NY Times: The Devil Wears Crocs

By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: September 26, 2009
At the end of many Shakespearean dramas, self-destructive leaders are usually strewn dead on stage.

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Maureen Dowd

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With modern presidencies, we have to watch the poignant tableau of such leaders realizing that they have squandered their chance for greatness even as they suffer the indignity of rejection by those who once sought their blessing.

These painful periods for W. and Bill Clinton, falling low after starting with such grand hopes, are recounted in two new books.

The pen-and-tell by Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer, “Speech-less,” is being denounced by some former Bushies and Republican commentators as a “Devil Wears Prada” betrayal. (Except, in this case, the Devil wears Crocs. Preparing to make a prime-time address explaining why the 2008 economic bailout wasn’t socialism — “We got to make this understandable for the average cat,” the president tells his speechwriters — W. pads around the White House in Crocs, an image that’s hard to get out of your head.)

“The guy is a worm,” Bill Bennett told Wolf Blitzer about Latimer, adding: “He needs to read his Dante. He probably hasn’t read ‘The Inferno.’ The lowest circles of hell are for people who are disloyal in the way this guy is disloyal, and at the very lowest point Satan chews on their bodies.”

Despite all the devilish critiques, the book is not that hard on W., except to state the obvious: that he was a Decider who made bold but bad decisions. And it’s positively dewy-eyed about two of the worst decisions, Dick Cheney and Rummy. (Latimer wrote speeches for Rummy at the Pentagon and is now helping the former defense chief with his memoir.)

My favorite part is when the White House political office suggests that W. go to Monticello and make a speech pointing out that his legacy matched Thomas Jefferson’s. “Jefferson had founded the University of Virginia,” Latimer writes, describing the aides’ reasoning. “Well, they said, Bush had gotten the No Child Left Behind Act passed. Jefferson had authored the Declaration of Independence. Well, Bush had launched the Freedom Agenda in Afghanistan and Iraq. Jefferson had authored the Virginia statute for religious freedom. Well, that was just like the president’s faith-based initiative.” Latimer balked, noting that “if Bush actually went to Monticello to proclaim himself the Thomas Jefferson of our day, there’d be grounds to question his sanity.”

His book ends with the downbeat time when Bush supports McCain simply because “a McCain defeat would be a repudiation of the Bush administration.” Both Republicans were uncomfortable. McCain was distancing himself from the unpopular Republican president and W. “was clearly not impressed with the McCain operation.”

One day, W. was told that a joint appearance in Phoenix with McCain, designed to show the two men could stand to be on the same stage together, was going to be closed to the press.

“If he doesn’t want me to go, fine,” W. snapped. “I’ve got better things to do.”

Then the president was informed that the event was going to be closed because McCain was having trouble drawing a crowd. Latimer writes that an incredulous Bush mordantly asked: “He can’t get five hundred people to show up for an event in his hometown?”

Happy he wasn’t the only political wallflower, W. drove home the point: “I could get that many people to turn out in Crawford. This is a five-spiral crash, boys.”

Like W., Bill Clinton had an awkward final act supporting Gore, even though Gore was distancing himself from Clinton, and Bubba was chafing at the misguided Gore campaign. Like W. with McCain, he felt a Gore defeat would be bad for his legacy.

In his new book, “The Clinton Tapes,” Taylor Branch describes an explosive meeting between Clinton and Gore after the election characterized by Clinton as “surreal.” Gore said people around him blamed Clinton’s scandalous shadow for the defeat. And Clinton, who told Branch that W. was “an empty suit, meaner than his dad,” shot back that if Gore had used him more in the last 10 days in places where he was still popular, he could have swung the election. He chastised Gore for not running on bigger themes and for dropping the issue he was most passionate about: the environment.

Gore asked Clinton for an explanation of Monica Lewinsky; he wanted an apology. Clinton blew up. Focusing on his mistakes, he told his V.P., demeaned voters and ignored the public’s business.

Branch summed up Clinton’s bottom line to Gore: “By God, Hillary had a helluva lot more reason to resent Clinton than Gore did, and yet she ran unabashedly on the Clinton-Gore record” for the Senate and won handily. Gore, Clinton said, was in “Neverland.”

The wrong turns Clinton and W. took made it harder for Gore and McCain to get elected. But in the final analyses, Clinton and W., both clever pols, were right: Gore and McCain tripped themselves up with awful campaigns.

Nicholas D. Kristof is off today.