Charles Krauthammer has a nice piece on the Clinton “Legacy”
Here are some nicer points:
Clinton is a narcissist but also smart and analytic enough to distinguish adulation from achievement. Among Democrats, he is popular for twice giving them the White House, something no Democrat had done since FDR. And the bouquets he receives abroad are simply signs of the respect routinely given ex-presidents, though Clinton earns an extra dollop of fawning, with the accompanying fringe benefits, because he is (a) charming and (b) not George W. Bush.
But Clinton knows this is all written on sand. It is the stuff of celebrity. What gnaws at him is the verdict of history. What clearly enraged him more than anything this primary season was Barack Obama’s statement that “Ronald Reagan changed the trajectory of America in a way that . . . Bill Clinton did not.”
Reagan changed history. At home, he radically altered both the shape and perception of government. Abroad, he changed the entire structure of the international system by bringing down the Soviet empire, giving birth to a unipolar world of unprecedented American dominance.
By comparison, Clinton was a historical parenthesis. He can console himself — with considerable justification — that he simply drew the short straw in the chronological lottery: His time just happened to be the 1990s, which, through no fault of his own, was the most inconsequential decade of the 20th century. His was the interval between the collapse of the Soviet Union on Dec. 26, 1991, and the return of history with a vengeance on Sept. 11, 2001.
I know it’s beyond obvious, and Krauthammer certainly agrees, but if Hillary is elected, so is Bill as her co-president. That means that anyone who supports her candidacy is also supporting his return to presidential power and influence (however covertly it may be exercised). This also means that any Cuban-American who supports or enables Hillary is supporting the man responsible for, among other things, the robotization and brainwashing of the innocent Elian Gonzalez and his becoming a political trophy object for the Cuban dictatorship.
I don’t know about other people, but I know what that means for me, regardless of who gets the Republican nomination. Politics is essentially always a matter of choosing the lesser evil, because having a mostly satisfying choice is all too frequently not the case. It sucks, but it’s the way it is, and the way it will remain.