Where Is The Love?

Reviewing John Harris's The Survivor*, Alan Ehrahalt makes a point worth taking on :

Roosevelt made enormous and sometimes reckless changes in the American government and economy, and when his critics loathed him for it, he loathed them back. ''They are unanimous in their hate for me'' he said of them in his 1936 re-election campaign, ''and I welcome their hatred.'' Clinton, on the other hand, was a centrist who undertook no dramatic transformations of society or government and, what was more, showed himself to be an instinctive conciliator who believed in compromise almost to a fault.

Ehrahalt is comparing, here, the deep-seated hatred for Clinton with the only "recent" president loathed enough to be used as precedent -- and you have to go back 75 years to find one  Moreover, he's right.  In 1992, a Democrat who eschewed liberalism beat a Republican who violated conservatism.  Republicans should have been bouncing off the walls.  Not only did their ideological betrayor find defeat, thus serving as a head-on-pike example for future tax-raising Republicans, but the Democrat who did win was shifting the party right!  Once Clinton entered office, he failed on some minor thing (gays in the military), some big things (health care), and succeeded on a variety of conservative-friendly ventures (NAFTA, welfare reform, deficit reduction).  Nothing truly liberal squeezed through, the welfare state did not grow, the government, in fact, shrank, and the country was generally run from between the poles. 

So why, exactly, did the right hate Clinton with the fire of a thousand suns?  Boomer ethics has been the refrain, they hated his sexual appetite, his generational difference.  But what then of Newt Gingrich, also an eggheaded boomer who switched wives like they had a shelf date?  Hell, compared to him, Clinton's marriage was a picture of rock-solid stability.  Was it that Clinton was too good?  Too eloquent, too smart, too attractive, too successful? 

Maybe it was, I really don't know.  But the fact remains that what the right hated about Clinton was ineffable, unexplainable.  Democrats hate Bush for being warlike, smug, and duplicitous.  They hate that he calls for compassion and cuts Medicaid, that he calls for cooperation and governs as a bitter partisan, that he wants a humble foreign policy and makes us an international Zorro.  Bush hatred, fair or not, blooms from identifiable seeds.  But Clinton hatred?  It was straight partisanship begging for a rationale.  That's why, in the end, the right needed to search so hard and dig so deep for Whitewater, Paul Jones, Monica, Travelgate, and all the rest.  It's hard to hate without a reason, and all the reasons, at least until Monica, proved inadequate.  So they had to be cycled out.  You could only get so mad over Travelgate and Whitewater, so once that rage was spent, a new outrage had to be summoned, which first meant it had to be discovered. It was a hell of a way to spend eight years. 

Indeed, the American Spectator, which had 300,000 subscribers back in the day, is a mere shell of a magazine without Clinton.  They must be begging for another Democrat to enter office.  But that's why, contra the DLC and some others, I'm not hopeful that there's a Democrat somewhere who can bring the country together.  If Clinton, an instinctual compromiser with a deep-seated sympathy for Republicans and conservative ideas, couldn't escape a full-out assault, then it's not a question of the candidate, the war is really up to the army.  So Hillary, Warner, Schweitzer -- take your pick, the hatred really doesn't care who it's aimed at.

*Which, though I'm not terribly far in yet, is shaping up to be an excellent book.