And so one might think that a torch had passed, tawdrily, from the president who led the Allies in World War II to the first president born after its end. But such a conclusion would be wrong. The heart of Clinton’s rhetoric last week was a call to the ““sons and daughters of the world they saved’’ to honor the memory of those who fought in World War II – whose number included the president’s father. ““Fifty years later,’’ Clinton said at Nettuno Beach in Italy, ““we can see the difference that generation has made.’’ But there was more to the smoothness of the generational transfer than that. As Clinton made his way from Italy to Britain and France for the D-Day ceremonies, it became clear that Europeans do not judge him only by his lack of military experience and his foreign-policy bunglings. As a domestic-policy president, Clinton is admired in Europe – probably more admired than any American in 30 years.
When Clinton, 46, was elected in 1992, many Europeans looked on with envy. It was easy to see why, watching Clinton and British Prime Minister John Major stroll through Cambridge last week: though only three years older than Clinton, with hair no more gray, Major looks and sounds duller, less vigorous – both as a man and as a leader. The British Labor Party and the German Social Democrats, out of office for more than a decade, see in Clinton a left-of-center politician who could appeal to those who had enjoyed the prosperity of the 1980s. ““What most impressed me,’’ says Peter Mandelson, a Labor MP and party strategist, ““was the way Clinton took the Democrats’ traditional values and appeal and turned them into 1990s language and ideas.’’ Mandelson and other ““modernizers,’’ including Tony Blair, the 41-year-old who is almost certain to win Labor’s current leadership election, have forged close links with some of the architects of Clinton’s 1992 victory. Labor, which had a senior party official in Little Rock throughout the campaign, hoped to learn how to win over the middle class.
Germans, for their part, noted with pleasure the deep interest of Clinton and his labor secretary, Robert Reich, in ““social market’’ theories and the importance of youth apprenticeships. Even the French, always prone to treat Americans like rich children, found Clinton refreshing. (In France, the same handful of men over 60 have dominated politics for two decades.) In Washington recently, French Foreign Minister Alain Juppe boasted of the common ground between France and the Clinton administration on weaving the pro-tection of workers’ rights into the next round of world trade talks.
This is quite new. With an air that oscillated between grandfatherly concern and icy contempt, many Europeans had long despaired of seeing a U.S. president determined to cure – in European eyes – deep social pathologies in America. Outside his fan club in the British Conservative Party, Europeans saw Ronald Reagan as a domestic-policy Neanderthal; they knew (because he told them so) that George Bush was not interested in domestic policy at all. To have a president who could talk intelligently about health care, welfare reform and crime has been, for Europeans, a welcome novelty. Yet this admiration for Clinton-the-policy-wonk goes only so far. Europeans still want U.S. presidents to be capable of world leadership. If they cannot have a JFK or an Eisenhower, then a Reagan or Bush will do. It wasn’t Reagan’s teary performance at the D-Day celebrations 10 years ago that impressed Europeans; it was his determination to face down a Soviet power that occupied half of their continent. It isn’t Bush’s waffling that Europeans remember. They recall, rather, his 1989 call for Germany to join America in a ““partnership for leadership,’’ his skillful diplomacy as the Soviet Union collapsed and his leadership in the gulf war.
By comparison, Clinton has not yet been convincing. European criticism of U.S. foreign policy centers on the continuing crisis in Bosnia. That war, like the Suez crisis in 1956, has poisoned transatlantic relations. Asked what policy matters Clinton would discuss on his trip, a senior State Department official said last week, with the air of a man facing a root canal, ““Bosnia. We always have to talk about Bosnia.’’ Europeans think America hypocritically moralizes about Bosnia without risking the blood of U.S. ground troops to save it. European diplomats desperately want America to force the Bosnian-Croat alliance to accept that 51 per-cent of the country is all it’s going to get, and to stop fighting.
If Clinton were to sell that unwelcome news to Sarajevo, Europeans might be prepared to consider him a legitimate heir to their old American heroes. He is who he is: he and his generation had fewer chances to be heroic than did his father – or Eisenhower – and more opportunities, usually taken, for self-indulgence and moral drift. Yet for all that, in many European eyes Clinton re-mains an articulate leader of the post-World War II generation: something to think about for those Americans overendowed with the cynicism that Europeans have made their own.
