America does not want to say goodbye to its first baby boomer President. Very nearly 70 per cent of the people approve of the way Bill Clinton has done the job. They haven't forgotten Gennifer, Monica, Paula, Dolly, Kathleen and Juanita, and funny Chinese money, and the renting of the Lincoln bedroom, and lying under oath, and so on. They know he is a bit of a lad, but they like a President who gets things done.
Even as the White House packers groan about the cubic footage of his beloved books, Clinton is centre stage with a grin and a wave. Between trying to rewrite the doomsday scenario for the Middle East, lighting a Christmas tree in Belfast, and wowing the young people in Vietnam, he has issued no fewer than 29,000 pages of executive orders in his sunset days.
Some sunset! In the last couple of months, he has created a vast new underwater nature preserve in Hawaii, given patients access to medical records, banned logging roads in some scenic areas, pardoned a bunch of malefactors, cut down on soot and smoke pollution and written new "ergonomic" rules to reduce office stress disorders.
None of this has done anything for the office stress disorder the new boy Bush faces with a right wing eager to reverse all this liberal do-gooding. They don't like the way Bush emerged bemused from a briefing lunch with Clinton at the White House where Clinton put on what he calls his "razzledazzle". Given an evenly divided Congress, G. W. will find it hard to rewind the sunset.
Clinton defies the laws of political gravity. That job approval rating is phenomenal. None of the popular postwar presidents - Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan - had this level of public support in the waning months of their presidencies. Ike came closest; even the much loved Reagan slumped into the low 40s. But for the foolish 22nd Amendment of 1951, limiting presidents to two terms, a silvery-haired Clinton would be raising his right hand this month to take the oath of office for the third time. He could well have matched Franklin Roosevelt's unique four terms.
Is he in FDR's league? No. FDR was tested by greater events and rose to them, but in economic terms Clinton has been the most successful Democratic president in the history of the party. Of course, like FDR, he does not enjoy unanimous approval. About 20 per cent of the population resents Clinton as a rock 'n' roll president who infected the 90s with the permissive moral values of the 60s. The haters, who are chorusing "Good riddance!" are something else again, a hard, unforgiving core of Republican rightwingers who have foamed at "slick Willie".
They are very like the crowd who went after FDR in the 30s, enraged that "their" White House had been usurped. Both in 1992 and 1996 Clinton won on a minority vote with the help of third party candidates. The right's sense of entitlement fed an incipient paranoia: when the deputy White House counsel Vincent W. Foster jnr was found shot dead, he must have been murdered; when Hillary Clinton's Rose law firm billings could not be found, she had burned incriminating documents.
The foamers were led by the Wall Street Journal, the Christian fundamentalists, moneybags Richard Mellon Scaife who financed the sleaze police, Rupert Murdoch's New York Post, Bill O'Reilly on Fox TV, a group of libertarian think-tanks, and Rush Limbaugh, epitomising a network of reactionary populists of radio who claim to vent for the real America. They are paler versions of Father Coughlin, who had audiences of 45 million for his antiFDR rants, but for eight years they have never stopped colluding to fit Clinton with a cement suit.
The surprising thing is that they failed. Houdini has nothing on the man from Hope. At the start of his first term, in 1992, he tied the knots himself. He promised he would be a new Democrat, not a prisoner of bureaucrats or the party's tax and spend core. He would raise the ethical tone of government. He would stop the military discriminating against gays. He would act swiftly and decisively on the economy.
THE ECONOMY bequeathed him by George Bush snr was nothing like the great depression Roosevelt inherited from Herbert Hoover in 1932, but Bill, too, was going to have his hundred days of action on jobs and growth. And then he would match FDR's social security revolution with a national health service reform that would both lower medical costs and cover every American. It was a grand vision of what the presidency might achieve, but his eye on the stars, Clinton stumbled badly. Given the smoothness of the White House operation of the last four years, it is easy to forget that when they came in the boys from Arkansas were the gang that couldn't shoot straight. Clinton insisted he must have a woman as attorney general, then nominated Zoe Baird knowing she had broken the law by failing to pay taxes for a housekeeper. The radio talk circuit blew its fuses. See, Willie was a liberal hypocrite, exploiting working people and excepting his friends from laws ordinary people had to obey.
Next, he gave the country the wrong idea of his priorities by getting into an immediate hassle with the military - his military - over gays. He had to retreat into accepting a "don't ask, don't tell" formula. It was, he himself now recognises, "a dumb-ass" thing to do.
He had led the country to expect rapid action on the economy, which had emerged from recession but was still throwing up record deficits, threatening inflation. "It's the economy, stupid" was his campaign theme, but seven months into office, and with a Democratic Congress, he was still unable to get a budget agreed. He was sandwiched between Democrats who wanted money for investment he had promised (including the much-mocked "information highway") and crossparty alliances in the Senate determined not to vote tax increases to pay for them. He had to fight his own party and its rooted protectionism.
It is to his enduring credit that he broke the Democratic mould. In August 1993 he at last persuaded enough Democrats to vote immediate tax increases and phased spending cuts - the first real attempt to contain the federal deficit in more than a decade and passed only on the casting vote of Al Gore. Not a single Republican in House or Senate voted for it. Its importance was underrated by almost everyone, but the wrangling left a bitter taste.
His success in enacting the North American Free Trade Area upset organised labour. The health reform he had provocatively delegated to Hillary was going nowhere, bogged down in such complexity it was easy for its enemies to misrepresent it as the Clintons telling you what doctor you could use. A fine initiative, well supported by the public and with the Republicans initially eager to trade, became vulnerable to a massive propaganda campaign by the special interests in health and insurance. Clinton's popularity at this point slumped lower than any postwar president.