We spend so much time dissecting First Ladies living in the shadow of their husbands that this portrait of Bill Clinton as First Man is startling, and so poignant. New York Times reporter Peter Baker addresses how little access Clinton has in the Obama administration, but the story succeeds mainly as a character sketch. Clinton is a Philip Roth character somewhat restrained, trying to explain his outbursts during the campaign, coming to terms with the indignities of aging, and of being eclipsed by a younger, more vibrant man. A man who, to top it off, now has his wife's loyalty. Some key scenes:

• Clinton browsing a trinket shop, looking for the right jewelry and carvings for his wife and other female friends.
• Clinton showing off his cool new hearing aide.
• Clinton complaining, sort of good-naturedly, about how hard it is to get his wife on the phone.
• "I've got plenty to do. I've got a full life here. If I come up with an idea I think that's helpful to them, I give it to them."
• Clinton trapped in the audience listening to Obama praise Edward Kennedy, whom he now hates, for his work with the Americorps program, which Clinton founded.
• "Stay in touch," said Obama.
• Clinton and Vladimir Putin talking well into night, presumably because Putin believes Clinton has the ear of the new administration.
• "I also noticed since I had the surgery—and this is what you picked up in the campaign—that if I'm really, really tired ... It's neither an excuse for any mistake I made or anything else. I'm just explaining. It's something I've noticed. My life has changed."

Tags: bill clinton, new york times magazine

Alongside all the finger pointing about bank failures and the collapse of the US housing bubble has come the slow puncturing of the legend of consequence-free 1990s economic growth. Peter Baker's fantastic New York Times Magazine piece takes a good, hard look at the maker of that world: Bill Clinton. Like Hanna, I find the portrait both honest and poignant. The meat of the article—which follows Clinton on various travels, speeches, meetings, and duties related to the Clinton foundation—is naturally the substantive, frank, and reflective conversation between Bill and Baker with respect to the Clintonian economy. David Leonhardt, also of the Times, parses the back and forth, wherein Bill admits that he "should have raised more hell about derivatives being unregulated."

That's a big concession for a former president who in the past has been fairly prideful about his legacy. But of course, the real story is that, writes Baker, "No one has combined the roles of former president and cabinet spouse before, and the lines are blurry." He begins the piece by narrating Clinton's trip to a Peruvian crafts market:

Standing all by himself, the former president of the United States moved his eyes methodically across shelves of wooden carvings, jewelry and sculptures as he searched for something distinctive to bring his wife. “She used to look forward to me coming home from wherever I’ve been,” he mused with a laugh. “Now I’m afraid I’ll be second fiddle to whatever world leader she’s just met.”

Hillary Rodham Clinton, the secretary of state, had in fact just returned home from a trip to Mexico, then rushed to the White House to help announce a new war strategy. “I saw her on CNN standing behind the president talking about Afghanistan,” her husband said. “Then she went to Dallas for something. I don’t know why.”

He spotted a turquoise bracelet. “Hillary likes turquoise,” he noted as he fingered the piece.

With all due respect to Linda Hirshman's desire for more spinach in ladyblogging: What a divine lead.

Sure, the passage tactlessly preys upon dated gender norms ("Bill Clinton likes to shop," it opens)—poking fun at the supposedly emasculated former leader of the free world. But I'll forgive this transgression, merely because the imagery so finely evokes a man who is totally enjoying the "stay-at-home" life. (Which is hardly stay-at-home; Bill has just accepted a position as U.N. special envoy to Haiti.)

Reading the scene again, I realized this must be enormously different from the arrangement that the Clintons had in mind when Hillary first began her extraordinary campaign for president of the United States. Rather than campaigning as "two for one"—which they did in 1992, when it was pretty unthinkable that a woman could win higher office—the Hillary Clinton campaign was largely about her: her record, her solutions, her commander-in-chief threshold, her fluency in domestic policy. She kept the "white boys" of Bill's circle out, and it seems her mistakes were her own. For his part, Bill was used as an effective surrogate in key swing states and remote, blue-collar areas of the country, but (and especially after the New Hampshire and South Carolina primaries) allowed the Hillary who'd "found her voice" to shine.

That Hillary ended the campaign with an ability to barn-burn and kiss babes and rile a political base of her own, bigger (or, in the Internet age, at least more quantifiable) than her husband's. That itself is a remarkable outcome.

But that doesn't mean Bill wouldn't have liked another crack at 1600 Pennsylvania. Yet in countless ways, the Secretary of State job has forced the titular "Mellowing of Bill Clinton" and kept the focus on Hillary alone—a good, if bittersweet gift from the president. Having had nearly six months to adjust, the naturally feminist (I await the howls on that one) Bill, who didn't mind sharing the 1992 ticket with his pioneering wife, suddenly doesn't seem to mind at all that he's picking jewelry in Peru.

This is something of an instance of playing against type. The pink-faced "fairy tale" campaign Bill; the defensive "What'd you say about my economy?" Bill; the slavering "Oh, man, do I want another crack at Israel-Palestine" Bill—they are gone. Now, he tells Baker, "If [Hillary] asks, I tell her what I think ... And if there’s something that’s going on that I feel that I have a particular knowledge of, I say that." The boy genius who charmed his way into extraordinary power says this like it were no big deal.

Rather, I imagine, like having your children young so that you can start the Sandals Jamaication as soon as they leave the house.

Tags: bill clinton, deregulation, former presidents, Hillary Clinton

Hanna and Dayo: I, too, was interested to read the lengthy profile of Bill Clinton in this weekend's New York Times Magazine, but I had a very different reaction to it. I found the profile fawning and thin, the reportage of an obedient dog happily following close on the heels of a once-powerful leader, and I felt like the story behind the story, which shadowed its every word, was left embarrassingly untouched. Aside from a short aside, which is vague to the point of hilarity, almost nothing is mentioned in regards to Clinton's sexual dalliances with Monica Lewinsky.

Apart from that one buried nod, we get: Bill playing second fiddle to Hillary! Bill flying all over the place on do-good missions! Bill, like, totally mellowed, man! But the concurrent story, that Obama's administration seems to be working hard to distance itself from Hillary's husband, seems to me very much tied to the fact that, in case anyone has forgotten, other than the article's author Peter Baker, the long and the short of it is that for the most part Bill Clinton is widely regarded as a fool, a policy wonk who let his penis get the best of him, a man who had the tenacity to rise to the highest office in the land, only to throw it all away with a splooge mark on a young woman's Gap dress. And then lied about it. And then got caught lying about it.

And what's his punishment? The real imprisonment? Playing second fiddle to his wife? Getting shunned by Obama? No. It's his inability to concede that he is little more than a national joke, a court jester who, contrary to tradition, doesn't speak the truth, and it is this image that he seems dedicated to pretending doesn't exist, the unspoken truth Baker ignores, too, in this act of journalistic adding and abetting.

Tags: bill clinton, Hillary Clinton, new york times magazine

I've spent a crazy week in New York City covering the United Nations General Assembly and the accompanying intense crush of foreign languages, traffic jams, and foreign policy. At the fifth annual Clinton Global Initiative in New York, former president Bill Clinton was kind enough to sit for a lengthy, far-reaching private interview with a few bloggers, during which he discussed the role of women and girls in his administration and in his new nongovernmental role. I wanted to share the meat of his response to a question from a mom-blogger whose name I now unfortunately forget. Below, his response to her question about regrets about action on women's rights during his term, and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's commitment to the development of women around the world:

Well, you’ve got a Secretary of State that thinks it’s the most important thing going. When president Obama talked to her about taking this job, she said "I want to help you, and I feel duty bound—no one has the right to say no to you. But if I’m going to give up a job that I love, I hope that you’re going to let me do this, because it’s really important to me." …

I want the NGO community to complement whatever the United States does on this, and I want them to do what they do best to move quicker and faster into the gaps—to prove that this is worth doing and it can be done.

Julia Ormond once said I was insufficiently aware of women’s rights. [Good for her!] That there is more sexual violence and human trafficking than I was aware of. She was right. A lot of young women are being abused and used for sexual trafficking. And increasingly today, young boys are also being sold into sexual slavery. So in addition to the education and health issues [facing women] there is also the trafficking.

Clinton then launched into a profound, consensus-building argument about the rights of women that seemed to attempt to fly above the abortion wars:

With all the fights in the world about abortion rights and choice and family planning and all that there is only one proven strategy that is not opposed by religious authorities—except some fanatics and cultural authorities—that slows the birthrate and raises per capita income. The only proven strategy is to put all the girls in the world in school. And a marjority of the people who go to substandard schools with no teachers and training materials are women. So if you put all the girls in world in school and give young women access to labor market, it slows the birthrate and stabilizes civil society.

We’ve seen the rates of women in college go up in the U.S. There are now more women than men in school in Saudi Arabia—even there [shakes head].

It was a smart and remarkably honest assessment. And Hillary Clinton has indeed made these hybrid reproductive and economic advancements a centerpiece of her agenda as Secretary of State. In Democracy Journal, I’ve penned a review of Michelle Goldberg’s fantastic new book on the topic, The Means of Reproduction. Goldberg picks up where both Clintons leave off, establishing a similar causality on economic development in emerging markets. She clearly backs up the thesis: The best way to empower women around the world is to educate them and give them reproductive choices. She also probes the factions in international law that are moving toward a theory of women’s rights as human rights:

It was not until the late 1970s, several years after Roe, that the population control alliance fractured, and the Protestant right began to agitate against the freedoms that 1960s cooperation had helped normalize. Goldberg, author of 2005’s Kingdom Coming, a book probing the rise of Christian nationalism in America, is well matched to the task of reporting the unique aggression of religious groups in this battle. She argues convincingly that the rise of the religious right, as well as the advent of globalization, began the outsourcing of the domestic culture wars. Suddenly, religious conservatism was not all prayer and sloganeering; American Protestant groups, as well as the Catholic Church, began to play a strong hand in the law and diplomacy surrounding access to contraception and abortion. The so-called "global gag" on abortion providers is the classic example. The Christianist Ronald Reagan coalition could not shake Roe, so it picked the lower-hanging fruit: withholding assistance to clinics abroad where doctors even whispered about abortion. Goldberg describes the seismic shift:

As the global women’s movement fought to make reproductive rights universal, conservatives from around the world joined hands across theological divides in opposition to what seemed the ultimate in aggressive cosmopolitanism. United Nations meetings and conferences would become forums for seemingly obscure but often intense and consequential struggles between universal rights and religious and cultural tradition, between the liberties due each individual and the power of groups–nations, villages, families–to regulate their members.

Read the whole essay here.

Photograph of Bill Clinton by Marvi Lacar/Getty Images for Meet the Press.

Tags: abortion, bill clinton, Clinton Global Initiative, economic development, Hillary Clinton, Michelle Goldberg, reproductive rights