No, the reason I'm going to miss Bill Clinton is that watching him these past eight years has given me the same unbridled, childlike joy as watching a cartoon. Clinton was our first cartoon President. He ran off cliffs, was crushed by anvils and flattened by turn-of-the-century trains. Yet moments later, we always saw him, just like Wile E. Coyote or Daffy Duck, completely reassembled and eagerly pursuing his next crazy scheme. Essentially, people love cartoon characters because they cannot be hurt. They defy the rules of Greek tragedy. Clinton, unlike Richard Nixon or Lyndon Johnson, was not undone by his flaws. Whenever the smoke cleared, Clinton remained standing, covered in soot and looking at us slightly chagrined. But before we could pity him, the music was back on, and he was confidently strutting across the New Mexican landscape. Clinton was such a cartoon that anyone who entered his orbit immediately became an absurd, two-dimensional character. Ken Starr, once a boring lawyer, magically sprouted a buckle hat and musket. And, like all cartoon villains, Starr became single-mindedly obsessed with catching his wisecracking prey. He did everything short of arranging sticks of dynamite into the shape of a woman, dropping a wig on it and hiding behind a nearby rock. Clinton made Starr funny and watchable. And without Clinton on the scene, Starr, Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh and all the rest revert back to bland, Anglo-Saxon reality.
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,93324,00.html

















