| Impeached former president Bill Clinton can't get office space in the more desirable parts of Manhattan, the first firm to hire him to speak was immediately compelled to apologize, his Hollywood friends are refusing to defend him on the Marc Rich pardon and White House ottoman heist, there is a sex-saturated emporium in Thailand named The Clinton Entertainment Plaza, and The New York Times has finally admitted to its readers that Clinton wasn't so popular after all. In a related development, O.J. Simpson has been arrested and may face jail time.
We are governed by a just and good God.
Wholly apart from the comedic aspects of watching Clinton's erstwhile supporters take up the hard work of the Clinton-haters, it's kind of a relief to know that once he's out of power, no one likes him. The only way to distinguish Clinton-haters from Clinton-lovers these days is that only his former friends are claiming to be shocked by his charming exit from office.
Clinton's alleged popularity was never merely a political dispute. He became the Rorschach blot of what kind of country this is. Consequently, it got a little depressing to keep hearing claims of Clinton's runaway popularity on account of his being a lying pervert.
Columnist Maureen Dowd continuously referred to Clinton's "vertiginous approval ratings," complaining that Gore had "frittered away this huge, amazing gift that had been bestowed on him."
Frank Rich (Dowd's colleague on the diverse New York Times op-ed page) said the main problem with the Gore campaign was that "the Democrats have fallen into the same 'fatal eddy' that the Republicans did in '98 -- buying into the Washington establishment's still completely unproven conviction that you can win elections running as moral paragons against Bill Clinton's sins."
Except the only "unproven conviction" was the lunatic claim that the "American people" adored Bill Clinton and adored him most enthusiastically for his "sins." It didn't matter that these were subjective assertions of irrelevant people. Soon, dour conservatives were claiming to believe lying liberals, and nearly everyone was insisting the country loved Bill Clinton.
Everyone else loved him, that is. The "American people" came to be an Oz-like concept. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain!
Sweeping statements by journalists about those 280 million people behind the curtain are always highly informative about precisely one thing: the opinions of those journalists. But they really tell us nothing at all about the "American people" that the authors claim to speak for.
On the other hand, there are methods of gauging public opinion that, unlike newspaper columns, can be tested. The behavior of campaign consultants and Wall Street investors, for example, provides meaningful data because it has real and immediate consequences. The 280 million people cavalierly summarized by the opinion columnists weren't able to chat with Dowd and Rich. They were able to vote with their ballots and with their money. Continued... |