Clinton on Being President
No, this is not a review of My Life. I don't yet have the book and given its size, it will take me a while to read it.
My friend Tommy told me today that he went to the premiere of The Hunting of The President and was surprised to find out that Bill Clinton was in the audience watching it at the same time as he was. At the end, as Tommy described it, Bill got up and gave an amazing history lesson on presidents and politics since the time of George Washington.
I know that there's a lot of people out there who hate Bill Clinton. I am not one of them. In fact, I love the guy. I wish I had been there. Apparently, Jeff Jarvis was.
Fred.....'hate' is a pretty strong word. 'Dislike' probably fits....and Clinton continues to serve plenty of justification for some people to maintain their position. Consider:
According to Jarvis's terrific post, Clinton states "The personal animosity I engendered, maybe that's because there's something about me they just didn't like...".
Elsewhere in the Jarvis post Clinton is quoted labeling anyone who votes republication a 'Pavlovian creature'.
Presidential record aside....Clinton could have learned a thing or two from Dale Carnegie.
Posted by: Bill | June 17, 2004 at 08:53 PM
unfortunately, "hate" is a pretty accurate word for how the opposition to either party feels these days. I wish we could get back to a time when the word "dislike" was as far as things went, there's too much hate in politics today, on either side of the aisle.
Posted by: jeff | June 18, 2004 at 12:17 AM
Even though I'm not much of a Clinton fan (or detractor), it was one of Jeff's better posts of late, IMHO.
Did Jeff blog it live or was it postplay? I'm guessing the latter.
Either way, in this post you can really see his trained-journalist skills coming in handy. The guy's amazing.
Posted by: hugh macleod | June 18, 2004 at 08:41 AM
Someone, anyone, please tell me what was so bad about peace and prosperity.
Posted by: Alice Marshall | June 20, 2004 at 02:23 PM
Alice -
The "peace and prosperity" you mention was the result of lax enforcement by the Clinton administration of business law and the failure to confront the foreign policy problems he was faced with.
On the business side, Clinton gave us the dot-com bubble and the corporate governance scandals, costing millions of investors their money and savings.
In the international realm, Clinton failed to act against Osama and al Qaeda, even though they repeatedly declared their intentions and attacked us.
Clinton also did nothing about the NorKor problem, except to give them nuclear technology in exchange for empty promises, resulting in the current situation we face.
What else did Clinton do? Hmmmm...
About AIDS in AFrica? Nothing.
About Israeli-Palestinian situation? His "negotiations" resulted in the Second Intifada, killing over 1000 innocent Israelis.
Shall I go on?
Rwanda? By Clinton's own admission, he failed there.
Slavery in Sudan? Nada.
Women's apartheid in the Islamic World? Zilch.
I could go on, really, but you're not paying attention anyways and Fred's too busy sticking his head in the sand...
Posted by: Zander | June 20, 2004 at 03:08 PM