It was not much different from our attitude towards most of his immediate predecessors: we were sniffy towards the elder Bush, we never got it about Reagan, we mocked Carter, laughed at Ford, despised Nixon (sometimes even we get something right) and saw only the bad side of Lyndon Johnson, arguably the greatest American politician of the past half century. This failure to take Clinton seriously was characteristic of too much of the liberal left's trivialised disdain towards real politics. Our appetite for tittle-tattle about Clinton's sex life and speculation about his marriage was endless, but too many of us glazed over when it came to the boring old political strategies and policies that were at the real heart of his heroic - yes, heroic - attempt to pick progressive politics up off the mat in the wake of the new right's transatlantic counter-revolution in the 1980s. We may think we love Bill Clinton now, and we may yearn for him to be miraculously - and unconstitutionally - restored to the presidency, but my God, we patronised him something rotten when he was actually there. In fact, over the past half century, such disrespect towards the man in the White House has been far more the norm than the exception. It would be a dreadful mistake to suppose that George W Bush was the first American president who has failed to capture the hearts and minds of liberal-left British opinion.
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