Bill Clinton kicked off his book tour to promote My Life (a tome that, by all accounts, reads like a phonebook in Sanskrit) by talking about his Presidential nicknames on 60 Minutes with Dan Rather. In the 90’s, Clinton’s nicknames piled up almost as fast as his indiscretions. There was “The Comeback Kid,” and “Bubba” and “Elvis,” and, my favorite, “Slick Willie.” Clinton says that “Slick Willie” is the only one that still makes him bristle. Apparently he’s fine with the others.

I thought that “Slick Willie” fit him just fine. “Bubba” was assigned to him because he was ostensibly a southerner, but I know a few Bubbas who would bristle if they heard their appellation applied to Bill Clinton. I never understood why anyone would call Clinton “Elvis,” though. I always thought him more similar to another long-dead rock star… Jim Morrison. Like the lead singer of The Doors, Clinton made a career out of style without substance. He was a master at using words that sound good but really mean nothing, and he sure could strike a pose. Like Morrison, Clinton lived hedonistically and insisted that those who had a problem with his lifestyle were, in fact, the ones with the problem. Just like Jim Morrison, Clinton BS’d his way to his position in life and then didn’t know what to do with it once he got it. He preened and pouted and smiled for the cameras and ultimately accomplished little of substance. Like Morrison, Bill Clinton’s legacy has more to do with star power than with talent, guts, or value. If Jim Morrison was, as he named himself, “The Lizard King,” then Bill Clinton must be “The Lizard President.”

It’s hard to be objective about Clinton when his choice of words and his presentation and his body language make it so obvious how impressed he is with himself. Regardless of the disasters he left behind in Washington, Clinton genuinely thinks of himself as a revolutionary, a visionary, and a smashing success. Even his self-acknowledged failures smack of hubris. Clinton confessed to Dan Rather that his failure to bring peace between the Palestinians and the Israelis was his biggest failure, “an error of historic proportions,” as he called it. Am I the only person left aghast at such a simplified, meaningless confession? Honestly, does Clinton think that it would have been possible in eight years to have brought a real and lasting peace to the Middle East? What might he have done during his two term presidency that would have been so different from everyone before him who has worked to stabilize that hottest of world hot spots? Could he, in his monumental wisdom and progressive world view, actually have accomplished in two terms what’s seemed impossible for thousands of years? He seems to think he could have, and names his failure to do so as his biggest mistake. He may as well chastise himself for not controlling the weather. To point to the continued unrest between Arabs and Jews as his biggest failure is to name no real failure at all. This is shocking, considering the list of failures he had to pick from:

Osama bin Laden
Clinton claims to have been “obsessed” with Osama bin Laden during his Presidency. Well, there’s obsession, and then there’s Bill Clinton’s obsession. I’ll give Slick the benefit of the doubt and assume that bin Laden did cross his mind from time to time… but not because he was concerned in any meaningful way about the threat of terrorism. If he had been, maybe Clinton would have used the military to capture bin Laden instead of relying on overwhelmed police agencies. Maybe he’d have recognized the 1993 World Trade Center bombing as an act of war and not as an isolated crime. If Clinton had possessed even half the resolve and determination of George W. Bush, perhaps he’d have been obsessed with actually capturing the Saudi terrorist. Instead, Clinton’s “obsession,” such as it was, had more to do with his fear of whatever stain bin Laden might leave on Clinton’s dreamt of legacy.

Iraq
Another Clinton failure, another mess left for his successor to clean up, was Saddam Hussein. For eight years, Bill Clinton did nothing real to stop the Iraqi dictator’s return to threatening power. The sanctions imposed on Saddam’s regime after the first Gulf War were largely ignored in the 90’s, as Clinton gradually caved in to Russian, Chinese, and French pressure. Gradually, Iraq returned unhindered to the world marketplace as Clinton resulted to doomed policies of appeasment. Saddam repeatedly threw out weapons inspectors in the name of national sovereignty. He also used his starving people as pawns to pressure the world to allow him, practically unchecked, to resume his oil trade. Money began to flow through Saddam’s regime again and he began to rearm, becoming an increasingly bold and dangerous law-breaker. Faced with this threat, Clinton made a few speeches and dropped a few bombs as punishment. Saddam weathered that punishment, having called Clinton’s bluff and knowing full well that the American President wouldn’t lift a finger to actually stop him from rearming. By the beginning of George W. Bush’s Presidency, Saddam was bolder and more threatening than ever, having spent eight years enjoying the freedom of Bill Clinton’s failure.

North Korea
What of Clinton’s failures in North Korea? Clinton now says he was “determined” not to let North Korea become a nuclear power. So, why did he let them, then? In 1994, the U.S. inked a deal with North Korea wherein we’d provide them with food and fuel and they’d start living up to the Non-Proliferation Treaty they’d previously signed. During Clinton’s second four years in office, North Korea developed the nuclear capabilities they’d promised not to. We continued to live up to our end of the deal, anyway. And what’s worse, believable sources indicated that Clinton knew that the North Koreans were cheating and never moved to call them on it. By then, the rock star President was already dreaming about the way he’d be remembered, content to leave North Korea to his successor as well.

The Fund Raising Scandal
What about Clinton’s shady relationships with questionable foreign campaign donors? Might that be his biggest failure? Could he have left a black mark on the Presidency with his actions? Nope. Clinton didn’t even address that issue during his 60 Minutes interview. I suppose he considered that issue to be moot... after all, he'd already condemned foreign campaign contributions. Of course, he condemned it after the fact, and it was his buddy John Huang who got stuck twisting in the wind... but, hey, who's counting?

Impeachment
Maybe his impeachment represented his biggest failure? Not a chance. While some of us remember that period as a dark, embarrassing time for our country, Clinton calls it a “badge of honor”. He’s actually proud of it. The whole scandal proved him to be a liar, a cheater, and a perverse abuser of the public trust. And yet he sees it as his victorious battle against political forces that aimed to bring him down unjustly. I suppose Jim Morrison felt the same way about the cops who arrested him for exposing himself during a Doors concert in Miami. Fight the power, man. Right on.

Monica-gate
Even the way Clinton seduced and clumsily bought off Monica Lewinski failed to elicit any real shame from the former President. If there’s any element of Clinton’s presidency that welcomes comparisons to Jim Morrison, it has to be Monica-gate. It’s hard not to draw parallels between the White House intern and a star-struck groupie, dazed and amazed to have a private audience with the Big Star as he sings “Come on, come on, come on, TOUCH me babe…” Dan Rather gave Clinton several opportunities to call the scandal his biggest failure in office. Instead, Clinton told of his sleepless night before confessing his affair to his wife. What are we to make of that? Are we to take in this striking image of a man tortured by his own misdeeds? Oh, my. How brave. How remarkable. How totally irrelevant. Clinton lost a night of sleep over the affair. Big deal. Show me a man who cheats on his wife and doesn’t lose sleep over it. Frankly, I’m not remotely impressed by Clinton’s candor that the affair was a “moral error.” Instead, let me draw your attention to his explanation that he had the affair “for the worst possible reason, because I could.” Only Bill Clinton… and perhaps, Jim Morrison… could make a statement that comes off simultaneously as self-effacing in structure and self-congratulatory in tone.

Clinton success in office, as I see it, is limited to one single item: his work on the federal deficit. Other than that, he was an abysmal failure. Those who credit him for the fairly robust economy the country enjoyed in the ‘90’s fail to consider the internet stock boom. And that had little, if anything, to do with Clinton. (By the way, when those stocks fizzled, the recession they created had nothing to do with George W. Bush.) Clinton’s foreign policies were inept and tragically flawed. Through inaction he strengthened global terrorism and emboldened rogue nations. And his shady back-room fundraising and last minute pardons for criminal friends rubbed the last bit of salt in the wounds. Clinton’s moral ambiguity and legal smarminess define his character, and his character defines his presidency. For all his grand posturing as a visionary and a leader, Clinton was little more than a handsome face with a lot of style and nothing to say. Like Jim Morrison before him, Clinton managed to trick a nation into believing that his indulgences and ramblings were meaningful. He was the lizard President, and he could do anything.