This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present, surface delightful treasures, and examine the American idea. Sign up here.
Not so long ago, an Atlantic writer set out to defend the former president, a notorious liar with a knack for escaping jams—and one who derived an unseemly joy from impunity. Hand-wringing about this sort of behavior, Roy Blount Jr. wrote, not only smacks of self-righteousness, but also misunderstands the very business of politics, which is to get things done, not be a moral exemplar. Despite the whining of elite classes, the public was getting what it wanted:
The American people like being lied to. Hence Ronald Reagan. But even for a President who is not a professional actor, misrepresentation is part of the job. Commentators who do not bear this in mind are like critics in the audience shouting “Tell us what you really think” at an actor who is trying to bring off a drama.
Falsity is so fundamental to U.S. politics that to even speak about the personal integrity of a president is to indulge in oxymoron, which is why people shouldn’t get so censorious about the former president, Blount argued: “Maybe Bill Clinton was sent from heaven to preserve us from those who would present themselves as unimpeachable.”
Okay, so Blount wasn’t talking about Donald Trump. But as Americans wrestle with the apparently interminable presence of that former president, as well as the widely dreaded prospect of a second Trump–Joe Biden election next year, Blount’s ideas about what exactly we should look for in our presidents are useful for thinking about the dangers and virtues of partisanship.
Though just over 20 years old, Blount’s essay is a time capsule from a moment when the stakes of politics didn’t feel quite so immediate and existential. The ability to write about Washington with ironic detachment was dead even before the 2022 passing of its great exponent P. J. O’Rourke—although, as my colleague McKay Coppins wrote five years ago, today’s apocalyptic vibes are a white-elephant gift from the Clinton era. “If we thought of a President less as a role model than as a character in fiction, we would see him more clearly,” Blount wrote. “Bill Clinton may not have had a great character, but he has been one.”
This is exceedingly true of Trump, but few of his critics would be eager to say so, for reasons that Blount explained when I asked him about the differences between the two ex-presidents. “I hasten to state that I do not regard Trump in the same light as Clinton. Or if the same light, then Trump shows up much more nastily in it,” he wrote me in an email. “Trump has no sense of humor or respect for the law or tradition. Clinton, like any successful politician, had Teflon. Trump’s coating is poison.”
Blount made another point in 2001 that feels as fresh as ever: “We must resist the temptation to dismiss all candidates for president as beneath us. Otherwise we’ll never forgive ourselves for voting for any of them. We must compare them not with ourselves but with each other. One of them is always less deeply beneath us.” Or as Biden likes to put it: “Don’t compare me to the Almighty. Compare me to the alternative.”
Cringing at presidential candidates is easy, because they are all cringe, at best. Pundits and voters obsess over whether politicians are “authentic” or sincere, but Blount proposed a more pragmatic metric: “I want a president who caters, effectively and constructively, to the right people.” Given how coalition politics work, an election is maybe better understood as a choice about which electorate to empower, rather than which candidate. The problem, then as now, is the very subjective business of determining who the “right” people are. Everyone believes they’re on the right side, and all of them get a vote.
