Baby Huey vs The Dauphin

by digby

They really didn’t need to do this poll on whether Clinton outperformed Bush. It’s obvious to anyone who lived through the era. What the story fails to mention is that Clinton outperformed Bush while fighting off the rabid, slavering GOP congress of Newt Gingrich and Trent Lott that was determined not only to thwart his program but used every institutional lever of power they had to destroy him personally. He wasn’t perfect, but the guy had the most amazing grace under pressure I’ve ever seen. He even showed good humor about it most of the time:

“I’m a lot like Baby Huey. I’m fat. I’m ugly. But if you push me down, I keep coming back.”

Bush by contrast has had a free hand. He had an historical moment that could have brought the country and the entire world together — which he decided instead to use as an opportunity to aggressively assert arrogant partisan and American power. Rather than being a “uniter not a divider” as he promised in the campaign, he roared into office with his one vote majority and treated the Democrats like lackeys, behaving as if he had a mandate to enact the most extreme items on the GOP agenda. He used patriotism as a bludgeon to intimidate all dissent against his inexplicable war with Iraq. At every turn he behaved with insolence and hubris and his failure has been manifest. Now he lives in a bubble, wandering around dazed and confused about what is happening to him — which is not the result of Democratic partisanship, I might add, but rather the assessment of the American people. (The Democrats were paralyzed during most of his term.) Perhaps that’s why his fall has been so steady — the slow realization among the people that being a leader takes more than a manly swagger and a down home accent.

Bill Clinton may have been an imperfect human being but he was a president. This guy is, and always was, just a brand name in a suit.

.