REVIEW & OUTLOOK

Big Bill
Originally published in The Wall Street Journal, August 3, 2000.

Sunday, August 13, 2000 12:01 a.m. EDT

Every now and then there's a scene in a movie involving a pool party and a fat guy. Everyone's sitting around the side of the pool socializing, when the fat guy gets up on the diving board and starts bouncing up and down. Sometimes he's holding a fat cigar. Everyone stops to watch the fat guy jumping on the diving board and obviously they're wondering if the guy is going to catapult his corpus into the pool. And of course the fat guy does exactly that, driving a huge wave of water onto all the guests who scatter screaming in dumfounded disbelief. How cheesy can you get?

Well, Bill Clinton, the President, has just belly-flopped into the GOP convention. He's managed to get the whole place talking about him. He's got the Republican nominee talking about him, the nominee's father, a former U.S. President, talking about him, and now yesterday even the nominee's sainted mother was talking about him.

Man, this is fat-guy heaven. It's all about him. It's all about Bill Clinton. President, politico, pundit--it hardly seems to matter which hat Bill Clinton's wearing at any given moment; the personas all seem to, well, blur.

We happen to indeed believe that the simple answer to what Mr. Clinton has been up to the past week is unbound self-centeredness, even by the normal standards of mammoth presidential psyches. Mr. Clinton, however, is not merely one of the weekly shouters on "The McLaughlin Group" but a two-term President in the last months of his tenure in office. At this twilight moment few historians of the Presidency would likely call these Clintonian interventions "presidential," though conceivably it is the fading twilight itself that has brought on all this braying at the opposition.

Some readers might think the forgoing a bit harsh; this is, after all, the President of the United States. Consider, though, what's been said.

This is the Clinton crack that set off President Bush and Barbara Bush: "I mean, how bad could I be? I've been governor of Texas; my daddy was President; I own a baseball team. They like me down there; everything is rocking along hunky-dory. Their fraternity had it for eight years, give to ours for eight years."

Then there was this on the Supreme Court to the trial lawyers' convention on Sunday, after first noting that Dick Cheney's South Africa vote "takes your breath away." What really worried him, said the President, are "the people now whom I've tried to put on the court of appeals who are African-American and Hispanic who are being held in political jail because they can't get a hearing from the Republican Senate."

On Fox TV Tuesday, the day John McCain and Condoleezza Rice spoke, the President got into a riff about the GOP darkness descending on the elderly, the environment and abortion: "What they want to do is to seem safe and reliable and compassionate and inclusive. They're not going to be up there saying, 'Vote for us, our favorite Supreme Court judges are Justice Thomas and Justice Scalia, and we're going to repeal Roe v. Wade,' but that's what's going to happen."

And finally came the President's assessment of the state of his wife's candidacy for the open New York Senate seat: "Everybody that always hated me all those years and were so mean to me, they've transferred all their anger to her now. It's almost as if they've got one last chance to beat me." He also added that "it wasn't her idea to run"; she was goaded into the race by some New York Democrats.

All this in less than a week. In the past six days, Mr. Clinton has made at least eight political appearances. The biggest looming ahead is the Democratic Convention in Los Angeles, and on the available evidence it appears there's a good chance that Bill Clinton will hit L.A. like some political black hole, siphoning into himself all the event's available oxygen and energy, and along with it Al Gore's candidacy. He speaks Monday.

It is impossible to imagine that either the Gore campaign or other high-level Democrats are happy with the President's recent hyperactive assaults on the opposition. You can't say they weren't warned. These are classic Clinton improvisations, executed for reasons of self-interest. The most recent victim of this exercise was Israel's Ehud Barak. Ask all of his lawyers about it. And if this belly-flopping into the campaign pool keeps up, you can ask Al Gore about it in November.

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