Something else about Bill Clinton: he was President during a time when the internet and high tech took off in an unprecedented trajectory. The mania of overspeculation in the stock market and the boom in ready capital was very similar to that of the 1920s, another period of great prosperity that eventually went bust, just as we, to a much more limited degree, have experienced in our own time.
Americans then, too, had a charming but morally weak president on their hands in the person of Warren G. Harding. His own father thanked God his son hadn't been born a girl for fear that "she" would have been "in the family way" early and often. Only premature death rescued Harding from personal disgrace. His successor, Calvin Coolidge, was a colorless and morose CEO of the United States, Inc. "The business of America is business," he said, and they all rode high on credit and played the margins. High tech had everyone's attention in those days, too: radio, the talkies, big cars, and Kodak cameras. But the economy that made them eventually collapsed as it rarely had before. The Great Depression had begun.
Now, who did this fall on? Who was blamed for the disaster that seized America? A very decent and self-made man; an extremely bright engineer whose interest in public service made him one of our country's most beloved representatives in Europe ---where he was credited with keeping that war-ravaged continent from starvation. Today, of course, people associate Herbert Hoover's name with black-hearted Republican callousness, but there was nothing he could have done to stop the awful wheel of economics from rolling over everyone. The Federal Government simply wasn't equipped to rescue the working man from destitution; those mechanisms hadn't been instituted yet. And, frankly, some movements are beyond our control ---and we deserve neither blame nor credit when they go right or wrong.
So, just as Hoover didn't cause the Great Depression, Clinton was not the moving force behind the American economic boom of the last half of the 1990s. If the times hadn't been as good during his watch, more people than might be realized now would have agreed that Clinton's poor character was deserving of punishment. But folks were fat and happy and it seemed like bad taste and low style to fault such a powerful man for his pecadilloes. And, so, the feminists turned their heads and bit their tongues and abided in him what they wouldn't have in a Republican president. That's a fact in your Library of Congress, jackson. The double-standard is out and blowing in the wind.
Anyway, what is happening now is that people blame Bush for the hard economic times, but that is plainly wrong. The seeds of this economy's downfall were sewn well before the President entered the White House. Maybe people want to forget that and charge Bush with all sorts of sins, but that is also wrong. Bush is showing us that the times DO make the man and that anyone who strives to overcome his own faults deserves our praise, not our censure. What a tremendous burden the President bears these days! He is laying a foundation for peace in the Middle East and people attack him for everything they can think of. The times make the man. These people are just angry that Clinton can't rise to the occasion as Bush has.