationship with Miss Lewinsky, and who knows how many others.

Which brings me back to crassness Obamaesque: It isn’t about sex, or the definition of sexual relations, or the meaning of the word “is”; and it isn’t about French-accented elegance-covered venality, even if venality there surely has been in their lives, or about French chefs in the White House kitchen—though in part it does involve the kitchen garden sowed, so they say, by Mrs. Obama’s own personal two hands, with the help of a bunch of elementary school students (some of the same children, maybe, who’ve been deprived by her husband and his co-teachers-union-religionists in Congress—whose own children attend private schools—of access to the vouchers and grants for the private-school educations their parents are so desperate to get for them?), and used as a trowel to shovel good nutrition down our throats. 


It’s the hagiolatry, including Mr. Obama’s own two contributions to the published literature, elaborating his stratospheric brilliance, it’s the brazen vanity of the man: “I have a gift,” “Every place is Barack Obama country once Barack Obama’s been there,” and, best of all, given two years’ worth of foreign-policy disasters, “foreign policy is the area where I am probably most confident that I know more and understand the world better than Senator Clinton or Senator McCain”; it’s the ugly (and duplicitous) disloyalty to old friends when they’ve stood in the way of the main chance: “I never heard [Reverend Wright] say some of the things that have people upset.” No, I mean, “Our relations with Trinity [United Church of Christ] have been strained by the divisive statements of Reverend Wright, which sharply conflict with our own views.” Or “We've got a governor in Rod Blagojevich who has delivered consistently on behalf of the people of Illinois.” That is, “I believe the best resolution would be for the Governor to resign his office and allow a lawful and appropriate process of succession to take place”; and it’s the shameless whining about the great good fortune of being president of the United States: “You know, the typical president, I think, has two or three big problems. We’ve got seven or eight big problems,” that are so vulgar.

Add to this the remnant of the racism that punctuated his wife’s senior thesis at Princeton (“Regardless of the circumstances under which I interact with whites at Princeton, it often seems as if, to them, I will always be black first and a student second”) and rises to the surface in both of them from time to time, like pond scum after a storm—“For the first time in my adult lifetime, I'm really proud of my country, and not just because Barack has done well, but because I think people are hungry for change”—and you have a pair as comically and tragically Dickensian as ever the Kennedys and Clintons were. Alas that all their comedic drama must also be imprinted on our memories, and some of it even in our history books.