Good Old Boys Like Us: Bill Clinton Turns 75

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Bill Clinton turns 75 today.

He is my favorite president of my lifetime. (The current incumbent is the 12th since I was born; I wriggled into this world while LBJ was in the White House).

( I suspect he is almost certainly not your favorite, though if you are my approximate age and you have fond memories of the simpler, less fraught 1990s, you may hold some affection for him based merely on your memory of where you were during Bill’s time in office.)

One way to judge a man is by the caliber of his enemies, and Bill has always had legions of detractors. In the 1990s, it was mostly from the right; in the 2020s, the contempt comes more from the left. Both sides can recite the litany of his shortcomings: a man of great gifts who achieved too little; a predator; a cheater; an opportunist, a sophist; a dishonest cipher devoid of anything beyond talent and naked ambition.

Slick Willie.

And yet.

No president I have ever heard has had Bill’s oratorical gifts. He was not always “on,” but at his best, Bill could easily surpass Reagan or Obama — or any other gifted rhetorician, for that matter. Every year, I rewatch his 50-minute 2012 convention speech (which single-handedly revived Obama’s troubled re-election campaign). The cadence is perfection, the content soaring, the delivery impeccable.

I have never seen a political leader so instantly and completely comfortable in any environment. Bill had (and has) this preternatural ability to adjust to any audience. At home with rural whites, at home in the urban Black church, at home with the Queen of England, Bill always gave the impression that he was delighted to be back somewhere he had missed immensely. When I was in graduate school; I heard him speak live at UCLA’s 75th anniversary ceremony in 1994. He strode into Pauley Pavilion, and demonstrated what came across as genuine awe at the ten national championship banners that hung from the rafters. He knew Bruin history intimately, and even if it was just the result of background preparation, there was no doubting his enthusiasm. He told us anecdotes about our legendary coach, John Wooden, that we had not known — and had 10,000 of us in stitches.

The Monica Lewinsky scandal broke in late winter and early spring of 1998. I was turning 31, and falling in love with a student who had just turned 18. Lily pursued me — and then, after a brief and intense relationship, dumped me in disgust. I was so much more needy than she had imagined, so far from the confident, glittering professor on whom she had crushed. I wept over Lily as I read about Bill and Monica, and I felt an intense protectiveness towards them both. Then, as now, I blamed Linda Tripp and Ken Starr more than either of the participants in the affair. I didn’t focus on the sexual details, but rather the tender, awkward snippets of romance that unfolded between them.

In 1998 and 1999, I was comparatively flush. I was single and newly tenured with few expenses. Over the course of a year, I gave more than $2000 to the Clinton Legal Defense Fund, to help Bill and Hillary cope with an onslaught of attacks. I gave so much because I saw Bill as a proxy for myself. We were just two soft-hearted and talented rascals who had problems with impulse control; the puritans and the harridans despised us, and we good old boys had to stick together.

I liked how Bill adored and promoted smart women. I have never doubted his deep admiration for his wife, nor her devotion to him. (Trust me on this one — compulsive infidelity is evidence of ego and lust, but not of the absence of deep love.) Janet Reno, Madeline Albright, Ruth Bader Ginsburg — no president had ever been as willing to promote brilliant and talented women to high office, and to trust their counsel. My best friends have always been women, and the majority of those close friendships have been platonic. I sense it was so with Bill.

Bill and I have fallen from grace together. Less than a decade ago, I was teaching and thriving; less than a decade ago, Bill’s speech saved Obama’s hide. We were once sought after, though of course on very different levels — now, we are personae non gratae. In the #MeToo era, it is unimaginable that Bill Clinton will be given the same role at the 2024 or ‘28 Democratic conventions that he occupied in 2012. Bill is an embarrassment; to the Young Woke, the fact that most on the left supported him during his impeachment is a scandal. They cannot undo the indulgent 1990s, but they can scornfully repudiate a culture which was untroubled by a furtive romance between a powerful middle-aged man and the intern who was less than half his age.

The prevailing view these days is that Monica Lewinsky was incapable of giving meaningful consent to Bill because of the age gap and the power differential; we no longer see her as an adult with agency. The same is true for the prevailing view of my affairs with students. Bill, wrongly, has refused to apologize to Monica. Though I have made amends for the lies I told and the hearts I bruised, I refuse to condemn my affairs with students as inherent ethical violations. We are stubborn, Bill and I, and though he is rich and I am on the margins, I think of us as brothers in a particular kind of disgrace.

Perhaps history will be kinder to us than is the present moment, perhaps not.

I have spent 30 years not only thinking about Bill Clinton, but dreaming about him. Only my father comes to me more often when I am asleep: I have dreamed about Bill far more often than I have about any other public figure. Once, in a dream, he was my defense lawyer; several times, he has appeared as my therapist. Most often, though, he is simply my companion, a Virgil to my Dante (or the other way around), a Lone Ranger to my Tonto, as we go out and about and explore strange little corners of the cosmos.

“You’re a better man than Bill Clinton,” a friend says when I mention my deep identification with our 42nd president.

”That’s because you see me more fully than you see him,” I reply.

”Or maybe you only see what you want to see, and you’ve made him into something that isn’t real at all,” she says.

It is so with all our heroes, I suppose, especially the “problematic faves” whom we choose to love despite all that we know.

In the book and film “Primary Colors,” a fictionalized account of Bill Clinton’s rise, the candidate is fond of quoting an iconic Don Williams song. I have loved the tune since I was a boy, long before I heard of the boy from Hope.

The famous chorus concludes:

I guess we're all gonna be what we're gonna be
So what do you do with good ole boys like me?

Bill is who he is, and I am who I am, and our culture is still coming to terms with what to do with lovable, generous, maddeningly self-absorbed and complicated good old boys like us.

Happy birthday, sir.