POOR, POOR, PITIFUL ME

You'd think it would be pretty cushy being Bill Clinton these days. He has a devoted wife and a charming daughter. He lives in one of the world's most beautiful mansions and never has to worry about getting stuck in traffic or mowing the lawn. More grandly, polls show he has won the approval of a large majority of his countrymen, who only three months ago re-upped his contract in an Electoral landslide. His political adversaries are in disarray, and he's on a first-name basis with Sharon Stone. So life, for Clinton, is good, no?

No. At least not to hear him tell it. His performance at the National Prayer Breakfast last Thursday, a long cri de coeur, has forced many of us at last to face an uncomfortable truth: the President of the U.S., the most powerful man in the world, is a whiner.

He is not, of course, a run-of-the-mill whiner. His whines are of a particularly elevated type. He went to Oxford, after all. At the Prayer Breakfast he took as the text for his complaints a passage from Isaiah: "Thou shalt be called, The repairer of the breach." He has used the passage so often lately--it appeared, as well, in his Inaugural speech and the State of the Union--that he may soon attach it to his official title: President of the U.S., Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces and Repairer of the Breach.

"I got to thinking about who is it that's in the breach," he told the Prayer Breakfast. "Who has fallen between the cracks?" His answer: the poor, the disenfranchised of other countries and ...him.

But not him alone. "The third people who are in the breach and are in a deep hole and need to be lifted up are the politicians. And we need your help...And some members of the press, they're in the breach with us too, and they need your help."

"This town," he continued, "is gripped with people who are self-righteous, sanctimonious and hypocritical; all of us are that way sometimes...And it doesn't matter who started it."

Thanks so much for sharing. You can be forgiven, though, for thinking the President is a bit disingenuous when he includes himself among the sanctimonious. It may not matter who started it, but he wants everybody to know that it sure wasn't him.

"I remember when I came here one time, I got so mad at our friends in the Congress and the Republican Party because they were real mean to me over something ... So then, pretty soon I was behaving that way. I'd wake up in the morning, and my heart was getting a little harder."

And then, "We're in a world of hurt. We need help. We are in the breach."

The President as victim! What is perhaps most remarkable about the President's complaint last week is how unremarkable it is. It fits a pattern established early on in his presidency that continues even now, at the highest point of his political popularity and power. Two weeks after his re-election, when reporters pressed him on the foreign-contribution scandal, he compared his treatment by the media to that of Richard Jewell, of Olympic-bombing fame. Two months later, in a speech to the Democratic National Committee, after his Inauguration, he showed the same chutzpah (as Isaiah might have put it).