Now it’s Bill Clinton’s turn to be in the spotlight, his favorite place. His “life story” will be released a week from tomorrow, but I guarantee the heavy media coverage will begin this week.
If a freelance fact checker could have landed the gig of fact-checking Bill Clinton’s book, he/she would have hit the jackpot (but I’m sure Random House has its own fact-checkers). Clinton has a propensity to shade the truth, and I’m certain his publisher had numerous fact-checkers going behind him to clean up inconsistencies.
Get ready for weeks and weeks and weeks of Bill Clinton’s face and stories splashed across newspapers. The Washington Post has already started:
Now, it’s the Democrats’ turn. After a week-long flood of commentary on the most popular Republican president of modern times, the country is about to be immersed in another tide of reminiscence and argument about the most successful Democratic president within the memory of most voters.
A month anchored at the beginning by Ronald Reagan will be anchored at the end by Bill Clinton. The release of Clinton’s memoirs, “My Life,” on June 22 will put a spotlight on a presidency that in policies and style was wholly different from Reagan’s. Like Reagan, however, Clinton as ex-president has seen the controversies of his tenure recede while appreciation for his outsized personality has seemed to deepen. And like Reagan, Clinton is now widely regarded as a touchstone for his party, including for the presumptive presidential nominee, John F. Kerry.
One of the many differences between coverage on Reagan and coverage on Clinton is that the country was appropriately immersed in stories about the life and death of the great Ronald Reagan, the man who ushered in a conservative revolution, not to mention ending the Cold War. But Clinton is neither great nor dead, and the only thing he ushered in was degradation of the presidency.
I wonder if liberals will complain about excessive “Clinton nostalgia” media hype the way they did about a puny week of coverage for Reagan? That’s rhetorical, by the way.
No doubt the Democrats will count on Clinton to add some excitement to John Kerry’s boring campaign. They admit that kicking George Bush out of the White House is what excites them.
I think I just might read Clinton’s book. And while I’m at it, I’ll pick up a copy of Hillary Clinton’s book (both from the library) just for sport. Pointing out contradictions in and between both books should make good blogging material.
We’ll see if they got their stories straight.
