Glenn Garvin of the Miami Herald did a bang-up commentary on the Clinton 60 Minutes interview:
'Slick Willie' slippery as ever about himselfIt would have been a revealing moment, if we hadn't seen it before so many times. Bill Clinton, asked about his last-minute pardon of a rogue oil trader accused of cheating the government out of $48 million in taxes, said it was a mistake -- but only because he ''took a lot of grief'' about it. ``Nobody's yet made a case to me that it was the wrong decision.''
What matters is not whether the trader's a thief, or whether the U.S. government owes him an apology for wrongly indicting him, or any of the right and wrong of it. All that matters is Bill Clinton.
It is precisely that self-regard -- and the lawyerly evasions and wounded complaints that accompanied it -- that has caused Clinton so much trouble over the years. But as his hourlong interview with Dan Rather on 60 Minutes Sunday night showed, he still doesn't get it. After all, he didn't inhale.
Clinton's political success has always been based on his easy intimacy, his ability to make you feel that even though he's speaking to 300 million Americans and half the rest of the world on television, the only one he's really talking to is you.Posted by floridacracker at June 21, 2004 10:00 PMThat side of Clinton was abundantly on display in his interview with Rather. He quietly, gravely described how he sat on the side of the bed to tell his wife he had cheated on her. He hilariously demonstrated how he traded judo grips while practicing how to keep Yasser Arafat from kissing him at a public ceremony. He was contrite about his ''terrible moral error'' and appealingly introspective as he explained (but, he noted, didn't excuse) his dalliance with Monica Lewinsky: ``I did something for the worst possible reason -- just because I could.''
But Clinton has never understood that it's precisely those intimate links he establishes with perfect strangers that cause them to be so enraged when he's caught cutting corners. Regardless of whether you thought his cigar games with Lewinsky (and his lies about them to a grand jury, which Clinton conveniently omitted from his discussion Sunday) rose to the level of an impeachable offense, or even a matter of public concern, it was infuriating to watch him on television boldly declare: ''I did not have sexual relations with that woman,'' then admit a few months later that he had.
Clinton did not understand that the nature of the relationship he forged with Americans elevated presidential lies into personal betrayals. And he still doesn't. He said Sunday night that what wounds him most is the nickname ''Slick Willie.'' But what can you expect when the whole country watches you squirming in front of a grand jury, saying things like ``It depends upon what the meaning of the word is is.''
He danced his trademark sidestep throughout the 60 Minutes interview, on matters both personal and political. He said he and his wife Hillary rebuilt their marriage after his affair with Lewinsky through marital counseling, but failed to mention that they also went through lengthy counseling after his earlier infidelities while governor of Arkansas. He implicitly criticized President Bush for failing to do enough to catch Osama bin Laden while not acknowledging that his own efforts were ineffectual, if not half-hearted. He said Bush shouldn't have invaded Iraq but overlooked the fact that the official policy of his own administration from 1998 onward was regime change.
Clinton even claimed that his nemesis, independent counsel Kenneth Starr, after spending $70 million to investigate the Whitewater scandal, ''issued his report and there were hundreds and hundreds of references to sex, and two to Whitewater.'' In fact, the independent counsel's office issued a 2,000-page report on Whitewater that concluded while there was evidence of wrongdoing, there was not enough to ensure a conviction.
Dan Rather let that slip by, as he did most of Clinton's tiptoeing half-truths. It would be unfair to say that Rather pitched nothing but softballs, but in none of the six interviews he has had with Clinton over the past dozen years has Rather ever shown the combativeness he did in confrontations with Richard Nixon.
To see how Clinton reacts under that kind of cross-examination, we'll have to wait for an interview on the BBC this week, where British journalist David Dimbleby asks Clinton just how genuine his contrition over the Lewinsky affair really is. Clinton's response, reportedly, is anything but vintage Slick Willie.