President Clinton was often mocked for his declarations that he still believed “in a place called Hope.” But he understood that instilling hope is a critical part of leadership. Other than a few special interest programs — like cutting taxes on the wealthy and giving various incentives to business — it is hard to think of areas in which the Bush administration has raised the nation’s hopes and met them. This president has, instead, tried to focus the American people on the fear of terrorism, for which there is no cure, only bad choices or something worse.
Part of Mr. Bush’s legacy may well be that he robbed America of its optimism — a force that Franklin Delano Roosevelt and other presidents, like Ronald Reagan, used to rally the country when it was deeply challenged. The next generation of leaders will have to resell discouraged Americans on the very idea of optimism, and convince them again that their goal should not be to live with their ailments, but to cure them.
I think there is a great deal to this argument. Talk to any conservative who admires Reagan and one of the first things you will hear is that Reagan restored a sense of American greatness. He restored optimism. He believed that it could be Morning in America again, and that we were a shining city on a hill. Independent of his actual legacy as president, which historians will continue to debate for decades, it would be hard to take seriously any argument that did not give credence to Reagan's disposition, from which so many of his values and policies flowed. Thankfully, the extreme perceptions of Reagan -- the demonization from the left and the canonization from the right -- is steadily giving way to a historiography that acknowledges the man's manifest strengths while taking serious aim at his administration's flaws.
We have not yet reached a similar stage with Clinton, whose reputation is similarly polarizing but will change as time softens (or marginalizes) both his most dogged detractors and his most blinkered apologists. And what I suspect that we will get is a picture of a charming, optimistic, well-intentioned centrist with an overactive libido operating in an increaingly poisonous culture. As Cohen implies, mock the man who believed in a place called Hope all you would like. It will still be hard to taint Clinton as someone who did not carry forward a sense of optimism that worked to such an extent that he could get things accomplished -- welfare reform, say, or inaction in the face of genocide in Rwanda -- all the while maintaining, indeed strengthening his hold on, constituencies that seemingly should have been most turned off by such action or inaction.
Think also of LBJ, whose greatest successes stemmed from a profound sense of optimism. Think of his "We shall overcome" reference when he signed the Voting Rights Act, or his "Great Society." These were fundamentally optimistic in spirit and scope. LBJ effectively foundered on the shoals of a loss of this optimism, when it became unsustainable in the face of the morass, both at home and abroad, of Vietnam.
This is not to celebrate optimism for optimism's sake. Scratch an optimist in almost all of these cases and you find a political realist, or worse, a cynic. But it is to say that in maintaining a generally optimistic outloook, these politicians experienced their greatest successes. When that optimism waned, things went awry. But to echo the Cohen piece, and to add an extra historical analogy, hasn't the Bush administration crushed optimism? We hope things will go well even if we feel that maybe we are whistling past the graveyard. The George W. Bush years feel to me a lot like the Carter years. Except that Bush has brought a lot more of the current malaise upon himself.
Two-and-a-half years is a long time. Much can change. But it does not much feel like morning in America, and it's been a long time since many of us have visited that place called Hope.
2 comments:
We have not yet reached a similar stage with Clinton, whose reputation is similarly polarizing but will change as time softens (or marginalizes) both his most dogged detractors and his most blinkered apologists. And what I suspect that we will get is a picture of a charming, optimistic, well-intentioned centrist with an overactive libido operating in an increaingly poisonous culture.
I think this is a great quote and I pretty much have a similar perspective of Clinton (as someone who neither really loved him nor hated him all that much). But I think one of the other valid criticisms given by his detractors was that he conveyed a lack of conviction - perhaps not to the absolute or extreme degree that they characterize it, but it come across as less pronounced than was Reagan's, particularly in foreign affairs and particularly when it came to his approach of how to massage initially unpopular or poorly understood stands in our foreign policy.
Perhaps this justifiably represented the uncertainty (though accompanied by a much more real sense of possibilities) in an era of unprecedented globalization, economic expansion and technological innovation.
But the one area where his convictions did impress me (and many others) was when he was willing to stand up to a newly Republican-controlled congress to the point where the government had to be shut down, and to the detriment of largely the standing of their own party in the eyes of the American people.
Interestingly, when pressed to note something that he admired about Clinton's presidency, candidate George W. Bush referred to Clinton's resolve in standing up to Congress.
Perhaps this is not the strongest strand, but it's an interesting one to note, given the behavior of the current administration and the ready and direct (at least, when not hem-hawed or implied) say-so with which it tends meets George Bush's approval.
MUL --
I tend to agree that Clinton's centrism is a bit of a mixed blessing. Obviously he was oftentimes criticized for letting the polls dictate his opinions, but this is something I do not believe. I think that this is the cross that centrists have to bear.
I do not really consider myself a centrist, as my domestic politics are on the left, but my views on some aspects of foreign policy are more centrist than most democrats, even if on issues ranging from Africa to human rights issues I am comfortably on the left. But in a lot of ways i admire centrism, and I cannot help but wonder whether or not Clinton's centrist liberalism won't end up being his saving grace when the chits are counted.
I agree with you fully in admiring the stands Clinton took with regard to the government shutdowns. It will be interesting to see what GWB does if faced with a democratic House or Senate.
dcat
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