How he can still roar: When he feels that the herd is threatened, when he sets aside the dislikes, the bad blood and the offenses to his lioness Hillary, Bill, the old, hoary “Lion King,” climbs onto the rock to defend the person he detests but embraces, Obama.
A speech of 49 minutes (naturally many more than the 30 minutes planned, because he never respected a schedule in his life) under the tents of the Democratic circus in Charlotte to stir up some nostalgia — even in those who had hated him and tried to kick him out of the White House, waving underwear and lipstick. William Jefferson Clinton Blythe, III, “Bubba” — the son of a controversial nurse and a salesman who was probably an alcoholic and who was killed when he crashed his car into a pole in impoverished Arkansas — is still the type of champion that politics can produce in democracies of every generation. Men (waiting for the first woman) who, like Roosevelt, Kennedy and Reagan, can leave an indelible footprint in the sands of politics, like Neil Armstrong’s “moon boots” on the moon.
A week ago, in Tampa, the Republicans exhumed another great old man, Clint Eastwood, in the sketch with the empty chair, in order to fill the void of communicativeness and charisma and show that neither Mitt Romney, with his human emptiness, nor vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan, with his ideological limitations, could have filled.
The Republicans knew that their Democratic enemies would send in a lion like “Bubba” Clinton, someone capable of combining the art of oratory with charisma, numbers with seduction, humor with polemic. A former president who could say, as Clinton did, that he knew what he was talking about, that he had lived in that [White] House and brought America eight years of peace, prosperity, a balanced public budget and a surplus with regard to the national debt. He could therefore say from experience that Barack Obama is the one who will carry on this legacy, and that he shouldn’t be fired or judged in the middle of his work, especially not by those who are responsible for the mess that he inherited when he took office.
While the Republicans had to hide George W. Bush, kept out of the tent and invisible like an uncle you can’t take to family dinners, the Democrats could brandish an icon of a happy past. Time — Clinton’s white hair worn with pride, without the shoe polish that Mitt Romney spreads on his — and the forgetfulness of the crowd have purged this icon of his sins and, maybe, his lust.
Clinton had worked on his speech all summer long, locked in a house by the sea with his wife and his beloved Terry McAuliffe, manager of Hillary’s losing campaign against Obama, but still a great “consigliore” of Clinton’s clan.
When the Obama team offered him the “prime-time” slot on the penultimate day of the convention, relegating the political nullity of Vice President Joe Biden to another time, he knew that they had set him a golden trap.
If he had been too tepid toward his successor, they would have devoured him, mounting the obvious accusation that he wanted to make Obama pay for the humiliation inflicted in 2008 on the woman who, in the year of Monica, saved his career, staying faithfully by his side with cynical political stoicism.
If his adulation had been excessive, his lady would have devoured him herself. A man caught between his wife and his party is in a bit of an uncomfortable position. But they had underrated him again. The big guy, whose passion for cheeseburgers made him even heavier, is now thinner, thanks to his attempts at maintaining a vegetarian diet. The head of salt and pepper hair that I accompanied during the pilgrimage of his first, impossible electoral campaign in 1992 — set to the haunting notes of Fleetwood Mac’s “Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow” at every stop (and they made them listen to it at the convention, too) — is now white. The seducer who managed to make every woman he talked to for a few seconds feel like the center of the universe (solid foundation of every seduction), the actor who could make his voice hoarse “to feel your pain,” was whittled away by the years, by the coronary bypasses, by the doctors.
But all it took was him getting on stage and pointing his finger — now a bit trembling — at the enemies to reignite the electricity between him and the crowd. He neutralized the tension between himself and Obama with a joke. He said that the president is not a resentful man but rather a man who wants to govern with everybody instead of against everybody: “He appointed Republican secretaries… He appointed several members of his Cabinet, even though they supported Hillary in the primary. Heck, he even appointed Hillary.” Laughs and ovations. Case closed.
The master wanted to say that he wasn’t resentful either. The distance from his wife, who invented a mission in Asia right during the convention, while her husband was speaking, was no longer scandalous. The Lion King dispelled every suspicion of internal dissent or opposing views of the future within the party. And it’s not the orderly hug that briefly tied Billy “Bubba” and “Barry,” as Obama was called as a kid; it was still the usual cautious contact, a bit aslant between American males (to avoid any suspicion of friction between controversial zones of their bodies). There was also a hug in Denver four years ago, and it was just acting.
Clinton roars for Obama, but also for himself and for his latest assignment, the assault on the White House in 2016 in the name of his wife, his final debt to her. The master of “triangulation,” as he was called — of saying something to do something else, of playing off the cushion like in billiards — decided that Obama’s re-election is convenient to his clan. Or he wanted to ensure that, if Obama should be kicked out, the Clintons couldn’t be blamed for it. He has already received and accepted orders to make pro-Obama speeches and appearances in the 60 days that separate us from the vote on Nov. 6.
The Democratic Party is mine, he roared, but I’ll lend it to you this time, which may well be the last. Clinton destroyed Clint. As a real lion, he marked the territory that belongs to him, that of a party that, now that the Kennedys are gone, has only him as an icon and myth. It will be very hard for Obama to do better. If it weren’t for the Constitution, which limits the president to two terms, this man would still be the president of the United States. Instead, along came George W. Bush.
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