Why Bill Clinton's Speech Will Live In Infamy

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Because he was grudging and graceless, because he was not utterly candid and unsparing, because he kept alive old questions and gave life to new ones, because he was his worst self, Bill Clinton did not end this story. He left his friends what they so often are, embarrassed, and his enemies emboldened. He did not rob the engine of its steam. He did the one thing he absolutely could not afford to do: he stoked the fire.

Are we surprised by all this? I was. Clinton has usually been equal to the moment. He has never been eloquent, merely verbal, and he has never--how to put it?--stunned us with his brilliance. But he has often been shrewd, and he has always shown the skills of the survivor. He has always, too, acted the public part of the presidency with ease and burly vanity. The other night on TV I saw a videotape of Clinton walking along the White House lawn, his hands clasped thoughtfully behind his back, his face a shaded mask of contemplation. In physical attitude and facial expression he looked exactly like the lovely White House portrait of President Kennedy. And you know what I am sure he was thinking as he walked by the cameras? He was thinking, "I look exactly like the lovely portrait of President Kennedy."

So he can act, and does. Why was his acting so bad the other night? I don't think he was acting. I think he's tired. I think he dropped the mask. I think it was the real Bill. And I think that for a lot of people the glimpse was unsettling.

But the speech was one thing all speeches want to be. It was historic. It changed things. Alice Roosevelt Longworth once explained the scandal-plagued President Warren Harding to a friend: "Harding was not a bad man, he was just a slob." For six years, Bill Clinton's countrymen have thought that for all his messiness and melodrama, he was a basically good fellow, our Bubba, our flawed and favored good ole boy. But after this speech, with its sullen anger and trimming, a chord may have been broken, an estrangement begun. Something tells me "He's not a slob, he's a bad man" is on the way, which will be especially wounding for one who so needily gulps the people's approbation.

Early reports are that Hillary Clinton had a hand in the speech. This would seem to suggest that Dr. Freud was right: a person who has been hurt by another individual will sometimes take unconscious revenge.

Peggy Noonan is a former special assistant to President Ronald Reagan. Her most recent book is Simply Speaking