Jesuits: You Know Them By Their Students: How Georgetown affected the truthfulness of Bill Clinton, back when he campaigned as a MAGA guy

 

Bill Clinton addresses a crowd in Little Rock, Arkansas, in 1992 © AP

Sam Leith

Published: Nov 8 2017

“Believe it or not,” Bill Clinton said in a speech at Georgetown University on Monday, “we thought it was pretty polarised” back in 1992: “we had income inequality, we had alienation, we had unequal opportunities, and we had a lot of social division”. But, as he reflected, America now looks even more polarised. 

It’s 25 years ago this month that the boy from Hope, Arkansas, was elected president of the US — an event that he celebrated from the steps of the Old State House in Little Rock with the resonant pay-off (made possible by his birth town): “I still believe in a place called Hope.” 

He has an enduring reputation as one of the most effective speakers in the modern history of the presidency. But there are two Bill Clintons that we tend to remember, oratorically. There’s the great empathiser who said, “I feel your pain”; and there’s the Jesuitical lawyer who could argue straight-facedly about “what the meaning of ‘is’ is” or redefine “sexual relations” in a hitherto unique way. 

At his most effective, he combined those two things: argument and passion; or logos and pathos, in Aristotelian terms. It’s seldom remembered, for instance, that “I feel your pain” was delivered not in gooey Oprah Winfrey mode but in great anger. On the 1992 campaign trail, the then governor Mr Clinton was heckled by an Aids activist called Bob Rafsky. The sound bite was delivered as part of an angry response to Mr Rafsky’s off-beam jibe that Mr Clinton was “dying of ambition”. 

“Let me tell you something. If I were dying of ambition, I wouldn’t have stood up here and put up with all this crap I’ve put up with for the last six months. I’m fighting to change this country. 

Mr Clinton has always been at his best as a speaker when combining intellectual sinew with well-pitched displays of emotion. 

“And let me tell you something else. Let me tell you something else. You do not have the right to treat any human being, including me, with no respect because of what you’re worried about. I did not cause it. I’m trying to do something about it. I have treated you and all the people who’ve interrupted my rally with a hell of a lot more respect than you’ve treated me, and it’s time you started thinking about that. 

“I feel your pain, I feel your pain, but if you want to attack me personally you’re no better than Jerry Brown and all the rest of these people who say whatever sounds good at the moment. If you want something to be done, you ask me a question and you listen. If you don’t agree with me, go support somebody else for President but quit talking to me like that. This is not a matter of personal attack; it’s a matter of human wrong.” 

Here, rather than a passive surrender to empathy, was a venomously articulate call for courtesy, and for active pragmatism over yah-boo displays of feeling. 

And — though in softer and more sinuous mode — he combined a display of feeling with a lawyer’s precision when seeking to turn things around during the investigation into the Lewinsky affair. He chose the occasion of a White House prayer breakfast to mount a shamelessly political fightback, by turning a legal and political issue into a spiritual one. While noting that “I will instruct my lawyers to mount a vigorous defence”, he said: “But legal language must not obscure the fact I have done wrong.” 

In a speech at Georgetown university this week, Bill Clinton says America is even more polarised than it was when he became president in 1992 © Reuters

Casting himself as a humble repentant, he quoted scripture, apologised to those he had hurt, and (in a foxy shift of translative stasis) put his spiritual renewal into the hands of God — thus, by implication, raising it above and beyond the petty realm of impeachment proceedings. He even — as a notoriously fluent improviser — made the slightly hammy gesture of reading his remarks from a piece of paper and craving his audience’s indulgence in his wearing his glasses to do so. Here was an object show of human vulnerability, and a token of his seriousness. 

“I was up rather late last night thinking about and praying about what I ought to say today. And rather unusually for me, I actually tried to write it down. So if you will forgive me, I will do my best to say what it is I want to say to you. And I may have to take my glasses out to read my own writing.” 

To his opponents, that speech will have been enragingly brilliant. Mr Clinton, then, has always been at his best as a speaker when combining intellectual sinew with well-pitched displays of emotion. He’s an iron fist in a velvet glove; sentimental as a fox. 

And what of his comparison, in Georgetown, of then with now? Well. It’s curious, and salutary, to look back at the rhetoric of 25 years ago. Did you remember, for instance, that when he accepted the presidential nomination Mr Clinton gave a speech in which he railed against “Washington”, warned that we’re “losing the American dream”, approvingly described “citizens banding together to take their streets and neighbourhoods back” from “crime and drugs”, vowed to “rebuild America”, reform healthcare, “demand fair trade policies”, stick up for the “forgotten middle class” — and ended by promising to “make America great again”? Me neither. But he did. That shows, perhaps, how ideologically flexible the clichés of the political speech can be. [SOURCE]