Ex-Presidents are a unique fraternity with unique characteristics, responsibilities, and opportunities. Bill Clinton is one of a very select group of men who understand what it means to control the fate of the "free world" and to have one's finger on the button. In our modern world, with only one extant hyper-power, the President of the United States has great power and great responsibility.
It would not be too much to expect that an ex-President would have some empathy for his predecessors and successors. I do not remember Ronald Reagan ever being less than gracious to Jimmy Carter. I do not recall the Senior Bush ever being less than gracious to Bill Clinton.
At a time of National testing, ex-Presidents are ideally suited for re-injecting civility into our national discourse. While they certainly want their parties to do well, they also have the luxury of no longer running for any office; as such, they can easily take a position of Elder Statesman, learned advisor.
Bill Clinton could have gone on Fox News Sunday with Chris Wallace and taken a Statesmanlike, above the fray, position. Clinton, for reasons best known to him, though in no way a surprise, chose a different tack, and clearly missed an excellent opportunity.
Imagine the reaction if he had said that he had, in fact, not done enough to stop bin Laden; that all of us in government at the time underestimated the dangers and did not feel the country was yet able to muster the necessary will to confront the growing menace. He would now be lauded as a great ex-President, using his tremendous political skills, intellectual abilities, and position to elevate our political discourse and rescue the Democratic party from the grips of BDS.
Partisanship is a built-in part of our system. Yet from the consensus policy of "containment" with the Soviet Union until the Vietnam War, "politics stopped at the water's edge" was the rule, rather than the exception. The tacit agreement that we can argue and fight among ourselves but will refrain from giving aid and comfort to our enemies has broken down and may be irreparable. I am not interested in assigning blame for our failures of imagination and execution prior to 9/11, and I am not interested in arguing the wisdom of our subsequent actions. The fact is that whether you believe that Saddam Hussein was a danger or not, and whether or not you believe we should have gone into Iraq, Clinton does the Nation a great disservice by pandering to the rabid core of the Democratic party. Perhaps he imagines that he can both rehabilitate his image and assist Hillary in her aspirations. If so, his character has once again sabotaged him. His behavior in the interview, bordering on the paranoid, was yet another example of his self-involvement and will re-confirm to many Americans that 8 years of a Clinton in the White House is more than enough.
Does he completely fail to understand? 9/11 was never about Bill Clinton; the war on terror is not about Bill Clinton and his legacy. We are facing a global challenge from totalitarian Islam; Clinton is a foot note. The single best defense for Western civilization and the values that Bill Clinton presumably holds dear would be a unity of purpose, and he could have made an important contribution to the defense of Western Civilization in his interview with Chris Wallace.
Bill Clinton could have taken a stance that the weight of responsibility now rests on George Bush's shoulders and that even if we disagree with his policies, we need to support our President in time of crisis. He could even have defused the moment by pointing out that he knows how difficult it is to perform the duties of the Presidency when under unrelenting political attack. Toning down the rhetoric would have been a wonderful service that this ex-President could have performed. Instead he leaves us wondering if he was even more culpable than we thought.
Unfortunately, once again, it was all about Bill Clinton and the best interests of the nation fell a distant second. What a missed opportunity.
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