The Clinton Show
A book blitz reminds us why we -- and TV -- can't take our eyes off him
A lot of America will be eating takeout in front of the tube this evening, transfixed as Bill Clinton goes through his paces with Dan Rather on "60 Minutes." Mr. President, Bill, Bubba, Slick Willie -- whatever you call him -- is unleashing a promotional tsunami for his 957-page doorstop of a book about himself, and, love him or hate him, most of us can't resist his performance art.
Why we are still seduced by a man who looked us in the eye and said, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky"?
Because, quite simply, he remains the most interesting character in our midst. Political TV has been thin gruel in his
absence. Since his departure from the White House, we have subsisted off the bread and water of George Bush and John Kerry. Clinton, in contrast, remains a big old mound of comfort food. Ronald Reagan had a particular television facililty, honed by decades in front of the camera as an actor. Clinton was a gifted politician who simply applied his agile brain to whatever medium presented itself. Television happened to be one.
Still, when this other great communicator emerges to flack his new book, we'll be reminded of his considerable TV talents. And we'll remember, too, the giddy sense that whenever
Clinton is on television he is playing without a net. What Clinton emits, in contrast to Reagan, is an intimacy, real and fake. And as a purveyor of intimacy, Clinton is bested only by FDR, the greatest Oval Office communicator of them all, who became part of the American family through his brilliant fireside chats on radio.
Where Reagan triumphed in formal presentations, Clinton trafficked in confessional television that meshed seamlessly into the medium that was dominated during the '90s by the likes of Oprah and cable talk shows.
Where Reagan was formal, Clinton was loose. He was most effective selling his emotions and was preternaturally sensitive to ours. Former Time magazine Washington bureau chief Robert Ajemian once called him "our first pathological president." By that he meant that Clinton took the manipulative package common to any president and raised it to new levels.
"Clinton's greatest strength is his personal appeal," says Larry Grossman, former president of PBS and NBC News. "He's talking from his emotions."
Where Reagan was scripted, beautifully, Clinton was spontaneous. No one ever knew what he would do, and it was this unpredictability as much as his gifts that drew us to him, again and again.
Media guru Marshall McLuhan called television a cool medium. Within it, John F. Kennedy was the coolest of television presidents. There was nothing remotely confessional about him. He was remote and elegant, disdaining any display of weakness. Reagan, in turn, was medium warm, offering us more but still not much of his true self. Clinton, in contrast, is a hot presence, dumping his emotions on us like a 12-step cowboy.
Clinton also brings to television an intellect as impressive as his dissembling is transparent. His charm is unnerving. This giant political pinata consumes the screen as he did New Hampshire living rooms in the primaries.
Even for those who hate him -- no, particularly for those who hate him -- the specter of Bill Clinton on television for an hour tonight is irresistible.
"Am I going to watch the interview? Yes," says Bill O'Reilly, host of the eponymous talk show, "The O'Reilly Factor" and no Clinton fan. "Am I going to believe what he says? No."
If Clinton's bald-faced prevarications on television appalled us, they did little to stem our appetite for what "Hardball" host Chris Matthews calls "a classic American corsair -- a Rhett Butler who's kind of fun to watch as he's taking your pants off."
"The best of them are just as good at the B.S.," Matthews says of politicians. "Clinton was as good when he wasn't telling the truth as when he was."
"He's the best combination politician we've ever had," he adds. "He was fabulous at retail politics -- the best you could ever be -- and he was damned good at wholesale, the TV piece."
Says O'Reilly," "He's a star. There's a fascination with him. That's the kind of culture we live in."
That said, it is by no means clear that Clinton is a television natural.
"That's still open for discussion," says Robert Thompson, director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University. "When we think of the very best television personalities, Johnny Carson or Oprah Winfrey come to mind. We don't have any evidence that Bill Clinton is such a character."
His lack of discipline has been as noticeable on television as in the rest of his life. He never knows when to shut up. "Clinton is a mixed bag on TV because he's not specific enough to get his point across in a sound bite," says O'Reilly. "He's a conversationalist. He likes to expound."
Indeed. Clinton's tedious speech at the Democratic Convention of 1988 was so long that he later went on "The Tonight Show" to ridicule his own verbosity. Smart. (Nonetheless, Washington pundit Mark Shields said that no president has ever been more articulate and less eloquent.)
What Clinton is on television is fast. "You see his commanding intellect on TV, and he can react instantly to problems, like the teleprompter," notes Matthews.
(Clinton talked flawlessly from memory for the first seven minutes or so of his 1993 State of the Union address after aide George Stephanopoulos put the wrong text into the teleprompter. This astonishing performance had almost nothing to do with television and everything to do with brute brain power.)
Yet there is nothing seamless about Clinton on television. Think of Clinton's appearance in January of 1992 with his wife, Hillary, on "60 Minutes" to defuse charges of infidelity and save his tanking campaign. He confessed on-air to "wrongdoing" but denied a sexual affair with Gennifer Flowers. He was shaky throughout the interview with Steve Kroft but survived.
And what about Clinton playing the saxophone in shades on "The Arsenio Hall Show" in June of that year? The stunt went well, but no one knew if it would fly going in. And that's the point. With Kroft or Hall, Clinton was willing to risk embarrassment that Kennedy or Reagan would never have entertained. For better or worse, Bill Clinton remains essentially unembarrassable.
"You knew this was not your father's candidate," Thompson says of the Arsenio event.
It worked. We elected him twice, and he rolled Republicans in Congress before he fell by his own hand. When GOP consultant Ed Rollins was asked before
the Monica Lewinsky scandal why they
hated Clinton so much, Rollins replied
that Clinton was simply better than they
were. So we will watch Bill Clinton reach for us once again. We haven't a clue what we'll get, which is part of the attraction, but we'll marvel at his talent and hubris and cunning. Even the legion of haters will watch him perform because, much as when Manny Ramirez is batting at Fenway, you don't want to be in the kitchen in the event that he hits the little white ball out of the park.
So we will watch Bill Clinton reach for us once again. We haven't a clue what we'll get, which is part of the attraction, but we'll marvel at his talent and hubris and cunning. Even the legion of haters will watch him perform because, much as when Manny Ramirez is batting at Fenway, you don't want to be in the kitchen in the event that he hits the little white ball out of the park. So we will watch Bill Clinton reach for us once again. We haven't a clue what we'll get, which is part of the attraction, but we'll marvel at his talent and hubris and cunning. Even the legion of haters will watch him perform because, much as when Manny Ramirez is batting at Fenway, you don't want to be in the kitchen in the event that he hits the little white ball out of the park. 