Quote of the Day | July 26, 2008: To Transcend the Selfishness and Meaninglessness. . . .

Thoughts on former President Bill Clinton from William H. Chafe's 2006 The Unfinished Journey: America Since World War II:

It was almost as though the best parts of the 1960s had come together to make a reappearance -- feminism, a commitment to fairness, a modern marital relationship, but one framed by devotion to family, an energetic excitement about the ability to use government to make people's lives better. "What excites most people about Clinton," one magazine said, "is precisely the degree to which he speaks to their hunger for meaning and purpose, their half-conscious and often inchoate desire to transcend the selfishness and meaninglessness of materialistic and narcissistic society." Time was equally elegaic: "For years," it said in its Man of the Year issue, "Americans have been in a kind of vague mourning for something that they sensed they had lost somewhere -- what was best in the country, a distinctive American endowment of youth and energy amid ideals and luck: the sacred American stuff." And now here was Clinton, with the potential of providing answers. "[His] victory," Time enthused, "places him in a position to preside over one of the periodic reinventions of the country -- those moments when Americans dig themselves out of their deepest problems by reimagining themselves."

. . .

Perhaps appropriately, Bill Clinton brought to these issues a personality and set of character traits as complicated, colorful, vivid, and contradictory as any occupant of the White House before him. "He is the most seductive and persuavie person I have ever met," one White House aide declared, summarizing -- almost in understatement -- the impact Clinton had on those around him. Yet if he was "one of the biggest, most talented, articulate, intelligent, open [and] colorful characters ever to inhabit the Oval Office," New York Times reporter Todd Purdom wrote, he could "also be an undisciplined, fumbling, obtuse, defensive [and] self-justifying rogue." Purdom's colleague Maureen Dowd described the same paradox another way: "[Clinton] is naive and sophisticated, thin-skinned and self-assured, bold and hesitant, genuine and glib." There was no way to separate the good from the bad. Few if any presidents before him had demonstrated such a capacity to master the details of the most complex policy dilemma, or articulate a vision of how to deal boldly with it. Yet few among his predecessors displayed so much slickness, expediency, and disingenuousness. The irony, as Todd Purdom wrote, was that "his strengths and weaknesses not only spring from the same source, but could also not exist without one another. In a real sense, his strengths are his weaknesses, is enthusiasms are his undoing, and most of the traits that make him appealing can make him appalling in the flash of an eye."

Tags: William H. Chafe, Bill Clinton