Though he’s only 55, the pouches under his eyes were the size of beagle pups.
The iron-grey ’do stood at attention, like a U.S. Marine honour guard. Table talkers whispered that he dyes it just so, for that statesmanlike look.
Blue dress jokes were flying. And when someone asked for a virgin caesar, the bartender wickedly admonished: “Hey, Clinton’s here. There’s not a virgin in sight.”
Now, is that any way to talk about the first two-time Democrat president since FDR (another notorious two-timer)?
Is that how we refer to the budget balancer, the bomber of Saddam, the Balkans peacemaker, the Rhodes Scholar, the Vietnam dissenter, the successor of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln?
Sadly, the answer is yes.
When William Jefferson Clinton rolled through town last week, it was reminiscent of a stop on Bob Dylan’s Never-ending Tour.
Clinton seems primed to follow a show-biz tradition dating back to Victorian actress Sara Bernhardt, who capitalized on long-faded glories by dazzling the yokels on stages from Sheboygan to St. Joe.
Not surprisingly, though, the words of the 42nd president were uttered expertly, and crafted with the astonishing skill audiences find almost routine in this epoch of supreme spin.
It was an anti-terrorist message, delivered with a depth of conviction at which only the most recalcitrant cynic would sneer.
It was also a plea for the world’s dispossessed, its broken and its bleeding. The Calgary Sun’s Rick Bell wrote that Clinton’s appearance, and his speech, took us back to more innocent times, the halcyon days prior to Sept. 11.
But, with due respect to the Dinger’s nostalgic maunderings, it seems unlikely Clinton would want to relive the 96 action-packed months of his presidency.
History will show he did a decent job, maybe even a great one.
For one thing, he restored at least a pretence of human compassion to the Oval Office, a spirit beaten to the ground by Nixon, unnoticed by Ford, wallowed in by Carter, and blithely ignored by Reagan and Bush the First.
He held his own against a hostile Republican Congress, and presided over prosperous economic times. He handled himself with aplomb on the international stage, contributing to the peace whenever possible, and waving a big stick at implacable foreign foes.
In Calgary, though, Clinton sounded weary beyond his years. Small wonder, when you consider the weight of disgrace he carries.
The day after his speech, the ex-president offered to resign from the U.S. Supreme Court bar, as an alternative to fighting potential disbarment. He had already lost his licence to practise law in Arkansas.
His dalliances with Paula Jones and Monica Lewinsky cost him the respect of his profession, and led to lies that almost cost him the presidency, thanks to the vindictive hounding of Whitewater Special Prosecutor Kenneth Starr.
If it’s true he was paid $100,000 to speak in Calgary, it’s probably already been set aside to pay down his legal bills.
He’s the head of the most visibly dysfunctional family since Hamlet. Journalists have tied themselves in knots trying to get a handle on the ‘real’ Slick Willie.
One writer called him “scholarly and shallow, outgoing and shy, principled and craven.”
He’s been derided as a psychopath, a devil, and a “Sun King who deceives, exploits, betrays and rapes his subjects.”
And now the temptation is to dismiss Bill Clinton as one of the youngest and most capable has-beens on the contemporary scene.
Because the world doesn’t need another high-profile vaudevillian.
Dylan’s already doing the Never-ending Tour to perfection.
What it needs is for individuals of Clinton’s stature and gifts to join the effort to set things right.
That admirable Canadian, Stephen Lewis, turned his back on politics to concentrate on more urgent matters.
A principled and eloquent man, Lewis is the UN special envoy to the secretary-general on HIV/AIDS in Africa, and the mere fact that he’s part of this fight provides some hope it can be won.
Rather than be content to turn himself into a travelling sideshow, Clinton should follow Lewis’s lead, and apply his skills where they’ll do the most good.
Slick Willie talks a convincing game when he says “we’ve got to build a world where we have more potential partners and fewer potential terrorists . . . it is a battle of mind and heart.”
He could do his image – and the planet at large – a favour by putting his mind and his heart where his mouth is.
