Bill Clinton's Job Hunt
Got a job for Bill Clinton? If so, get in line: It seems to be Keep Clinton Busy season. Ex-presidents, of course, need something to do to while historians revise each other's judgments. Until now, Clinton's been busy trying to spin those judgments. Now that an interval, decent or otherwise, has passed, he's drawing different types of offers. Is he qualified?
Characteristically, the ex-prez kicked things off last week by offering himself a job. He's available, he hinted loudly, to bring peace to the Middle East. Blessed are the peacemakers, of course, and better yet they constitute a Nobel category all their own. But Clinton's Mideast track record makes Jesse Jackson's self-serving forays into apparent diplomacy seem Solomonic.
Jackson's function has been merely to give public-relations ops to some of the world's worst people, including several in the Mideast. But while Jackson's efforts have at least freed the occasional pawn (downed pilots, for example) in the Mideast match, Clinton's approach upset the chessboard itself. He's best known for shooting the Mideast moon; his marathon Camp David peace efforts revealed Chairman Yasser Arafat for the peace poseur he is, and Arafat rewarded Clinton's over-ambitious effort with an explosion of violence that was still continuing when Sharon marched in. The region's near-intractable issues aren't spinnable; they're amenable to neither persuasion nor charm, and negotiators who think otherwise are at a disadvantage.
A quite different sort of job offer supposedly involved TV, and if nothing else it highlighted both Clinton's remarkable talent range, and the esteem in which he's held. According to this report, Clinton was up for an available network morning slot. That is, if Clinton couldn't step into Jesse Jackson's shoes, maybe he could squeeze into Bryant Gumbel's. Gumbel is leaving whatever network he's been working for, so there's now room for somebody who can feel the nation's daily morning pain. This report seems to have been false, but it's historic nonetheless. Has any other former president been so esteemed as to have generated expectations that he could replace Bryant Gumbel? Yet it makes sense. Television is obviously Clinton's medium; he floated two rocky terms largely on his ability to use the camera to his personal advantage. It's unknown if Clinton is any good at interviewing anybody, but that probably wouldn't matter anyway. Clinton wouldn't need guests as long as he had himself to talk about.
Finally, Kim Jong-il, the Pericles of North Korea, has actually offered Bill Clinton work. Kim, who is forcibly known to his hungry and miserable countrymen as "Dear Leader," wants Clinton to play a mediator role so as to cool the hot rhetoric between Washington and Pyongyang. Any mutual rhetoric problem is not immediately apparent, because while there may be legitimate concern about North Korea's weaponry, nobody outside of Seoul cares what Pyongyang has to say about anything.
Of course, North Korea appeared on President Bush's Axis of Evil list, but Clinton's access to Bush's speechwriters, in order to mediate rhetorical flare-ups, is probably pretty limited. Even so, Clinton can claim a track record in solving problems that nobody realized were problems. While president, he made a point of appearing every day to announce some new problem-solving initiative involving things like child-seat regulations, that were not exactly in the headlines until he put them there. The point then was to associate himself daily with good news. He could no doubt apply a similar strategy to this Washington-Pyongyang War of Words, and we could all breathe easier as a result.
Indeed, if he kept that sort of thing up, he could trade in Jesse Jackson's shoes, and even Bryant Gumbel's, and emerge some day as Jimmy Carter.
