Bill Clinton: Ex-President, the First Black President, Leading International Figure, and Sinner

Sunday, September 17, 2006

Ex-President Bill Clinton is a leading international figure. His grasp of issues, his friendships with world leaders, his voracious reading and deep grasp of many subjects; his ability "to feel " others' experience; to reach out and communicate with everyone he meets support this description. He is also an admitted sinner, as he defines it. It is all these qualities and contradictions that in the eyes of a segment of the Black community, and Toni Morrison in the pages of the New Yorker Magazine, that view Clinton as "The First Black President".

I recommend that anyone interested in learning more about the qualities of eadership, charisma, political vision, and the ability to practice curious judgment, read David Remnick's article in the September 18, 2006 issue of the New Yorker Magazine. His brilliant writing describes this fascinating person much better than of my observations.

It is well known that Clinton has become a world traveler and international spokesperson and fund raiser for HIV-AIDS research and treatment in Africa. Noteworthy is his recent alliance with the Gates Foundation to serve as the diplomat for this program. But what is much less well-known is that Bill Clinton openly admitted his failures as President to deal with the genocide in Rawanda and his lack of dilligence on dealing with the HIV-AIDS pandemic. This apology, repeated widely in his travels in Africa, obscures but also puts into the queue of importance his bad judgment and his almost soap opera demonstration of his uncontrolled sexual impulses.

Not unrelated to his apologies is his brush with death in 2004, when he underwent heart by-pass surgery. Clinton is now almost obsessed with his mortality, in part because of his family history of heart disease and untimely deaths. It is almost because he realizes he needs to accomplish "something else" before his life ends in what could be, according to his musings, in the next moment. Though confessions and recoveries can be the stuff that propels so-called sinners to "do good" in a very moralizing manner, it is rare that a figure with such a built-in sense of the political to come right out and say " I screwed up and I'm sorry." And, then, to spend his life after his Presidency trying to amend this record.

I was personally outraged about the amount of negative attention and political intrigue that followed Clinton's ascendency to President. The Whitewater "scandal" was so much ado about nothing. And the national moral knee jerk reaction to the Monica Lewinsky affair, and, then, an impeachment that focused more on morality than "high crimes and misdemeanors" made an exception to all of the cover-ups of other Presidents. The recent "icon" President Kennedy was renowned for his sexual addiction, about which the press of the day paid no attention. His Presidency was very much enabled by his father's money and ferocious dedicaton to the notoriety of the Kennedy family. Joe Kennedy's background of "rum running" during Prohibition with his connection to the MOB and his incessant sexual peccadillos were well known but kept undercover by the same press. And don't forget Warren Harding's illegitmate child living undercover with his mistress in New York City.

Which brings us back to William Jefferson Clinton. The imperfect man, the President held in low regard by his sinner critics. He is, nevertheless, an ex-President, the "first Black President, still an international figure, and a confessed sinner of the big issues. Clinton's high intellect underpinned by the rare ability to look beyond what is apparent for the deep issues, and who can discern where others moralize has made a positive place for himself in current history.