As much of an empathetic posture he managed to present, no one really expected him to spend his retirement building houses with Jimmy Carter, but after the bypass it was hard to see him chasing poon again. Elective office was probably out of the question, Hillary lost the nomination, and the only cooter he was going to get from now on would have to be under heavy medical supervision and promise a greater-than-average chance of a state funeral and decades-long rumors of a 25-year-old secretary with no secretarial skills getting a lifetime stipend from the Clinton Estate.
So what to do with a randy ex-President in his pasture years–too old for stud but still too young for the glue factory, and that last, glorious Preakness so far behind him that people recall it in the grainy Super-8 film of their memories? What is the passion, the life force that’s going to sustain him in the decades to come, where his posterity, his library, his grandchildren, and his national monuments await?
Anger, perhaps. Targeted, committed, methodic anger.
It’s a mood that once seemed ill suited to the notoriously smooth and seemingly imperturbable Clinton, from his days as baby-faced party wunderkind to 42nd President of the United States to much-beloved elder statesman. That unruffled countenance burst into flames mid-air about the time that the aftereffects of his heart surgery began and, presumably, the extra-marital blowjobs ended.
The new volatile Bill wasn’t widely noted at first. There was a nearly bottomless reservoir of goodwill the ex-President could draw on. When he pulled away from Washington, D.C. that bleak January day in 2001 was the last anyone could remember of peace and prosperity. His Republican successor was daily turning a once proud and generally well-liked country into an emotional, political, and diplomatic Superfund site. Two Democratic standard bearers would have been better with Marcia Clark and Chris Darden running their campaigns, turning two elections that should have been home run derbies into an embarrassing series of flaccid ground balls easily fielded by a small posse of angry pretend Christians with big bank accounts, an egomaniacal consumer advocate 30 years past his prime, and a nation taught to be terrified of a cave-dwelling diabetic its leaders were too disinterested to catch.
Clinton nostalgia was all the rage in 2004, and there was even wistful debate about whether John Kerry could appoint Clinton as his running mate. The fantasy baseball scenario was even more tantalizing to Bill Partisans with the added hypothetical of Kerry resigning on January 22, 2005 and handing the reins back to the Man from Hope. (Technically, it would probably have been Constitutional, but the Republicans would have been literally apoplectic, and a GOP body count of 1,000 Jonestowns might have given the Dems a numbers advantage in the mid-terms but would have started the kind of blood feud that has brought down entire civilizations).
As the 2008 elections drew near and the Bush Administration was running out of America to break, when it looked as if the Democrats couldn’t lose unless they nominated Marcia Clark and Chris Darden, the country seemed ready to stencil “The Clintons” back on the White House mail box. Of course, they couldn’t have Bill back, but with a term and change in the Senate under her belt, Hillary was newly beloved, and with Bill tagging along the country would be getting, again, “two for the price of one.”
But then that scrawny upstart from Chicago had to go and ruin everything. So recently adored, Bill Clinton was suddenly the favorite uncle letting the kids see him drunk for the first time. “Managing Bill” became a recurring, nearly daily theme on a mortally wounded Hillary campaign that for months refused to accept last rites. The once rock-solid President who endured years of battering at the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Richard Melon Scaife, Kenneth Starr, Tom DeLay, Newt Gingrich and a million fellow travelers with an ever wink and a smile, was suddenly lashing out at the slightest provocation–the media, Hillary’s staff, Barack Obama. Some say he even cost Hillary the VP nomination because the last thing Barack Obama wanted to find in his office the first thing every morning was a stack of hectoring, second-guessing emails and text messages from Bill.
With a confused Democratic electorate grasping for answers of why their beloved Babe Ruth had turned into Ty Cobb, Vanity Fair’s Todd Purdum issued a scathing prognosis in a 10,000 VF piece last year that Clinton’s 2004 bypass surgery changed him irreparably, manifesting itself first in a sort of “post-partum depression” common among bypass recipients, and exacerbated by the powerful repertoire of mood-altering medications that ruled the President’s days.
In an effort to refute Purdum’s thesis about the former President’s anger issues, Clinton offered an immediate rebuttal–a spitting, livid rebuttal.
For a nation of erstwhile fans desperate for answers that weren’t there, it was easy, albeit heartbreaking, to resign themselves to the reality of their once-revered President beset with ever-worsening fits of distemper, sure to devolve, into seething hatred, paroxysms of rage, and finally, madness and death.
What no one really considered, though, was that this might not be self-destruction, but reconstruction. Where many saw a downward spiral, few saw a man in flux, adjustment, learning to live with the New Him like any other man, woman, or child who has been confronted with a life-altering condition. The President was simply trying to find his new level.
To anyone really paying attention, it seems like his years of unmanaged fury are behind him. Don’t believe pie-eyed Pollyanna jobs like Peter Baker’s upcoming New York Times magazine profile on the former President, “The Mellowing of Bill Clinton.” Read between the lines and you’ll see that this isn’t a man mellowed, but a man recalibrated and rejuvenated. Bill Richardson has already been put on notice that his disloyalty in endorsing Barack Obama in last year’s primary will not be forgotten–ever. And Ted Kennedy? He’s going to have to do a lot better than a brain tumor to win any sympathy from the former President after the knife he planted between the Clinton shoulder blades with his own Obama endorsement.
To the uneducated, anger seems contra-indicated to living a long and healthy life after a very real episode of heart trauma, but there is a school of thought that says anger, properly managed, can be a force as restorative, enriching, and life-giving as tai chi, yoga, reiki, or any of the so-called “healing arts.”
Regardless of what the many psychologists and cardiologists say, it’s not a bad way to live, really. Buddy Rich carried a rage that caused miscarriages and ear-bleeding headaches within a four-county radius, and he practically achieved the male life expectancy of his day. Imagine if he’d learned how to tap that seething hatred and use it for good.
It’s not an easy haul, of course. It’s still a nascent science. Due to time constraints in posting this piece, I was unable to solicit the opinion of the former President or his staff on my own assessments of the President’s dispositive turnaround. I can only appreciate what I observe and what I know of the President’s hardscrabble political underpinnings.
Of course, it’s highly improbable that he’ll take his grudge with Ted Kennedy to a physical extreme, but it’s unfashionable, impolitic, and even of questionable humanity to speak ill of the lion of the Senate, the last stalwart of Camelot. With his upcoming comments in the Baker NYT piece, the President has crossed a verboten line with restraint but resolve, and is demonstrably in control of his bile in a way that he wasn’t on the campaign trail last year. Yet by that very control, he’s clearly indicated that not only does he have no intention of mellowing, but he’s going to take his anger and make it his cudgel.
And he’s only teed off on the terminally ill Kennedy and doughy but benign turncoat Richardson. Imagine what he has percolating for the likes of Starr, Gingrich, and company.
“Mellow”? Hardly. Surly to bed, surly to rise, and sleeping with the enmity all the while have reinvented Bill Clinton.
