bill clinton and global aids crisis and post presidency

As the New Yorker article says, when Clinton left the White House in January 2001, he was depleted both financially and in his personal emotional resources. The toll of the Impeachment hearings was great; the legal bills were immense; the victories were few. He faced the task of "re-inventing" himself at the relatively young age of 54. Because of increased longevity, ours is the first generation where Presidents in general have had "post-Presidential" lives. Oh, there were classic exceptions to this rule: (1) sixth President John Quincy Adams served in the US Congress after his Presidency ended in 1829 until his death in 1848; (2) eighteenth President US Grant heroically wrote his wonderful memoirs during his losing battle with throat cancer; (3) William Howard Taft became Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court eight years after he left the White House, but the general sense was that Presidents just faded away in retirement.

We have seen a change right before our eyes in this area. Johnson was the last President of the "old order," finishing his Presidency in disgrace in 1969, retreating to his TX ranch to nurse his wounds and then dying invisibly a few years later. Richard Nixon, in contrast, left the White House during Watergate and spent the next 15 years trying to reclaim his image. His stirring re-entry into American life with some insightful comments about the Soviet Union in the late 1980s showed us that one of the purposes of post-Presidential life might be to spend time trying to reconstruct what had collapsed in one's Presidency. But then there was the amiable, if generally hapless, Gerald Ford, who has spent his retirement playing golf and generally keeping out of the public view. I am really "pulling" for Jerry these days, however. Within two months he will become the longest-living President in US History (Ronald Reagan died precisely at 93 years and 4 months, and Ford will hit that milestone just before Thanksgiving this year), and I hope he makes it. His new pacemaker or some heart insertion that he recently received ought to give him another 10,000 miles or so.

Jimmy Carter has set the "gold standard" for post-Presidencies, however. He became something greater than he was in the White House, and he is still active at 82. I think he has convinced Americans of the virtue of the balanced life, the joy in volunteering, and the need to keep oneself mentally alert through writing, family and other healthy activities. His varied life of political involvement (mostly through monitoring of elections and his continued emphasis on human rights), teaching, running the Carter Center, writing (poetry, autobiography, other stories), and volunteering (Habitat for Humanity, among others) had made him truly a remarkable person, in most peoples' minds. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, had his most signal contributions during his Presidency. Slipping into dementia probably while he was still in the waning days of his Presidency, Reagan then lived out his long life as a symbolic figure--of the ravages of Alzheimer's disease and the recipient of care by a faithful spouse. George Bush (I) has spent most of his post-Presidency, from what little I know, making money in quiet transactions while occasionally jumping from planes at significant age milestones.

So, when Bill Clinton had to re-invent himself in 2001, he did so with a growing collection of "data" out there. How has he done so far? Well, to be honest, it seems that he started out with some of the same missteps of his Presidency but is gradually getting his feet. But he hasn't quite learned yet the lesson of Jimmy Carter--that whatever you do, you must have a way to "package" what you have done for simple consumption by the American (and world) watching public. To that end, the image people have of the post-Presidency of Bill Clinton is a conflicted one. On the one hand, he is an author of a book, but one gets the sense that he really isn't an author. He wrote the autobiography to pay his bills and to get out of his system some things from the past. We don't get the impression that he will have a continuous engagement with the joyful, and difficult, task of writing.

Then, he has engaged himself in loads of good things with his rich friends, but the only thing that has really "made the news" is his interest in the global AIDS crisis. Responding to the insistent cries of Nelson Mandela, whom Clinton highly admires, Clinton has tried to bring his stature, knowledge and political clout to the drug companies, heads of state, the medical community and others working on developing a vaccination or other ways of slowing the spread of this killer disease in the Third World.

One can't help get the feeling, however, that though Clinton wants to help change the world (and, he has done so in America--during his Presidency), he also likes and lives off the banter, card games and "guy-like" give and take that makes him more of a friend and inspiring companion than necessarily a global change agent. In any case, he needs a better press agent at this point.

2008

But the issue before him now is getting his wife elected to the Presidency of the United States. Almost everyone I talk to, many of whom are liberal people, cringe at the thought of a Hillary candidacy. But I think it not only is credible but that she will win the Democratic nomination. And, what Republicans learned the hard way in 1992 and 1996 is that you really can't count a Clinton out when s/he is campaigning. The Clintons are the only ones whom the Republican strategists, in my opinion, genuinely fear, because they are the Democrats who can tap into a well of American frustration with Bush and to aspirations and longings of more common people that have long been ingored in the Bush Presidency. What Hillary Clinton can't hide, however, is that she is an unabashed first-generation feminist (I have written about the "generations" of feminism elsewhere), and this will simply spark visceral acceptance and hatred from the American electorate. No amount of burnishing the image will really tone that down.

So, Bill's task is to get his wife elected President. I think he has had to trim his sails a bit in his criticism of the Bush Administration because he doesn't want to hurt Hillary's chances. But the duo would be formidable on the campaign trail. With George Stephanopoulos back in the saddle as press relations big guy, they could ward off almost any Republican attack. It is, frankly, the Democrats' best hope for 2008.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, then, Bill Clinton will have to put his "post-Presidency" on hold until we see how Hillary does. But this isn't a bad thing. A few more years of refining his thoughts on the Global Aids crisis or whereever his heart ultimately settles will help him as well as us. Good wishes, then, to Bill Clinton, who still is seeking a marriage, so to speak, between his skills, his image and the world's need.

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