How cool was it this morning when Laura Ling, back on US soil after nearly 140 days in a North Korean jail,
tearfully described the moment, 30 hours earlier, when she and Euna Lee were led to a meeting by her captors, and saw Bill Clinton standing there. "We knew instantly in our hearts,” she said, “that the nightmare of our lives was finally coming to an end."
There was something else coming to an end, too: Bill Clinton’s wandering in the wilderness in the wake of his disgraceful behavior during Hillary’s campaign against Barack Obama.
It was a killer moment for those of us who were former Bill Clinton believers—perfectly willing to blow off the Monica Lewinsky mess but appalled by the stupid things he said about Barack Obama in his enraged, protective-husband mode last spring in South Carolina. Bill was suddenly the petty, vituperative, undisciplined, egomaniac people like Maureen Dowd claimed he was. Whether it was heart-surgery, fatigue, or unbridled ambition for his wife talking, it was finally too much for a lot of Clinton stalwarts.
But here was Bill, back to being larger-than-life, statesmanlike,
using his charm and cred on the world stage for something worthy (and worthy of him, even if it did afford the
New York Post the opportunity for this winning headline: Bubba Gets the Chicks). Maybe it's the chick in me, but who wouldn't want to be rescued by Bill Clinton?
It was great to see the grown-ups working together again: Bill and the Obama people who still can’t like him very much,
Bill and his frenemy, Al Gore. Bill and the wife whose campaign he messed up trying to save. So what if the maniacal Kim Jong-Il asked for the former president specifically—so it wasn’t exactly a stroke of genius to enlist him for the mission.
It was nice to see the big guy going to the rescue after a summer of watching a bunch of lawmakers whose names you didn’t know in May brawl senselessly over health care, bloodying not only each other but hopes for any meaningful reform, while the current president doesn’t seem to have the heft to step in and impose order. If there’s leadership in play there on any level, and we hope there is, we’re not seeing it.
At least the White House managed to negotiate the release of these two journalists, and wasn’t afraid to, as Maureen Dowd’s headline writer put it aptly, “Let the Big Dog Run.”
Which is why it was irritating that
Dowd couldn’t resist reducing the whole thing to the Clinton marital psychodrama that’s been her schtick for so long: “Just as Hillary muscled her way back into the spotlight, moving past her broken elbow and grabbing the focus from her bevy of peacock envoys, she was blown off the radar screen again by an even more powerful envoy: the one she lives with.”
Dowd imagines Bill “savoring” his moment of relevance and enjoying some
schadenfreude over getting the call instead of traitor Bill Richardson; we can’t help imagining Dowd, too, savoring the (all too rare in the Obama era) opportunity to drag
Mr. and Mrs. Clinton out again. It’s been a lean year for the Clinton obsessed. “The one in charge of world affairs disappeared from the news
all day on Tuesday,” she writes breathlessly (emphasis mine). “The one out of office dominated the news. His plane is rolling down the runway in Pyongyang with the two pardoned women on board? Zowie!”
In the end even Dowd has to give it up and admit that when Obama and both Clintons are on the same team, they all look bigger. And right now we can really use some evidence that someone is in charge.
