Bill Clinton: "Lonesome Rhodes" Scholar
Barrett Kalellis August 11, 1999
Back in 1957, a prescient film was released whose message was
apparently lost or ignored by the boomer generation, a lapse of
inattention whose consequences we still suffer today.
I refer to A Face In The Crowd, directed by Elia Kazan from a
script by Budd Schulberg.
The film traces the rise and fall of its central character,
"Lonesome" Rhodes, an alcoholic, skirt-chasing hick roustabout
from the deep Arkansas outback. Brilliantly played by Andy
Griffith, Rhodes has the gift of gab, unctuous sincerity and a
silver tongue for the homespun homily. With the help of
handlers, agents and pollsters, he parlays his talent from lowly
beginnings at a small Arkansas radio station into a prime-time,
nationwide, top-rated television show based in New York City.
Reminiscent of Will Rogers, Lonesome Rhodes attracts the
attention of party politicians and kingmakers as what is known
today as a "media advisor." Craving the love and applause of
others, he starts using his TV show and personal charisma to
advocate political issues and candidates.
Unlike Rogers, however, Rhodes is revealed as an out-and-out
fraud who seeks only personal aggrandizement and ultimately
political office, along with a steady supply of comely and
pliable young women. He mercilessly exploits those around him to
advance his own ambition. If he is caught telling a lie, he
merely shrugs it off by saying "You ought to know me better'n to
believe everything I say." When he is warned that some action
might be against the law, Rhodes boasts, "Nothing's illegal if
you don't get caught."
What latter-day person does Lonesome Rhodes suggest? Mutatis
mutandis, Bill Clinton is also a "hometown boy makin' good by
makin' everybody." With his immense political skills ("Politics
is people," Lonesome declares), Clinton has used his telegenic
and effusive personality to gather followers and win support.
Ideas and policies he leaves to his wife and frontal lobe wonks.
Like Rhodes, Clinton is a child of the TV generation, and employs
the medium to maximum effectiveness with capsule slogans,
punchlines and staged PR events, where symbolism outweighs, as
they say, substance.
Emboldened by his newly found power, Rhodes envisions himself on
a messianic historic mission -- a wielder of influence, a force
-- strangely similar to the Clinton administration's view as
revealed by its manipulative domestic and foreign agendas: "These
people are even more stupid than I am," Rhodes states, "so I have
to do the thinking for them."
Sowing the self-destructive seeds of arrogance and out-of-control
recklessness, both Rhodes and Clinton pay the price. Rhodes
meets his downfall when he unknowingly insults his audience over
an open microphone; Clinton is brought low by a stained dress,
an impeachment and an unending array of political and personal
scandals.
In the final reel, Rhodes' friends and political cronies all
desert him, after they find he has lost his public credibility.
His political capital has been spent, and he will never regain
the heights of fame and reputation that he once had.
The real-life Bill Clinton, of course, is not the fictional
Lonesome Rhodes. Whereas the system wasted no time in flushing
Lonesome down the sewer pipe, fate has been kinder to Bill
Clinton. But while it has kept him in office, he is in fact
emasculated, and he traipses back and forth across the country
promising various groups government monies in an attempt to buy
some sort of historical legacy.
Pundits are now beginning to refer to the national phenomenon of
"Clinton Fatigue." This should be elevated to "Clintonschmerz," a
Germanic way of denoting a more universal, cosmic weariness of
anything having to do with the Clintons and what they have done.
A Hillary Clinton run for a New York Senate seat only prolongs
the country's agony.
Like Lonesome Rhodes' enabler Marsha in the film, Hillary is
doing yeoman work to make her husband seem better, as with her
recent armchair psychologizing in Talk Magazine. She functions
the same as Marsha: she is his locker room where he eases up
after the fight, win or lose; she is a shock absorber to handle
the collisions with interns, models and other assorted bimbos;
she is the little wheel of efficiency without which the great
streamline express called Bill Clinton plunges off the tracks and
leaps to destruction.
But whether Hillary departs the scene or not, in the end, Bill
Clinton's legacy will no doubt still be that of Lonesome Rhodes:
"We were all taken in. But we get wise to him -- that's our
strength -- we get wise to him."
Barrett Kalellis writes frequently for The Detroit News,
NewsMax.com and other publications.
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