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| It’s His Mojo, Stupid |
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| A Sneaking Suspicion Women’s Attraction to Clinton Fuels His Enemies |
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This is Dark Cloud on Wednesday, January 20, 1999. In trying to avoid the State of the Union Speech last night, which endured for an hour and seventeen minutes, I was amazed to find that even the Fox Network carried it. Then, realizing that the station that puts on the World’s Most Repetitive Video Clips is always on the lookout for a bloody train wreck, the synergy became apparent. Here was William Jefferson Clinton laying out the groundwork for a year of legislative action before a Republican Congress that, for the most part, despises him and the years of the late Vietnam War – often called, however erroneously, the Sixties – that bred him. Here were the overweight globs of unrisen dough, hair so carefully parted, poofed, and colored, trying to look senatorial when their anger at being clobbered yet again was revealed for all to see. President Clinton - his foibles and problems long exposed and known and unthreatening to any but those peculiar people who are so sure of his wife’s motivations and evil nature and evident superiority to themselves and their hopefully secret personal failings – here he was standing before the world as if nothing was wrong and providing a yard stick with which the public to measure his enemies’ profound incompetence. There was a train wreck on Fox. It was the Republican Impeachment express, off the track, spinning its wheels, afire and the crew pointing fingers at each other, refusing to admit it was the track layer, not the engineer, who caused it. In the deepest, darkest dreams of the far right, nothing could have been handed them more attractive than the weapons forged by Bill Clinton himself. Here he is, cavorting in the Oval Office with a young woman not his wife, exposed, and given $60 million and the dedicated work of an entire Congress for a half decade, he is still there, more popular than ever, as effective as ever, and seemingly impervious to the attacks of his enemies. At some point, even the most dedicated conservative has to ask themselves, if we cannot topple this guy, cannot get any legislation off the ground, cannot even provide a House Speaker that isn’t one of the world’s least likable people, or a raving hypocrite, or a faceless non-entity-hoped-not-to-have-had-an-affair-with-a-llama-known-to-Larry-Flynt, if we cannot do any of this, given all the ammunition lovingly prepared for us by our own enemies, perhaps, regardless of political persuasion, perhaps we ourselves are just too incompetent to rule this government. Perhaps this very easy thing, so clearly beyond us, speaks to our own deficiencies and not his. I think they realize this now. Like all losers in a war, the Republicans are now claiming the moral superiority that lesser people – the public – just doesn’t understand. Remarkably similar to Native Americans claiming spiritual elevation and environmental concern over their conquerors evidenced nowhere, House Republicans are saying just how darn proud they are of having the courage to vote impeachment. It took no courage, of course. Like religious fanatics of the past who really thought the world would applaud their stake burnings of female children if it simply understood that the supposed innocent really harbored Gnostic sympathies, or had expressed doubts about the Pope being superior to Council, or had – only God can forgive this – a sexual union with a man of a different faith, the Republicans exposed Clinton’s sins, expected to be applauded and – lost and humiliated by the deafening silence – have tried to cover up their misreading of history by pretending to have been concerned with something else. It’s the lying, not the sex. But it was the sex. It titillated and repulsed them, made them envious, and nothing was clearer than this during the effective and clear presentation by Clinton’s lawyer yesterday. The facts, which the Republicans claim is their sole concern, do not support the impeachment, most of the Republican’s claims, much of anything beyond a seedy affair between a fifty year old in rut and an overweight perpetual teenager on the make. Here are the facts. Since 1992, for the first time since Kennedy we have had a President whose competencies are those desired by women and envied by men. Clinton will never have to jump out of an airplane holding hands with a battalion of rangers to prove his virility. Whatever else, nobody suspects anything less of him. Sound irrelevant? For most of our existence, a people’s leader had to prove sexual potency, either by lots of children who resembled him or by marching with an erection in public. It apparently is reassuring on a primal level to his followers. I suspect Clinton’s faux pas satisfies the nation in this matter, which is why the Wag the Dog accusations don’t stick to Clinton, but could have to Bush or Reagan or Nixon or Carter or Ford, all of whom were too old or too strange to hold that image |
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