home
about
archives
|
THE CLINTON PATHOLOGY
01/28/2008
The television pundits keep trying to convince us that overall Bill's presence on the campaign trail is helping Hillary. "He's still a beloved figure in the Democratic Party," some say. Others call him the "big dog" or the "head of the party." Even when they are commenting on his questionable behavior or his head-scratching comments, they seem to think he does more good than harm because of his charisma and charm and political skills.
I'm not so sure.
Hillary seemed to be doing fine as long as Bill was running around being a reformed politician, a do-gooder who traveled the globe handing out money. But the minute someone in Hillary's campaign decided they needed his help (about five minutes after it became apparent Hillary would lose Iowa, I suspect) the campaign was in big trouble.
Why? Because Bill Clinton has an enormous amount of emotional baggage that can't stay hidden forever, especially once he feels threatened.
In pop psychology circles, the term "baggage" refers to unresolved and unacknowledged internal conflicts that cause an individual to act in self-defeating and self-destructive ways. Depending on the type of baggage, the person carrying it can be enormously destructive to those around him, with unpredictable behavior and irrational outbursts of emotion.
Psychological baggage is always problematic. In elected officials it can be devastating, not only to the official but even more importantly to the public he is entrusted to represent.
Numerous books have been written on the psychological baggage of past presidents, most notably Nixon, Clinton, and Bush, three modern presidents whose psychological problems were the most obvious because they proved so damaging to the country and to themselves.
Nixon's psychological problems were severe enough to cause him to be the first president in American history to resign, while Clinton's got him impeached. Bush's baggage has caused so much damage to the country and the world, that long after his generation passes on the world will still be cleaning up his mess. While Nixon did extraordinary damage to the country, his baggage was ultimately exposed and his presidency ended. Not so for Clinton and Bush, both of whom served two full terms in spite of their obvious pathology.
It is extraordinary, when you think about it, that the American people have four times in a row put into the highest office in the land men who are addicts, who have shown evidence in their lives, and indeed still show evidence, of compulsive, and extremely destructive behavior. Both of these men have extremely narcissistic personalities, which may explain to some extent why they were successful in their presidential campaigns. Narcissists are unrelenting fighters.
A brief review of the characteristics of narcissism will explain why Bill Clinton seems out of control right now.
Narcissism is a personality characteristic, and in its most extreme manifestations a personality disorder, in which a person believes he is unique and deserving of special treatment and admiration, has a grandiose sense of entitlement, is envious of others or feels easily threatened by the success of competitors, and has fantasies of unlimited success. Narcissists show their worst and most stubborn sides when someone threatens their self-important status or their reputation.
Bill Clinton's narcissism, combined with his sexual addiction, is what caused his 1992 campaign to have to deal with continual "bimbo eruptions," as woman after woman accused him of bad behavior. It's amazing, really, that he even considered running for the presidency with his history of womanizing. However, the same thing that made him feel entitled to cheat on his wife is what enabled him to believe that he could prevail in spite of it. Unfortunately, it was also his narcissism that gave the Republican Clinton-haters their opportunity to impeach him. A less narcissistic man would probably have resigned in shame over what he had done to himself, his family, and the country. But not Bill Clinton. He dared the Congress to impleach him and then turned the impeachment into a White House lawn victory party.
Democrats largely supported Bill Clinton throughout the entire impeachment drama, because they knew it to be a political maneuver by Republicans and because they felt the punishment did not fit the crime. Bill Clinton remained popular, in spite of the Lewinsky scandal, because he had been a fairly good president, and had kept the economy strong. But Democrats were also profoundly embarrassed by his behavior, and angry that he betrayed his family and his supporters by behaving badly and then lying about it. Many also blamed him for Al Gore's defeat in 2000.
For seven years now, Bill Clinton has been busy redeeming his reputation and his legacy by spending this time doing good works around the world. The negative manifestations of his narcissism have been under wraps for that time mostly because his behavior has been praised. As long as narcissists are being admired and given sufficient attention, they are easy to like. They tend to behave well and many of them have developed a charming exterior that hides their internal flaws. The problem, however, is that like all psychological baggage, Bill Clinton's narcissism has not disappeared. And now that his wife is running for the presidency, the problematic aspects of it have resurfaced and the public is reminded of the problems Bill Clinton is capable of causing. This could be disastrous for Hillary's campaign.
Many voters support Hillary Clinton because they see her as a brilliant and powerful woman who could become the first female president. But no matter how brilliant Hillary is, she is not running alone. Her husband, the former president, has his own investment in her campaign, namely to have a chance to remove the stain on his presidency and redeem his legacy. He also needs desperately to be back in the spotlight as a powerful Washington player, not just a do-gooder. So his investment in helping his wife become the next president, when he would undoubtedly be the focus of as much if not more attention than his wife, is enormous. That is why he is campaigning so vigorously on her behalf.
Unfortunately for her, it is also why he is hurting her more than helping her.
In order to understand Bill Clinton's behavior, it is important to consider how narcissists act when their goals, fantasies, reputation, or sense of entitlement are threatened by someone who others see as their equal or possibly more gifted and talented than they are. This touches what psychologists call the "narcissistic wound" they carry from childhood, and they tend to overreact and become vicious. They may only do it with words, especially if they are gifted speakers, but they become vicious nonetheless. And lately, Bill Clinton has been saying things that have been vicious.
He called Obama's record on Iraq a "fairy tale," thereby both demeaning and infantilizing Obama. He demeaned Obama's experience and dismissed his win in South Carolina, likening it to Jesse Jackson's win there in the eighties and thus inferring it was a victory only because Obama, like so many voters in South Carolina, is black. He accused Obama of inserting race into the contest, and blamed reporters for covering the bickering between campaigns. Like all narcissists, he refused to take any responsibility for his part in the controversy.
Obama is a real threat to Bill Clinton because he is the "rising star" that Bill was sixteen years ago and because he threatens to deprive Bill of a third Clinton term. The more success Obama has, the more of a threat he is. But beyond that, Obama really hit a Clinton nerve when he said Reagan was a transformational president while Clinton was not. Dissing Clinton like that was what really caused Clinton to go off the rails and turn the Reagan comments into something they were not. You don't criticize or demean a narcissist and get away with it.
The Clinton campaign now suggests they are going to rein Bill in, but it remains to be seen if they can do it. Bill Clinton simply can't help himself and one way or another he will get the attention he craves.
In the meantime, he has reminded Democrats that he is more than the philanthropist persona he has shown for the past seven years. He is also the man who inhabited the oval office eight years ago and shamed them and himself. They are also reminded that Hillary stood by him in spite of how he shamed her. This isn't good for her. She cannot become president by people feeling sorry for her, and she cannot become president if too many people remember the negatives associated with her husband.
When Bill Clinton said a few days ago, in reference to the bitterness of the rivalry between his wife and Obama, that he "didn't give a rip" what people said about him when he was running (which was obviously not true) but that when people were saying things about someone he loved (i.e. Hillary), he cared very much, people were also reminded that the one who had hurt Hillary Clinton the most was Bill Clinton.
Statements like this only remind us of how much damage he did when he was president, how much he shamed Hillary and all of us, and how much he let us down. They remind us that she didn't leave him when he humiliated her and reinforce how tied these two are to each other. They have us wondering just how big a role he is liable to play in a Hillary (or Billary) Clinton administration. They give us pause as we ask whether or not she can contain him and the damage he is liable to do when she is running the country. They make us wonder just how much of an independent woman she really is. And after enduring nearly sixteen years of governance by narcissistic and emotionally impaired presidents, some of us are reluctant to go through it again.
We forgave Bill Clinton his womanizing. He's only human, we said. We tolerated his abandonment of liberal ideas and policies. He's better than a Republican, we said. We sympathized with Hillary when she was treated so abysmally by her husband. She deserves our understanding and respect, we said. But we really don't want a return to the Clinton pathology.
Bill Clinton has reminded us over these past weeks of a side of him that we don't like.
If his wife is the nominee, and goes on to win the presidency, she will bring her husband's baggage with her into the White House. And that baggage could have in it a time bomb that could derail her presidency. Many of us have decided that no matter how brilliant Hillary is, no matter how much we may like to see a woman president, we simply do not want Bill Clinton back in the White House. And some of us don't want to elect the woman who stuck by him with all of his instability and unpredictability. His pathology infects her and to some extent reflects who she is.
Bill Clinton had his turn and he messed it up. Why elect his wife and give him another chance?
The country needs someone new, someone more psychologically healthy to run the country. The voters are taking a big risk if they decide to go back to the Clinton era.
It is time to go forward.
All content © 2005 outragedcitizen.com
|
