In relocating to New York, Bill Clinton has chosen a town full of people who were willing to overlook a little perjury but who firmly draw the line at free flatware.
The former president's new city has turned on him with a vengeance. Even Geraldo Rivera is calling his recent actions "unseemly." The New York Times opines that "Bill Clinton's leavetaking from the White House set a new benchmark for bad judgment by a departing president." And nowhere is the reaction more furious than among upper-crust New York Democrats, the crowd on whom Bill and Hillary had counted for a warm, sympathetic Big Apple welcome.
New York's power elite are wrinkling their suddenly delicate noses over the Clintons' recent behavior: the gifts, the pardons, the extravagantly self-regarding farewell on the day of Bush's inauguration; the high-rent post-presidential office suite, the $8 million book advance, the speaking fees. "High Society Turns on Clintons" ran a headline in last week's New York Observer, the tip sheet for media-centric Manhattanites. If the Clintons don't shape up, wrote Observer gossip columnist Frank Di Giacomo, "the city will be amused by their moveable feast for a little while, but then they'll suffer the same fate as Marla Maples and Jocelyne Wildenstein." (For those who don't read New York tabloids: This is the one of the worst things a New York gossip columnist can say about you.)
This is very striking, because elite New Yorkers made up one of the strongest redoubts of Clinton support during the impeachment drama; Manhattan, you'll recall, was the very epicenter of Leave-The-Poor-Man-Alone sentiment, where intellectual confabs denounced the "ayatollahs" pursuing him, and a dinner-table consensus had it that, after all, a little sex appeal was a good thing in a president. When Hillary Clinton began her run for the Senate, prominent city Democrats thronged to support her.
But suddenly, the scales have fallen from New Yorkers' eyes. The Clintons have a sense of entitlement? Astonishing! They showed contempt for the normal procedures and boundaries that usually guide the president's pardon power? Amazing! There's a certain shamelessness in their hunger for cash? Who knew?
"I have yet to find one person who can defend, explain or support what they've done," an anonymous but "prominent" Clinton supporter huffed to the Observer. "I've never seen a reaction this unanimous."
Which is a good reason to stop and wonder at the vehemence of this noise. Most of the recent criticism is, to be sure, richly deserved. But when the Wall Street Journal editorial page and New York's most ambitious Democratic socialites are in accord over something, it's worth identifying what itch is being scratched in this orgy of easy outrage.
To a great degree, this sudden drop in the Clinton stock was predictable -- just as predictable as the honeymoon that greeted George W. Bush's first weeks in office. The world has a way of abruptly noticing that those who have lost their power (and along with it their cachet, and their control of dishy White House invitations) have feet of clay after all. And New Yorkers' resentment at the sudden discovery of Clintons' flaws is deepened by the fact that the city had looked forward to the acquisition of a glamorous new asset, and found themselves saddled instead with a mass of new controversy.
But above all, the normal temperature shift that comes with the loss of power has been compounded by the effort it took to ignore or defend or at least tolerate the Clintons' earlier bad behavior. Those who defended Clinton through his ordeal-by-independent-counsel had to perform extraordinary contortions of moral and logical reasoning. The piling-on of the past two weeks is the displaced revenge of those who spent years denying the undeniable and defending the indefensible.
It's still not the fashion to talk about this. Notice how, in all this outrage over coffee tables and fugitive tax cheats, the news that Clinton had finally acknowledged lying in a court of law sank almost without a trace.
In truth, the manner of the Clintons' departure told us exactly nothing that we hadn't known about them before. Their sudden vilification is just the dropping of the other shoe, the anger and the judgment and the disbelief that were willingly suspended by all who helped shore up his presidency. It's not as if he doesn't deserve it, but let's not pass around the merit badges for moral delicacy, either, just because it finally feels safe to notice.
