jawfish

Why Dad Hated Bill Clinton
john posted in politics & culture on December 29th, 2006

The man they loved to hate. Star of the Davos back-slapping pow-wow, ex-President, possible First Husband, he overshadows any other American, indeed anyone else at all save the Pope, when he speaks and travels. His speaking fees are stratospheric, his command of policy details is legendary, and his humiliation travels with him.

Why doesn’t he crush his enemies?
Why does he go on talking, talking, talking into the night?

Talk, meetings, decision-making: Back to Bill in a minute, but first: the other day I was talking with a male friend about women’s meetings vs men’s meetings. Talking in sweeping generalizations, we agreed that guys are often frustrated in women’s meetings. Typically long after the decision is made, person after person is heard restating arguments, reaffirming the decision, going over old ground. People around the table nod sagely as a woman pays homage to an opinion already passed by, and eventually the discussion tapers off into a new subject. The guy is just fuming, because he thinks “time is being wasted, because we’ve already been over all that and the decision is made.” In the men’s meeting, the guys file in, figure out instantly who is in charge, and decide where they rank in the pecking-order. In a good meeting the chair will silence both the juniors with no clout and the talkative buffoons who can’t parse the heirarchy, while the real players quickly hash out their territory. But a woman present will think, “they run roughshod over anyone they don’t like, and ram their decisions through.” In some so-called knowledge businesses you’ll find a mixed style, but just attend a church committee, an AYSO or PTA meeting and you’ll see what I mean. Even if you disagree, take my basic point about men looking for a pecking order and control, and women looking for consensus as defaults. Think about what you hate about meetings. Now just what do politicians do? When they aren’t fundraising they sit in endless rubber-chicken dinners and meetings, where everybody’s ego demands they be heard, even if no one is paying much attention. It’s the worst of both worlds: everybody talks, nobody listens. But the pol must appear to be listening because it makes people feel good. Even if he knows the content is impossible or irrelevant ( please lower my taxes and increase military spending) people will like him more if they feel he listens. The Republicans have taken up a slightly different approach in the recent times. They take on the preacher role, with brass-band exhortation and a chorus to make everybody feel included in the group. “Let’s sing together and we’ll be together” they say.
Then who is Bill Clinton and why did Dad hate him? Bill is the absolute best consensus listener, feel-good spokesman in the world. He is so good at appearing to listen and still remain in charge that he was often criticized for not coming to a decision. In essence he runs a woman’s meeting. The Republicans coined “slick Willie” in an effort to get at his ability to make people feel heard and then go on and do something else. Of course this is exactly what every pol has to do, it was the fact that he failed to project decisiveness that got him in trouble. The flip side of dithering and indecisiveness could be humility and a genuine respect for truth. This is more the Jimmy Carter problem.
	What about Dubya? Dad didn’t stick around for Dubya, so I don’t know what he thought about him, but I think “The Decider” is the perfect anti-Clinton handle. It speaks to the manly decision making, the responsible tough-minded approach that appeals to guys, never mind whether there is anything but stubbornness and arrogance in Dubya himself. It’s the key to what Rove wants to send out to the Nascar Dads, it’s the image that Governator Arnold projects when he teases the reporters about being girlie-men, it’s what Reagan went for when he took David Stockton “out to the woodshed” for admitting the budget numbers were a hoax. You can call it father image, and indeed the voting patterns match gender patterns from red to blue states. The Lone Ranger is infinitely preferable to Mr. Rogers, at least to guys. In addition, guys have a strange willingness to follow decisive leaders long after it is clear they are fools, where they will abandon an indecisive man quickly, even though he keeps them out of harm’s way.
Why do guys feel this way? Imagine you are a soldier pinned down in a Baghdad house, and you start talking about the General – is he decisive but rash? Is he thoughtful, careful, a good listener, respectful of his aide’s opinions? Is it Patton or Eisenhower, Grant or McClellan the troops like to follow? If you are the squad leader in that house in Iraq, you’ll have to act quickly and decisively, you’ll have to order others to move based on your snap judgments. You’ll be forgiven if you are wrong, but not if you are indecisive. Sure, when you are older and safe back at home, you’ll mull over events and take a long view, but not when the pressure is on. When the pressure is on you want action, now! Those soldiers are instinctively going to prefer Patton and Grant, indeed this process describes why soldiers agree to follow the General’s orders in the first place. It’s a tribal thing, but that’s meat for another article.
	The hunters drive the managers. So our hunter’s instincts, if that’s where they come from, betray us into bull-headed, aggressive tactics if we aren’t careful to damp them down. Our instinct is to trust Patton and Grant, precisely because they’ll charge headlong, and to mistrust the dithering McClellan and the voluble, articulate Clinton. I think that’s at least part of what Dad hated about Bill, and explains why people who ought to see through the flim-flam, go for Bush. The rest of us wonder in amazement at the success of the fake Texan, the cowboy hat without cattle, the frat boy from Connecticut. But it seems that faking Texas will do for a Republican. Or perhaps like Reagan, there is so little substance there, that the fakery is not challenged by inner contradictions. Whereas with Clinton there were so many contradictions and complexities that he was called “the first black president.”

Experience teaches otherwise. When you are actually under fire the instinct for decisiveness is probably adaptive, because the ditherer gets the men of the squad killed. But in the larger world of suits and TV photo-ops and limousines and diplomacy, it’s the brainy chess player, the guy who lies in wait for the other guy to attack, the guy who buys off the opponent who wins. From Sun Tzu to Machiavelli, it’s the clever ones who stay on top. And it’s the thoughtful technocrats that get the job done.


Bill the one who must be loved: I have heard it said that Bill is fatally attracted to the idea that everyone must love him. He wants to be a star- that Bill we saw with his saxophone on TV, that was the real Bill. Ironically he is a star now that he is out of office, much more than Bush junior or senior. This neediness goes with the ditherer. He can’t stand to alienate anyone, not even his enemies. After the hatchet-job that Gingrich led against him, it’s remarkable how gently Bill treats his tormentors. Partly he is protecting Hillary’s flank with Rupert Murdoch, but he may also be playing a wiser game now. He isn’t required to be The Decider any more, and the door is wide open for the Great Conciliator. It’s a powerful role for him, and he is showing signs of cutting the herd of big business right out of the evangelical corral of the Republican party.
	We like a straight-shooter. The conciliator who buys everyone off is not the straight-shooter Dad would have respected. All of us say we want the straight talk, the real deal, and yet the day-to-day existence of a pol has him selling himself over and over to opposite constituencies, presumably hoping that he has a core of self-respect left at the end. Democrats seem to fear alienating any constituency, and it makes them look weak. Republicans can run openly against gays and sneakily against blacks, and still there are gays and blacks in the party. And they look like they stand for something, it’s something stupid, or even wicked, but it’s something. By picking an external threat to run against, Terror, the Bush team has weathered five years of utter incompetence, crookedness, wild spending, and pointless killing. But they stood for something. Somehow they can keep up an hysterical level of fear-mongering and still look calm and in control.
It’s easier to look tough when you are negative. It’s easier to run against terrorism, or crime, or gay marriage, than to run for sensible policy. Modern Republicans don’t really want to accomplish anything domestically, so they can spend all their time looking tough. Democrats have to try to get things done, like rebuilding the levees, replacing the military hardware, making international coalitions. It’s hard to look tough when you are going through the tedious process of maneuvering the Russians and the Chinese on the Security Council into agreement. Real tough guys can’t distinguish ritual toughnicity from actual threats. When Bush made his famous Axis of Evil speech, it now seems that North Korea and Iran took it seriously. Here in the States it looked tough or childish, depending on your party affiliation, but everyone knew it was saber-rattling for domestic consumption. Because Bush and his advisers weren’t sophisticated enough to know that they are always playing to two audiences, domestic and foreign, it looks likely that they made the nuclear situation worse. Of course there is a strong argument that the Bush administration still intends to use force against Iran, in which case it was bad strategy too. The current bizarre refusal to engage in diplomacy with Syria and Iran, because it ‘rewards them for being bad actors’ can be seen as an outgrowth of this fetish for the theater of decisiveness. It probably works domestically, but that’s command of a child’s puppet stage compared to the international boards, where everyone must be listened-to and no one trusted. Toughnicity is childish. When the US seems to command the world’s economy, has a military budget that dwarfs all others combined, and brandishes thousands of invulnerable nuclear warheads ready to fly on a few minutes notice, the US President had better weigh his words carefully and be truly decisive at the same time. Real decisiveness entails discussion, consideration, argument, and leadership. Retreat must be managed as well as attack, because the world is often a place where quartermasters and policemen are more useful than gunners and pilots.