Entries associated with the tag "Bill Clinton":

Carol Felsenthal made an interesting observation about the Clintons to me recently. Back in '98, when the Monica Lewinsky scandal was new, a lot of people thought Hillary should have thrown Bill out of the house. But the White House was his house. Giving the bum the heave-ho would have raised constitutional issues. If she's elected in November, he'll have to watch it.

Felsenthal, a friend of mine, is coming out with a new book, Clinton in Exile: A President Out of the White House. Even in 2001, when he moved out on his own terms because his presidency was over, she says, it was a pretty miserable leavetaking. He was in semidisgrace, thanks to the Marc Rich pardon and stories (way overblown, according to Felsenthal) of his staff trashing Air Force One and the West Wing. TV comics "made him into a ridiculous, pitiful figure." To top it off, he had nowhere to go. The Clintons had bought a place in Chappaqua so she could run for senator in New York, but now that she'd been elected she was never there and it meant nothing to him. "He was stranded with his dog Buddy and his butler and the Secret Service in the garage," with Maureen Dowd hiding out front in the evergreens waiting to pounce, she says.

Felsenthal predicts that Clinton won't be back in the White House anytime soon, but if she's wrong she has no concern that Bill would be, or would even attempt to be, a Putin to Hillary's Medvedev. "She would say, 'Forget that, buddy.'" So what would the ex-president do with himself? Apparently he had trouble with that as president, too. "Hillary goes to sleep at night and in the morning she's wide awake and ready for action," says Felsenthal. "Bill would stay up all night on the telephone and playing cards and then he'd go into a policy meeting and fall asleep." Felsenthal thinks Hillary would get him out of her hair, turning him into an envoy forever on the move, serving his nation by spreading his bad-boy charm.

Clinton showed up onstage with Hillary and Chelsea Tuesday night to bask in the Pennsylvania victory, but he hasn't been seen much since the night of the Iowa defeat. His staying away has been tactical, Felsenthal says, not a sign that the couple's on the outs. They seldom see each other, but they talk all the time, and despite how odd the marriage is it's a strong one, she believes. If Hillary's president she'll be the boss, but he'll be her top consultant, "and that's why the vice presidency in a Hillary Clinton administration would be a bucket of warm piss." In other words, a return to normalcy. That's what John Nance Garner called the vice presidency when he served under FDR, long before the office was taken over by Rasputin, I mean Dick Cheney. 

The book jacket calls Clinton in Exile a "definitive biography," which it isn't. Instructed by her publisher, Morrow, Felsenthal cut some 80,000 words from her original manuscript, most of them telling the pre-2001 "back story." The biographical stuff, in short. Felsenthal has been promoting her book by writing on the Clintons at huffingtonpost.com. She had a good post recently about Bill Clinton's wristwatches. When he was governor, and even after he was elected president, "he was infamous for wearing a cheap plastic Timex Ironman" -- or so Felsenthal was told by a watchmaker who does business with Clinton now. Timex had a big operation in Arkansas. Now Clinton has more than 50 watches, one of them valued at more than $100,000. Felsenthal regrets that "no one has reported which watch the former president sported when he traveled in Pennsylvania bashing Obama as an out-of-touch elitist."

Although Mark Brown's column in the Sun-Times Tuesday was for the most part insightful ("You always can tell when somebody in politics is starting to be taken seriously; you start hearing rumors about their sex life."), I'm not sure Eliot Spitzer would find it entirely fair. Brown's topic was the secret sex lives of the high and mighty in government, and he made the point that "one of the reasons there are a lot of rumors about politicians fooling around is that a lot of politicians fool around." Brown's list included Spitzer; his successor as New York's governor, David Paterson; the indicted mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick; the former governor of New Jersey, Jim McGreevey; and former Republican Senate candidate Jack Ryan of Illinois. Senator Larry Craig of Idaho has figured in similar discussions by other pundits, and some writers with longer memories have recalled the 1974 frolics of powerful Arkansas congressman Wilbur Mills and burlesque starlet Fanne Foxe. Bill Clinton is frequently cited.

I hesitate to speak for Spitzer, but he's in no position to say whether he's offended at being placed in the others' company. He did not "fool around" in the popular sense of that expression, with its intimations of pols gone wild and reckless rendezvous. He booked prostitutes -- booked them ahead of time, as he would barbers or personal trainers, fit them into his schedule, and was done with them. Other men couldn't control themselves and courted disaster. I'm guessing Spitzer's desk looked like his life -- tidy.

“Honeybun,” said the next president, “I expect the press to ask some questions about how you handled the 3 AM calls during your administration.”

“I don’t know why my prostate needs to become an issue in this campaign,” said the last president.

“Not those 3 AM calls. The ones where national security was at stake.”

“You should know,” said Last. “The smartest thing we ever did was put the phone on your side of the bed.”

“That’s because half the time when the phone rang at 3 AM it was you calling,” said Next.

“And the other half the time it was Boris Yeltsin drunk-dialing or Tony Blair needing to talk to someone about the Church of England. I wish I knew how to hang up on people but I don’t. You were totally remorseless.”

“I just said, ‘Do you realize what time it is? It’s 3 AM!’”

“And slammed down the receiver.”

“Blair would always call right back and apologize. It drove me crazy.”

Last chuckled. “Do you remember when it was the prime minister of Canada and neither one of us recognized his name and we told the FBI to trace the call. Good times!”

But Next wasn’t much for nostalgia. “Boris was worse than a telemarketer,” she brooded. “You couldn’t hang up on telemarketers either.”

Last wanted to keep it light. “I bet the press couldn’t guess in a million years that the real reason you won’t release our tax returns is you’re so embarrassed about our time-share investment in Branson, Missouri. Lordy, that gal was persuasive!"

“How persuasive did she have to be?” Next snickered.

As he’d long since learned to do when these intimate conversations took a familiar turn, Last refocused. “Anyway, the problem at hand is to demonstrate that I was cool and collected in a crisis and you learned from the master.”

“Even better,” said Next, “is to demonstrate that I was cool and collected in a crisis and you leaned heavily on my clear thinking and resolve.”

“Let’s not push it,” said Last. “I’m trying to remember just what crises did rear their ugly heads at 3 AM. Rwanda?”

“We probably don’t want to belabor Rwanda,” said Next.

“Anyway,” said Last, “I think that call came in after lunch.”

“What about the bombing of the Cole?” said Next.

Last thought and thought. “Decisive inaction might be hard to explain in a presidential campaign, when nuances get lost,” he said. Then he brightened. “There was that time Chelsea stayed over at her friend’s house and didn’t tell us. That was a crisis at 3 AM and I was the one blubbering ‘Something terrible’s happened to our little girl’ and you said ‘Don’t be silly.’ I’m not ashamed to tell that story.”

“It’s not what the press is looking for,” said Next.

“They’re unrelenting,” Last agreed. “What if we tell them that every time I had to make one of those 3 AM calls, I appointed you acting president. Between the prostate and the hemorrhoids, I could be gone a long time. You had an awesome weight on your shoulders.”