Bill Clinton in Winter

By Seth Mandel

Monday, November 04, 2024

 

On Sept. 13, 1993, President Bill Clinton put on a tie decorated with golden trumpets for the ceremony he was about to host, in which Yitzhak Rabin and Yasser Arafat would sign preliminary Israeli-Palestinian peace accords. The trumpets were intended, according to his advisers, to evoke the biblical shofars blown by the Israelites to bring down the walls of Jericho.

 

It is safe to say that Clinton saw himself as a world-historical figure on that day.

 

By the time his second term ended, it was all in tatters. Arafat had chosen to turn down the establishment of a Palestinian state and instead launch a terror war that would bury the dream of Palestinian self-determination even deeper in the sand.

 

As far as momentous historical processes are concerned, there may never have been one more transparent than the Clinton-era pursuit of Israeli-Palestinian peace—it was a very public undertaking that coincided with the advent of 24-hour TV news and alternative media. For posterity, Clinton himself recently reconfirmed the record while campaigning in Michigan for Kamala Harris. “The only time Yasser Arafat didn’t tell me the truth was when he promised he was going to accept the peace deal that we had worked out which would have given the Palestinians a state on 96% of the West Bank and 4% of Israel and … a capital in East Jerusalem and two of the four quadrants of the old city of Jerusalem, confirmed by Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak and his cabinet, and [the Palestinians] said no.”

 

I don’t know how much the Harris campaign appreciated the honesty. Clinton was not telling Democratic rallygoers what they wanted to hear. He was even heckled when he got choked up.

 

Was Clinton emotional because he was mourning his own personal legacy? Surely that is part of it, but only part. He was also in mourning for his own party—not because that party is electorally dead, in fact it may be one day away from retaining the White House despite the unpopularity of the Democratic president. But the party that would broker Israeli-Palestinian peace is well and truly gone.

 

Bill Clinton was looking out into a populist Democratic Party with a full head of steam. They have been cheering war, not peace. And although every word Clinton said was demonstrably true, he was talking to voters who simply don’t care what is true. When they hear him retell the history, they think Yasser Arafat is the good guy.

 

Bill Clinton—two-term president whose wife was a senator and then secretary of state—is a stranger in a strange land.

 

At a McDonald’s in Georgia last month, an employee’s face lit up when she saw Clinton approach the counter. When they shook hands, she asked him if he was Joe Biden.

 

They are both in the process of becoming forgotten, even though one of them is still technically the president of the United States.

 

And a Democratic Party that forgets Bill Clinton is shredding a lot of institutional memory. Take just the issue at hand: the peace process. Every president tries to negotiate peace; Clinton, however, created the architecture of an entire industry. “The Clinton Parameters” became shorthand for the basic assumptions you had to buy into if you wanted to be part of the peace process in government, academia, and media.

 

Many of these assumptions were fatally flawed. In fact, the Abraham Accords were only made possible by discarding the most flawed among them. But the Abraham Accords were made by Republicans; the idea that Democrats would simply memory-hole a quarter-century of foreign-policy practice built and maintained by the Clintons surely comes as a shock.

 

It shouldn’t. Kamala Harris owes her elevation to Democrats’ desire for a clean slate. Tomorrow, when Democratic voters go to the polls they will be motivated by what can be, unburdened by what has been. There’s a reason this has been the branded catchphrase, even if unintentionally, of the Harris campaign.

 

Republicans get frustrated that the media play along with this game, enabling Harris to shed past positions at will. But no one takes it as personally as Bill Clinton. He believes he put his heart and soul into building a durable Democratic Party apparatus.

 

Clinton was the first Democratic president to win two consecutive presidential elections since Franklin Roosevelt. Now people approach him and ask him if he’s Joe Biden. It’s not just because he older now. It’s because his party has made him irrelevant.

 

Thirty years ago he was on the cusp of cementing his place in the history of the world. Then Yasser Arafat walked away from him. Now his party’s doing the same thing.