What We'll Remember

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The Rev. Peter J. Gomes
Preacher to Harvard University and professor
Apply one word to Bill Clinton, it would be perseverance, which in his case is both a great virtue and a minor vice. He persisted in the face of terrific obstacles to his own ideals, obstacles that in some cases were his own creation. Throughout all the stress and trauma of these eight years, he is as idealistic and optimistic, maybe even to a fault, as when he began. Usually, Presidents become sadder, wiser and far more cynical. And I think he didn't because he has been sustained by his core Christian values. A lot of my Christian brethren and sistren are very hardhearted toward him because he doesn't conform to a particular profile of contrition. But I think he has been guided, and probably saved from even worse disasters, by his passionate desire to do good. For most of us in this country, he has functioned as a religious figure, however flawed, someone who speaks out of the depths of his convictions, not simply as a manager or a leader. The biblical figure he reminds me of over and over again is David, who was God's beloved but also fatally flawed.

Lewis Lapham
Editor, Harper's
At the televised gala, the night before he was inaugurated in 1993, Barbra Streisand sang Evergreen, and Clinton couldn't resist mouthing the lyrics. And the cameras--as he knew they would--started drifting away from Streisand and found the President, tears streaming out of his eyes, mouthing the words, devouring the words as if they were made of chocolate. And I then knew that what we had here was the story of a stomach. The man is defined--was then, is now and has been all through the eight years--as the Great American Consumer. He'll eat anything. Hugs, scandal, limelight, anything, as long as he gets to stay in the center of the stage. He's got this voracious appetite: more friends, more speeches, more food, more time onstage, more hands to shake.

He's a talk-show host. His diction is that of group therapy, and his tenure has been one long television gala. He's the man from Disney. It's been a series of poses, and very convincing ones. It's entertainment. Reagan was an actor pretending to be a politician; Clinton is a politician pretending to be an actor.

Michael Waldman
Former White House speechwriter
The 1998 State of the Union was surreal and intense, like nothing I ever experienced in the White House. The Lewinsky scandal had exploded about a week before, and to me that speech was a moment that crystallized so much about Clinton's presidency. Clinton had to try to govern through media clamor and partisan pressures that were almost unbearable, yet at the same time, he was able to seize the policy high ground.

For the first day or two after the scandal broke he was a little rattled, but then he pulled himself together to really bear down and focus on the speech. He steadied all of our nerves by doing that. It was just becoming clear there were going to be budget surpluses well ahead of anyone's expectations. The Republicans in Congress were determined to use that projected surplus for a tax cut, and in our view, it would be gone before it materialized. So over a period of many months, Clinton decided that using the surplus for Social Security was the best proposal he could make. Amazingly, it didn't leak.

When he walked out into the chamber, he was under the most intense amount of personal pressure any President has ever had at a State of the Union. Nobody knew what he was going to say; nobody knew how he could do it. And he said, "What shall we do with our new surplus? I have a simple, four-word answer: save Social Security first." The Democrats jumped up and applauded. And Gingrich thought about it for a second; then he stood up and applauded. And the Republicans looked at him, and looked at one another; then they stood up and applauded. At that precise moment, a trillion dollars in the budget shifted from the column marked "tax cut" to the column marked "Social Security."

That set the stage for this election and for the budget politics of the next 10 years. It was the most effective use of the "bully pulpit" by a President that I can think of, and it was at his most difficult personal moment.

Bob Kerrey
Retiring Democratic Senator from Nebraska
With the President, there has been a consistent desire to have federal policies that promote economic growth. In spite of my sometimes irritation with him when he makes a reversal or doesn't press ahead on important policy areas--like Social Security or Medicare--on the thing that got him where he is today, he has been unwavering: belief in economic growth, and belief that while the economy is growing, you've got to push the circle of freedom out with health-care and education investments. And he is relentless. Sure, he has altered course from time to time, but he's never backed away from his core set of beliefs.

He has redefined what it means to be a Democrat in several important ways. We no longer should be on the defensive about being a tax-and-spend party because we delivered just the opposite. We delivered economic growth. He delivered on law enforcement when the American people used to say Democrats were soft on crime. He hasn't abandoned the core Democratic belief that we should give people an opportunity. Even on defense, he's shown you don't have to have been in the military to be a good Commander in Chief.