Eric the Hun will probably be agreeing with him ten-twenty years from now! Here's another nice article written by a friend of mine here at Wash U.
themao [chainsawkill]
[url]http://www.lewrockwell.com/dmccarthy/dmccarthy25.html[/url]
Bill Clinton, Conservative of the Future
by Daniel McCarthy
Imagine an America where Bill Clinton is considered a mainstream conservative. An America, indeed, where conservatives model their own ideas and actions on those of the former President. Sound far-fetched? Just wait. It might take sixty years but the day is coming when William Jefferson Clinton will be an hero to the right.
Throughout his presidency Clinton was perhaps only marginally more popular among conservatives than Saddam Hussein, that other bugbear of the 90's. Conservative-penned exposes of Clinton corruption were more than a cottage industry, they were the publishing equivalent of the Palace of Versailles. All with good reason: Clinton's corruption and buffoonery were all that they were made out to be, and much more.
Bill Clinton was not the first American President to earn such well-deserved conservative animosity however. Within the same century there had been an even more corrupt and dangerous man in the Oval Office, whose popularity was even greater than Clinton's, and whom conservatives dedicated their lives and livelihoods to fighting. That man was Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
There was a time when the right-wing was practically defined by its opposition to FDR, in much the same way as opposition to Clinton was characteristic of '90s conservatism. Albert Jay Nock, later an influence on Bill Buckley and Frank Chodorov, discussed at length the similarities between Roosevelt's administration and fascism in the first chapter of Our Enemy, the State. H.L. Mencken's assessment of of Roosevelt's character was that "If he became convinced tomorrow that coming out for cannibalism would get him the votes he sorely needs, he would begin fattening a missionary in the White House backyard come Wednesday" and further that Roosevelt was "the first American to penetrate the real depths of vulgar stupidity."
That was then. Today, fifty-six years after Roosevelt's death, "America's Premier Conservative Website" runs a flattering imitation of FDR's "Four Freedoms." National Review On-line's Michael Novak doesn't just use this piece of New Deal propaganda for rhetorical effect; Novak's list includes the same socialist "freedom from want" that Roosevelt's did. The right has come a long way from Nock's verdict on the Four Freedoms: "There is no such thing, four or forty. Freedom has no plural. Freedom either is, or isn't."