Tonight Bill Clinton will speak at the DNC and I'll watch; in fact, I'm more likely to watch his speech than I am anyone else's including the President's. And I don't think I'm alone in feeling this way. There's something about an ex-Democratic President that inspires us, or maybe an ex-Southern Democratic President. Ah hell, I mean Carter and Clinton.
Now the same think tank that crowned Reagan king crowned Jimmy Carter a dunce some thirty years ago—it turns out to have been wrong on both counts. If you take Jimmy Carter's humanitarian achievements and match them up against the combined achievements of all 20th century Republican presidents, Carter wins. If you add Bill Clinton's work (some of it with George H.W. Bush—a notable exception) it's a landslide. Yet they both left office under a cloud—Carter's malaise and Clinton's incredible lack of judgment—but now they're revered.
It's because their politics, their philosophy is a bit romantic, one that speaks to an inherent belief in the basic goodness of man, the integrity of the individual, and the allegiance we owe—not necessarily to the country as an entity—but to the country as a disparate group of individuals. Maybe that attitude doesn't play well in the White House—maybe the majority of Americans don't want to hear about our duties to our fellow mortals especially in times of economic hardship, but that's just the time that we should.
The Republicans have portrayed social programs as a detriment to hard-working Americans, but if Clinton can show the voters that it isn't true, that tending to our fellow man outweighs the need for a bottom line, then this whole Republican schtick crumbles. And Clinton is the one to do it because he has walked the walk. And so to, on a less international stage, has Carter. Either one of them can appeal to the "better angels of our nature" and show us what we can be.
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