Immoral and/or scandalous behavior will not be part of history's judgment of Bill Clinton, New York Times Executive Editor Howell Raines seemed to suggest on PBS's Charlie Rose Show.
In the interview aired last week, when asked how history would judge Clinton, Raines only cited positives, extolling his “huge political vision,” role “in modernizing the Democratic Party around a set of economic ideas” and “holding onto the principles of social justice.”
Plus, moments after hailing how aggressively his paper's business section has pursued the Enron case, which indicates that a significant portion of the '90s boom was fraudulent, Raines effused about Clinton “presiding over the greatest prosperity in human history.”
As if Clinton's policies caused it and he didn't have the luck of timing or the benefit of a GOP Congress in 1995 halting his most economically destructive policies — such as the health care plan so admired by Raines.
On the August 6 PBS program Raines emphasized how as editor of the editorial page, a post he held until last year, he championed Clinton's most left-wing policy goal: “We were all out supporters of his medical reform plan and it's worth remembering that there are 45 million Americans who don't have health insurance and we're going to be paying for the children of those families for the rest of this century unless this society comes to grips with the issue of medical care.”
Rose soon wondered about Bill Clinton: “What will be the judgment of history about him?” Raines gushed: “Huge political talent. Huge political vision and I suspect — none of us, I can't predict who's going to win the next election, much less what history is going to say about anyone. But I think President Clinton's role in modernizing the Democratic Party around a set of economic ideas and also holding onto the principles of social justice. And presiding over the greatest prosperity in human history. Those would seem to me to have to be central to his legacy.”
Since historians, a profession dominated by liberals, make these assessments of Presidents, Raines could well end up being accurate about how historians will judge Clinton.
Raines has a long history of promoting liberalism and denigrating conservatives. In a 1993 book he charged that former President “Reagan couldn't tie his shoelaces if his life depended on it.” Raines, who was a White House reporter during the Reagan years, complained in Fly Fishing Through the Midlife Crisis, that “reporting on President Reagan's success in making life harder for citizens who were not born rich, white, and healthy – saddened me.” During a November 17, 1993 interview about his book on Charlie Rose's PBS show, he whined: “The Reagan years oppressed me because of the callousness and the greed and the hard-hearted attitude toward people who have very little in this society.”
(This update courtesy of the Media Research Center.)
