Onwards and upwards

And Bill Clinton is president for another four years. I voted for him, of course, (tempting as it was to vote for Nader; but if every liberal who had a bone to pick with Clinton voted Green, we'd have Dole for president) and given Yale demographics, you probably voted for him, too.

The fact that we face the next four years with a marked lack of enthusiasm probably doesn't trouble Clinton very much. After all, he's been re-elected, which is more or less what he spent the last four years trying to arrange.

It's something of a let-down, isn't it? I can still, if I try, remember some of the excitement I felt on election night in '92--finally, for the first time in my conscious lifetime, one of the Good Guys had won. I made excuses for Clinton when he backed down on gays in the military; I held faith in Hillary as national health care crumbled. But eventually that faith and excitement became simply another thing to laugh at, another one of my freshman year mistakes.

But there's a thing about those freshman year mistakes--you have to learn from them. And what you learn has to be more complicated than your first reaction. OK, Clinton let us down. He was inexperienced, bad at making intelligent compromises, and far too anxious to please. But now, for the first time since we gave up on him in about mid-1993, there's actually hope that he might do something.

The great thing about term limits for presidents is not only that it limits their power-- it also limits their campaigning. Clinton simply can't spend the next four years ensuring his re-election, and that means he has to do something else with his time this term. And who knows, it might even be something constructive.

With Clinton in office once again, there are now another four years to adjust the Welfare Reform Bill, to work on gay rights issues, and possibly even to actually do something about health care. If popularity isn't such a concern, maybe Hillary can once again be allowed to have an opinion. (She does, after all, have the same degree from Yale Law that her husband does.) My vote for Bill Clinton was just as much a vote for his wife. Let's see if it works.

There are dangers, of course. Bill Clinton may have larger prey in mind than merely the voters' esteem: he may want to secure a few pages in the history books. There's nothing like a good war to secure that kind of thing. But I think we're safe from that, since he did begin his career as a Democrat. Far better, then, if he institutes a series of reforms and goes down in history as the President Who Meant Well. Which, in the end, he probably does.

It doesn't pay to get too optimistic, of course. There's no prospect of Clinton deciding to hand out free rice and beans to the needy (imagine him doing it in person, with that affable grin on his face and a little rice powder smeared on his lapel, the Secret Service looking on in disgust). It seems depressingly unlikely that in the next four years we shall see the Defence of Marriage Act repealed and replaced with an edict requiring states to recognize gay marriages. We shall probably wake up one morning a few years from now to discover that our tax money has once again paid for the Government bombing the hell out of Baghdad for human rights abuses, while ignoring equally bad situations in other, more popular locations.

But there's hope. Even Clinton at his most crowd-pleasing can't imagine that his every move will now have the potential to damage his entire future. After all, ex-presidents have pretty nice career tracks ahead of them. Clinton has decades of lecture tours at nice universities to look forward to, and he will get to travel on goodwill missions to all sorts of interesting places. And he will have the opportunity to do this no matter how hated he is by the voters.

So here's hoping he takes advantage of it. Maybe now we'll have what we hoped for four years ago: an honest-to-God activist at the helm. Maybe now, after four years of stagnation, we'll actually see some progress.