Theories have arisen as to why Bill Clinton has behaved ineptly and inanely, offending blacks and misstating facts and angrily denying having plainly made those misstatements of fact.
His wife has taken to sending him to small towns, like the Republicans did to conceal Dan Quayle in 1988.
One suggestion is medical. It's that heart surgery weakened Our Boy Bill.
Another is that he got out of political practice while traveling the world to give big-dollar speeches filled with hollow platitudes and beheld by rapt, adoring audiences. When you are the toast of the global community, the little matter of an intra-party political contest in South Carolina or Nevada can seem positively beneath you. So you take it lightly, like a heavily favored football team. The next thing you know it's half-time and you've fumbled more than you've scored.
I buy the rustiness theory, but not the medical one. And I offer two other thoughts.
The first is that Clinton always has been prone this way, famously undisciplined, given to untruth, hypersensitivity and temper, ever in need of a Hillary Clinton or a Betsey Wright to put her foot down and save him from his wild-hair instincts. But now Betsey is fighting the death penalty from the shores of Beaver Lake and Hillary also is otherwise busy. So he's out there as a political lion without his tamer.
It has ever been so. He blew his first gubernatorial term amid fits of headline-making pique. He blew his first national political chance with a ponderously awful speech at a Democratic national convention. He once announced for re-election as governor by saying he really didn't have any desire to run. He got so mad at me that he sent me notes that his staff was horrified to learn about.
As president, he got so furious at Brit Hume (understandably) that his staff had to collar him. He waved his finger and said he didn't have sex with that woman. He went to Texas and said he was wrong to have raised taxes so much on rich people, which cut the legs out from under Democrats in Congress who had bitten the bullet for him, and who would soon lose their majority in disastrous mid-term elections.
Meet the new Bill, same as the old Bill.
Here's the other thought: Clinton walks around irritated, even angst-ridden, over this whole thing. His legacy, which is all a former president has, gets minimized either way.
If his own wife becomes the first woman president, he will be recorded merely as her and history's forerunner, like John the Baptist.
If Barack Obama becomes president, Clinton will be recorded as a mere interlude, a president of eight years marked by decent government and personal scandal. He will be recorded as somebody filling the gap between the conservative transformer that Ronald Reagan was and the generational and cultural transformer that Obama was. He will be the man footnoted for history for having been prematurely anointed as our first black president. He will be the one who managed near the end to sully his otherwise sterling reputation on matters of race.
Decades hence, they'll ask on Trivial Pursuit: Before Barack Obama actually became the first black president, which president had been called the first black president? Everyone will miss it. They'll say FDR or JFK. Everyone will be astonished to turn the card and read "Bill Clinton."
The best thing that could happen for Clinton's legacy would be for John McCain to win and continue the post-Clinton Republican ineptitude. He would need for both Hillary and Barack to fail.
You don't think? Naw. Can't be. Nobody could be that smart and manipulative.
John Brummett is a columnist for the Arkansas News Bureau in Little Rock. His e-mail address is jbrummett@arkansasnews.com; his telephone number is (501) 374-0699.
