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Bill Clinton: Like Other Presidents, Possessed of an Abnormal Drive

Joel Achenbach, in the Wash Post (July 4, 2004):

You can see him in action on the back of the book jacket, working a crowd with two hands, smiling, sucking up the attention, devouring the love. And it's fully reciprocated: The people are straining to reach him, to touch him, to receive his presidential validation. Bill Clinton's world has a radial symmetry, like a flower, with his white thatch of hair popping out at the center.

This was the life he wanted, the one he constructed, the one he recounts in 957 pages."My Life" has neither a subtitle nor subtlety, but it's surely a very American tale, a story of a kid who bounded from nowhere into the history books, erupting from the land like a force of nature (or a natural disaster, some might argue).

He was not a prince of the political universe like the guy who would one day be his vice president, or the fellow who would be his successor. Clinton was not anointed from on high. He never knew his dad, had a lush of a stepfather who once nearly gunned him down. He was pudgy. Talked too much. Silly clothes."I was a fat band boy who didn't wear cool jeans."

And now he's in the books as the 42nd president, two full terms, notwithstanding a wee bit of impeachment tarnish.

Historians will judge his merit as a president, and readers can decide for themselves whether"My Life" is as interminable as many reviewers suggest, but in any case the million-selling memoir adds more data to one of the great mysteries of America: Why do some people defy all the probabilities of the world and wind up as the president of the United States?

Political success at the highest levels may require such things as intelligence, cunning, idealism, an ability to read other people, an instinct for when to attack and when to retreat, and so on, but you usually don't get anywhere near the White House without boodles and boodles of drive. You need more than your garden-variety vim and vigor. You need to ache for greatness. You need to crave distinction. Often it is referred to in political circles as"fire in the belly."

This is the norm for presidents. They can sprout from the most depleted soils, and flower brilliantly, as though what flows in their veins is not the same kind of juice that sustains everyone else.

"They're not normal people," says Richard Shenkman, author of"Presidential Ambition: Gaining Power at Any Cost.""All of these presidents seem to have extra hormones. . . . They are not normal in their appetites, in their passions, in their drives, in their willingness to take on great burdens in service to their ambitions, and to sacrifice almost everything on the altar of their ambitions."

Their great attribute -- drive -- can be their downfall as well. Their success can be intoxicating. They sense they are invulnerable. They overreach. They take unneeded risks. They become the leaders of their own cult of personality....