10/31/00 4:45 p.m.
Bill Clinton, Esquire
The Lincoln pose.

By Jonah Goldberg, NRO editor--------------JonahEmail@aol.com

s you may have heard, the December issue of Esquire features an extensive "Exit Interview" with Bill Clinton in which the president asks Republicans to apologize for impeaching him. Putting that aside for a moment, let's talk about the cover, which has Esquire, the White House, and the Gore campaign either scrambling, fuming, or back-peddling.

As you may have heard, the cover photo of Clinton is special. The camera angle is shot from the, er, belt-buckle level. The leader of the free world sits with his legs akimbo and has his hands on his knees; his wedding ring appearing prominently. The president's bright blue tie, as many have pointed out, seems to be pointed like an arrow to an anatomical area that has been the subject of considerable conversation — and subpoenas — in recent years. The most disquieting thing, though, is the president's smile. It's not quite a smile, actually. It's a smirk. Showing no teeth, it is simultaneously smugly satisfied and vaguely sexual, like a he's thinking of the punch line to a dirty joke that he won't share.

The vice president and president aren't happy with Esquire, a magazine not widely read by members of the Vast Right-Wing Conspiracy. Why? Well, I'm no political genius, but conventional wisdom suggests that a picture of the president's crotch, a coprophagous smile, and the suggestion that Bill Clinton is owed an apology, is not the finely crafted message the Gore campaign was looking for a week from Election Day. The president swears he thought the interview and photo would not appear until after the election. And, I believe him. The president is many things but stupid isn't one of them.

Nevertheless, Esquire is in damage-control mode. Editor-in-Chief David Granger put out a statement saying "…any interpretation of our cover that is deliberately belittling or luridly suggestive, is wrong and wrong-headed, unexpected by us and unfair to the president."

But my favorite defense of the photo came from Michael Paterniti, who conducted the interview. I appeared with Mr. Paterniti on CNN's Talk Back Live and he was shocked that anyone, let alone everyone, could think there's anything suggestive to the picture. "If you go to the Lincoln Memorial," he said "it is the same exact view you are going to get of Lincoln."

Unfortunately, because Mr. Paterniti and I were not in the same studio, I cannot confirm that he is in fact 14-feet tall — which is roughly how tall he'd need to be to be at eye level with the Great Emancipator's crotch. Giving Mr. Paterniti the benefit of the doubt that he is in fact a giant — or stilt walker — I take him at his word that the 19-foot-tall somber statue somehow looks like Bill Clinton from that altitude.

But where I part company is when Mr. Paterniti suggests that people who don't agree that the photo is Lincolnesque simply have sex on the brain. "I think Clinton has become a Rorschach test, and there are people on the far right who see sex every time they see Clinton."

This, of course, is nothing but old spin. For years the president's apologists said that the president is a deeply sexual man and his problems lie in the fact that others can't cope with his mojo (as Austin Powers might say). Oddly, it never occurred to these people that they were the one's strangely attracted to the president and hence so forgiving of his transgressions. Famed Clinton spinners like Gene Lyons and Sidney Blumenthal suggested — with Bill Clinton's blessing — that Monica Lewinsky was little more than a deranged stalker enthralled by the president's sexual gravitas. I seem to recall that they reluctantly dropped this theory when the president was forced to admit the truth — thanks to DNA testing, not his conscience.

Which brings us to the actual content of the interview. Mr. Paterniti admits, "I'm not a full-time political writer," which shouldn't surprise anyone. There's not a single full-time political writer in America who would take Mr. Clinton at his word the way Mr. Paterniti does. In interviews, Mr. Paterniti simply asserts that Mr. Clinton "feels" this way or that; that the president is "committed" to working on X or Y. One does not get the sense that it ever occurred to him that the most famously seductive politician in modern American politics seduced him.

Regardless, the president insists that the he deserves an apology himself. Clinton argues that he has apologized plenty of times but Republicans "never apologized to the country for impeachment."

This is an apple and oranges argument. The president has never apologized or admitted that he did any of the things he was impeached for. He has only apologized for his "personal mistakes." But lying under oath (something everyone concedes he did), is not a personal mistake. Minting bogus legal privileges and improperly invoking existing ones to drag out the scandal for more than a year wasn't a personal mistake. Clinton insists that he did nothing wrong that wasn't purely private, but he wants Republicans to apologize for what they did publicly. If Mr. Paterniti were a "full time" political reporter he might have asked about that. But, alas, the joke is on him. And maybe that explains the smirk Paterniti considers so Lincolnesque.