The surreal week in Washington was brought to a fitting climax on Friday when Barack Obama handed the presidency over to Bill Clinton for 20 minutes. “I’m going to take off,” he said.
“You’re in good hands,” the president informed the press corps, patting his predecessor on the back. And take off the president did.
It wasn’t an official, unofficial or illicit transfer of power in any way, of course. But it somehow felt like it.
What happened here has, to my knowledge, never happened. When the president finishes speaking, whenever the president finishes speaking, the event ends. Period.
Not any longer.
President Obama can change the rules of etiquette governing his White House if he wants. The problem for him is that those rules of etiquette exist for a reason. They are intended to enforce the standing of the presidency itself. By breaching them, Obama did harm to his own standing, and at a time when he can ill afford to lose any more of his authority.
What’s more, by doing so, he overshadowed the purpose of his joint appearance with Bill Clinton by letting Bubba hold court. And hold court Clinton did, in a revelatory monologue masquerading as a press availability.
Like many retirees trying to stay active, he’s apparently taking classes. He says he spends “an hour a day trying to study this economy. And I’m not running for anything, and I don’t have a political agenda. I just — I try to figure out what to do.”
You see, “I’m out of politics now,” he said, only moments after declaring he had done “133 events” for Democratic candidates in 2010. And asked if he preferred kibitzing inside the White House to running things, Clinton said, “Oh, I had quite a good time governing.”
He even seemed to suggest that, had he defended the Democratic position in 2010 more effectively, his party would have done better at the polls.
“I don’t think I did a good enough job in this election season, obviously,” he said, a statement that initially sounds self-critical but which, at second glance, indicates that the depths of Clinton’s narcissism simply cannot be fathomed.
He even turned a question about whether he had been contacting Democrats to support the tax deal into a “there aren’t enough hours in the day” moment.
“As soon as the election was over, I took my foundation trip to Asia,” Clinton related. “I just got back from the West Coast, doing my annual trip out there . . . I flew overnight to get here today. And I have to leave again tonight . . . He asked me to come down today, because he knew I was going to — Hillary and I were appearing before the Brookings Saban Forum on the Middle East tonight.”
In case you were wondering whether he’s busy or not.
The whole business was simultaneously soporific — I had forgotten how boring Clinton could be when talking about policy — and riveting as a piece of political theater.
What was Clinton doing there, exactly? Could it be news to anyone that Clinton would support the deal, especially since it seems to come straight from the his political playbook? Not to mention that, let’s face it, Obama is his wife’s boss.
The event gobsmacked the political class. On Twitter, ABC News political director Amy E. Walter wrote, “Obama just ceded the podium to Clinton. This. Is. Awesome.” Christina Bellantoni of the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call used the same punctuation trope: “This is Un. Real.”
Washington froze in wonder at this momentary trip into the past. The sheer strangeness of the sight of Clinton alone at that podium crystallized the sense that the American political system (or more specifically, the Democratic party) had spun out of control over the course of the week.
The week began with the announcement of the grand budget deal on Monday, triggering rage from Obama’s base that he had somehow “caved” to Republicans — conveniently forgetting that the Democratic party in DC had been decimated only a month earlier in the midterm election.
That led to Obama’s angry comparison on Tuesday in that same room of the Republicans with whom he had negotiated the deal as “hostage takers.” And after he was done with them, he turned to his fellow left-liberals, lecturing them on the costs of their own “sanctimony.”
On Friday, down the Mall from the White House inside the Capitol, came the weird effort to restage the climax of “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” with a Brooklyn-accented Vermont socialist playing James Stewart’s part.
Bernie Sanders launched a one-man filibuster against the tax deal. The problem was that Sanders had no legislative or political strategy to derail it. Instead, he just talked and talked. An hour after Clinton had finished his psychodrama, Sanders concluded his 8 hour, 32 minute peroration. “I would yield the floor,” he said, and did. I guess we know what Passover is like at the Sanders household.
The budget deal will surely go through, and the events of the past week will be forgotten. But Obama’s cavalier handling of the institutional prerogatives of the presidency will leave it a little less grand, making his own job as he goes forward a little bit harder — and, through the entirely avoidable self-inflicted error, making himself seem a little bit smaller.
johnpodhoretz@gmail.com