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August 28, 2008
Welcome Back, Bill
One of the more personally rewarding aspects of Bill Clinton's speech last night to the Democratic Convention was that it liberated me to reconcile with him. Not that he cares, of course. We've never met. But like milions of Democrats over the last sixteen years I've been rather infatuated with him: the rhetorical clarity, the pouty ernestness, the visionary acuity. And if an infatuation means anything, it means a willingness to dismiss or ignore those glaring character defects that infuriate those not so smitten (especially when they look at guys like me and wonder why we just don't "see it").
But over the last year, as his behavior during Hillary's campaign became more and more offensive and unignorable, I began to feel something akin to what wives must feel after they discover their husbands of twenty years have been cheating on them from day one.
Or:
Maybe it's the disconcerting embarrassment parents feel when, for whatever reason, they suddenly see their own charmingly precocious kid as an irritating, self absorbed, obnoxious blowhard. (No personal experience there, really.) This image fits, I think, because what makes Bill work is that he has always been a child-man: selfish and relentlessly self-justifying, passionate and agressively innocent--all finely tuned by an exquisite and powerful adult intelligence. The best of Bill has always enabled the worst.
But last night made me love him again--now that the little shit is behaving himself.
Posted by stevemack at August 28, 2008 10:31 AM
