reading about clinton makes me think about bush

I just finished reading David Remnick's interesting, long New Yorker article on Bill Clinton as ex-President, and I couldn't help making the contrast with the current maximum leader, de facto President George Walker Bush.

A couple of things really struck me. First was the passing reference to how, when Bill and Hillary left the White House in 2001, they were broke and didn't even own a house. Being Governor of Arkansas and President of the US really doesn't pay all that well, and they'd been financially crippled in having to defend themselves against Paula Jones, Ken Torquemada Starr, and all the rest. Sure, Bill and Hillary both made big bucks on their books, and Bill is a popular speaker who commands big speaking fees. But I compared that to how both George Bushes entered politics already rich, from the efforts of their grandfathers and great-grandfathers. And in George W. Bush's case, from parlaying a $600,000 stake in the Texas Rangers -- most of it in the form of free loans -- into a $15 million payoff just a few years later, a 25-fold increase on his investment when the value of the team overall merely doubled. Of course, having your poppie as President didn't hurt.

A second thing was how Clinton, although a bit defensive on his relative inaction on AIDS and strongly (and accurately) stating the case that he took terrorism seriously and tried to get Bin Laden, bluntly admits he was at fault for not doing more on Rwanda. He admits he was wrong, and he apologizes. When pressed, Dubya admits his big mistake is approving the trade of Sammy Sosa. Otherwise, he's just perfection in his own mind.

The last thing I thought of was prompted by this excerpt from Remnick's story, where Clinton spoke at a school about the important of exercise and good diet to avoid becoming fat:

After Clinton was introduced, he stripped off his jacket and sat on a high stool. “When I was a little boy,” he said to the kids, “I was bigger than almost all of you. Now there are more kids like I was.” He told them about learning to exercise more and suggested they watch a show on Nickelodeon called “Let’s Just Play Go Healthy Challenge.”

When the question period began, a chubby kid, no more than seven, nervously held the microphone and asked Clinton, “What if you don’t have the channel?”

His quavery voice betrayed such a sense of terror and deprivation that a lot of the kids laughed. What? No Nickelodeon? It’s basic cable!

Clinton had clearly heard the laughing and seen the terror in the kid’s eyes, and he sensed the embarrassment that would likely haunt his nights, and so he said, “A lot of people don’t have the channel. So that’s a good question. A great question.”

The jaws of life! The boy smiled. His whole body seemed to relax. The laughing stopped. It was a great question!

I then imagined George W. Bush responding to that boy. I'm sure he would have come up with a confused half-smile, half-sneer. Rather than quell the laughter at the boy's expense, he would have chuckled himself. Rather than implicitly assure the boy that he wasn't alone in not having cable TV in his house, after a couple of semi-nervous laughs, Bush would've said something like "Well, ya better tell your parents to get cable TV," with the (probably unspoken but possibly uttered) subtext of "What's wrong with you, your parents welfare deadbeats or something?" And the boy would have been crushed as the laughter would have redoubled.

Because that would demonstrate in a small way our "compassionate conservative" president, who has no patience for views that differ from his, and no ability to understand people who don't share his privileged background and narrowminded thinking.

In any case, it's hard to imagine George W. Bush as an ex-President doing things like raising money for AIDS research in Malawi and South Africa. He'll probably hit the golf circuit and make big money giving speeches to the corporate elite, more Jerry Ford than Clinton or Carter.