“Character and Other Details on the Clinton Watch”

1:15

Bill Clinton tries to have it ‘all ways’ on issues. He has policies du jour. All are intended to maintain his “political visibility within the system.” That’s always been his lodestar. “Such an ambition saves a man from tragedy because it saves him from significance. In Howard Nemerov’s verse play about the witch of Endor, a minister to poor king Saul, having watched the king learn his fate from the witch, asks to be told his too. Shall he fight with the Israelites on the morrow, or join the Philistines in victory? The witch explains that it hardly matters: ‘I think Men of your sort, though they have lives and death never have fates. Maybe because they have their cleverness instead, their light, dry minds which blow in the wind of fortune back and forth. They can have many meanings, but no one meaning.’”