A THIRD TERM FOR BILL CLINTON

You can't keep a bad man down: Mark Steyn predicts another

triumph for the Comeback Kid — in the shape of a victory for his second banana in the presidential elections

New Hampshire EIGHT years ago Bill Clinton did some- thing no successful candidate for the presi- dency has ever done in the history of the modern New Hampshire primary: he lost.

In 1988, Bush won New Hampshire. And, before that, so did Reagan and Carter, Nixon, LBJ, JFK and Ike. But on primary In the Democratic caucuses in Iowa last Monday, Bill Bradley got 35 per cent, more than any challenger to the establishment candidate has ever received. For his pains, he was widely perceived by all informed commentators to be roadkill. In the crowded, six-man Republican field, George W. Bush won 41 per cent of the vote, more than any GOP candidate has ever got in Iowa. It was agreed by the media that he was felt to have 'underperformed'. But, on the basis of his losing 26 per cent in 1992, Bill Clinton went out and declared victo- ry; the self-anointed 'Comeback Kid' pronounced himself the real winner — the candidate who, after a month of alle- gations of draft-dodging and government jobs for mistresses, had come from behind and swept triumphantly to. . . er, a little less behind. The media decided to string along with this story, and in November they helped make William Jefferson Clinton the only man in half a century to win the White House after losing in the Granite State.

New Hampshire in 1992 should have warned us that the normal rules of elec- toral politics don't apply to Bill Clinton.

Or, as my own senator, Bob Smith, put it after dutifully casting his vote to nail Slick Willie's puffy-cracker butt in last year's impeachment trial: 'He's won. He always wins. Let's move on.' But, for some reason, I never learn. I always forget Bob's wise words. In 1992 the Clinton campaign pinned 'It's the economy, stupid' up in their war rooms. If I'd stuck 'Clinton always wins' up on my wall, I'd have got everything right in the last eight years.

Of course, as with every other entry in the Clinton lexicon, it depends what the meaning of the word 'win' is. Most of the time Clinton, in the technical sense, loses, as he did in New Hampshire, and in the 1994 and 1998 mid-terms. The latter was a classic Clinton defeat: the Republicans won and the Democrats were reduced to their lowest Congressional representation in 70 years. But somehow it got passed off as a Clinton triumph and a massive repudiation of the GOP, and Newt Gingrich wound up having to resign.

So, to work out what will happen this coming November, tape 'Clinton always wins' above the desk. True, he's not actually running this year, due to a minor detail known as the 22nd Amendment. But he'd like to stick around. For Clinton, winning means not going away. He's one of the great political Houdinis of all time, but with a unique twist: he's an escapologist who doesn't want to escape. You bring the trunk up out of the tank of water, you take the chains off, you break the locks — and he's still in there. Clinton is a vaudeville act with no big finish. If Dubya wins, if the Republi- cans hold on to the House of Representa- tives, if Rudy Giuliani is the next senator from New York, the Clinton era will be deemed to have ended and he'll have to skulk back to Arkansas and spend his days browsing the adult section of his presidential library. But, if next January he's walking out, of the White House kibitzing with his buddy Al, if he's congratulating the Democrats on taking back the House, if he's dancing with the radiant Senator Rodham at the inaugural ball, he'll have won his biggest victory of all: the Clinton third term. He's already been musing openly about running for the Senate from Arkansas in 2002, and friends have pointed out that in the year 2043 he'll still be younger than his fellow sex-fiend, nonagenarian Senator Strom Thur- mond, is now. Senator Bill will be a kind of President Emeritus. For what other politician in US history has ever bequeathed the White House to his sec- ond banana, a Senate seat to his wife and another Senate seat to himself? And, if he pulls that off, the biographical entry will bury impeachment halfway down the third page as a regrettable social faux committed by out-of-touch Republicans.

Could this happen? Well, look at it this way. Three months ago, Dubya was a shoo-in. Now he's derided as an establishment airhead who's failed to fire up Republican voters. A month ago, Bill Bradley told me he'd win Iowa. Now he's universally regarded as a schmucko loser with a one-way ticket on the oblivion express. Instead, the big news out of Mon- day night in Des Moines was: Whaddaya know? Turns out Al Gore is not a tar- nished cigar-store Indian dripping as much Clinton DNA as Monica's dress. Once again, we have to remember that it depends what the meaning of the word 'is' is. Technically, Al Gore is a tarnished cigar-store Indian dripping Clinton's DNA. But, as Iowa proved, that's no reason for Democrats not to vote for him.

It wasn't supposed to be like this According to columnist George Will, after eight years of Clinton the nation would be ready to take a shower. The newspapers wrote of widespread 'Clinton fatigue'. 'Character' was supposed to be the big issue, though it's a measure of how our understanding of the term has evolved dur- ing the Clinton era that, on the Republican side, the character junkies should have set- tled on a foul-mouthed vindictive adulter- ous sleazeball (Senator McCain). But Democrats, too, were said to be ready for a fresh start and were pouring money into Bradley's coffers. Al recognised the prob- lem and began 'distancing' himself from the man he'd called — on the day of his impeachment — 'one of our greatest presi- dents'. Asked about Monica, he took a bold stand: 'I wouldn't have done that.' Bill, who'd previously found Al as eager to please and as uncomplaining as Monica, let it be known he thought the Vice-President was being 'ungracious'.

But a funny thing happened when Al started distancing himself and being his own man: his numbers nosedived. As his own man, he was a sanctimonious dork. What saved him in Iowa was a decision to embrace orthodox campaign Clintonism: attack your opponent relentlessly, while appropriating the victim role for yourself. Gore's hammering Bradley on the same issue Clinton hammered Dole on in 1996: health care. Dole, the war veteran, was sup- posed to appeal to old folks, so Clinton tarred Dole as the man who'd wreck their Medicare programmes: MediScare, as the blitzkrieg was known. Bradley's big issue was meant to be race, so Gore has pounded him shamelessly with accusations that his Medicaid proposals would disproportion- ately harm blacks: MediSpade, so to speak. In a classic Clintonian touch, on victory night in Iowa he attributed Bradley's defeat to his opponent's regrettable decision to 'go negative'. By 'negative', he meant Bradley's half-hearted whining that Gore was being beastly to him.

The Vice-President will never be a perfect candidate. As Barbra Streisand told TV Guide, 'You watch and think, "You need media lessons." Bradley is much more com- fortable. Gore [she shakes her head] — he actually called from Air Force One for advice. I couldn't take the call. I was in the middle of something.' And yet, though she wouldn't take his call, Barbra is endorsing Al. And she's pretty much got the right idea: she doesn't want to have to listen to the guy droning on in his I-speak-your-weight voice, but, when the time comes, she'll cast her vote for him. As Barbra goes, so goes Iowa. Democrats at large have embarked on the same process as their party's senators did a year ago. After insisting that the President's conduct was 'unacceptable' and 'unforgiv- able', Senate Democrats accepted it and for- gave it; at the last minute, the rats climbed back on board Bill Clinton's sinking Love Boat and helped nurse it into harbour. Like- wise, after their initial squeamishness about voting for the chump who shined for Bill in a Buddhist temple, New Hampshire Democrats are falling back into line.

As for Senator-elect Rodham, the same thing will happen in the Empire State. To be sure, certain prominent liberal New Yorkers have put it about that she shouldn't be running. But she is. And New York is a Democrat state. And those prominent liberals can bitch all they want, but in the end they won't be voting for Giu- liani. As for Hillary being able to survive the scrutiny of the New York media, with the great and honourable exception of the New York Post, they're a bunch of wussies. If she can steer clear of the splendidly undeferential Tom Bauerle of WGN in Buffalo, an upstate disc-jockey who had the temerity to ask her if she'd had sex with Vince Foster, the worst she'll have to put up with is the likes of ABC's anguished Diane Sawyer and her dancing eyebrows putting tough probing questions like, 'Do you think one of the reasons you've been subjected to these unprecedented assaults is because there are certain groups in this country that still have a problem dealing with successful, independent women?' In its way, this will be the sweetest victory of all, the ultimate comeback. In the last two years, Bill Clinton is said to have been obsessed by his place in the history books, even while stacking up a pile of insur- mountable footnotes: the first elected presi- dent to be impeached; the first president to have his semen analysed by the FBI; the first to pony up 850,000 bucks to a plaintiff m a sexual harassment case; the first to be censured and fined by a federal judge for 'undermining the integrity of the judicial system'; the first to be accused, credibly, of rape. You'd think all that would be harder to shrug off than a lousy 26 per cent in the New Hampshire primary. After all, a year ago, the talk-shows were clogged with sor- rowful Democrats murmuring that, whatev- er he did, the word 'impeachment' would be in the first sentence of his biography. Don't bet on it. As in the Granite State in 1992, Clinton has declared victory and the world has decided to go along.

And don't expect the Republicans to take issue with that verdict. At Lebanon High School on Monday, one of my fellow Granite Staters stood up and asked, as someone always does, about 'restoring the honour and integrity of the Oval Office after the last eight years'. John McCain paused, and spoke about his love for America, his time as a POW, the wife, the kids, blah-blah. We're assured that these coded responses obliquely draw a distinc- tion between the candidates and the incumbent, but it seems more reasonable to conclude that the Republicans are declining even to mention Clinton — never mind attack him — because they're ner- vous about how it will play. The Iowa cau- cuses did, though, provide us with one indicator: the only candidate to refer regu- larly to the administration's scandals, Sena- tor Orrin Hatch, got 1 per cent of the vote. It seems America wasn't ready to take a shower, it just wanted to wash poor old Orrin down the plughole.

So, given recent events, how about this for November 2000? A diminished Dubya emerges from the primaries and loses nar- rowly to Gore; Hillary's steely glamour sees her through in New York; the Dems seize the House; and on Inauguration Day William Jefferson Clinton preens and prances his way around Washington — the king re-born as king-maker. I'd love to be proved wrong, but the Rule of Bob has no exceptions. 'He's won,' said Senator Smith. 'He always wins. Let's move on.' But Clinton isn't going anywhere: he'll never move on.

'Every day he returns Groundhog Day, only to rent it out again.'