Bill Clinton in Biblical Perspective

My first reaction to the release of Bill Clinton's autobiography was amazement, that the book's first reviewers could tell us so quickly what we should get out of it --- not much.

Frankly, I doubt that these guys could have read it carefully enough to reach this conclusion responsibly. More likely, they had their minds made up already about Mr. Clinton's make-up, and they used what they encountered in cursory looks at his book to fill in around the edges of long locked-in certitude. And so, they ring only the same wind-worn chimes about the Clinton era. Hillary's book got the same treatment.

For all of their tendentiousness, however, the early reviewers of My Life nevertheless have been able effectively to re-launch the one rhetorical shower-blast, to borrow a phrase from Kierkegaard, that will keep on pummeling Bill Clinton until, in a phrase of his own, the last dog dies. Its theme is the squandering of the opportunities that the former President's immense talent and political gifts opened up, however briefly, to the American people. He could have done so much, the refrain goes, if he weren't --- check your own favorites --- so hungry for others' admiration, so wonky about social policy, so self-aggrandizing, so disloyal to faithful associates, so priapic, so… so… so…

Two things about this indictment should be more troubling than they have been, especially to people who strive to be as loyal to their country's principles as they are faithful to their churches' biblicism. The first is the anomaly of demanding a transcendent perfection in the leader of a government whose system of checks and balances presupposes the fallibility of every citizen, and the importance of keeping power diffused across three branches rather than concentrated in just one. The system works best when we keep expectations of all politicians on the low rather than the high side, and aligned with what we in fact get from most of them: something a lot less than their best, because they and we almost always act from what is less than the best in us.

Clinton's presidency is likely to be remembered more for the scale of its missed opportunities than for the missed opportunities themselves. Bigger than most of his predecessors in so many different respects, Clinton's humanness simply requires a bigger mural for its full display. Nine hundred plus pages haven't even begun to do it.

The second thing to note about the squandered opportunities refrain is how foolish it sounds against a major theme of the Bible. Lest we forget, both the Old and New Testaments are crammed to overflowing with references to people who misuse from the first moments of their appearance in history every last one of the divine capacities with which they are endowed as part of their created nature. The pages depict in all their ingloriousness people who represented with an eerie perfection the pattern which each and every one who comes after them exhibits shamelessly to a world falling steadily under the sway of a widening human corruption. As we have in every one of them from Adam to Saul (both of them), we have met the enemy in Bill Clinton, too --- and the enemy is us.

A lot of people have allowed themselves either to be charmed by Bill Clinton, or to excoriate him, for the same reason: he is just the kind of rascal they themselves would most like to be. There is something especially ironic about this. For of all the dishonorable people we love to read about, Mr. Clinton seems the least willing to carry our own yearnings for us. He is too preoccupied with his own. Perhaps it is his failure to accommodate us in this regard that made impeaching him so irresistible, even though we surely should have known that dissipating so much vital energy for governing the country on such a preposterous cause called us into question far more than it did him.

Bill Clinton can serve as an important and helpful case study for those of us who are working hard at becoming better loggers, that is, seriously committed to getting the logs out of our own eyes rather than fixing their gaze on the specks in others'. He serves even better than does the woman taken in adultery as an example of someone at whom we can with great profit practice not hurling the first stone. He is, after all, only --- a man, merely human. Just like everyone in the Bible is, at least until the really human one finally showed up.