Was Clinton a Wonk? Was he really cool?

Cut on the Bias has transcribed part of an interview with Lawrence O'Donnell from Fresh Air.

What caught my attention was this exchange:

Host: Did you identify with the policy wonks of the Clinton administration?

O'Donnell: That's a hugely exaggerated notion, that President Clinton was a policy wonk or anybody working in the West Wing was a policy wonk other than Gene Spurling. That's just the rap, that's just the image they wanted for themselves, the positive rap they wanted for that president, he was no more a policy wonk than any other president.

From my experience in the Oval Office with Bill Clinton, he knew about an index card worth of material. Let's put it this way, I was never in a meeting with Bill Clinton and the senators where Bill Clinton was not the single most ignorant person in the room.

Later O'Donnell added

But the image that Clinton easily achieved was that he knew more than most presidents. That's because up against the White House press corps that's a really easy thing to achieve because no one's allowed three follow up questions in a row...

These observations mirror P. J. O'Rourke's assessment based on an interview with Clinton in 1992:

He explained. He gave examples. And he knew what he was talking about—until he talked about something I knew.

I'd just been to Bangladesh, where I had toured the Grameen Bank, founded by the Third World development guru Muhammad Yunus. Clinton proposed using the Grameen's programs of microcredit and cooperative lending to fight poverty in American inner cities. The Grameen Bank lends $30 or $40 to groups of Bangladeshi village women so that they can buy pedal-operated sewing machines to make napkins, place mats, and decorative pillow cases to sell to tourists, in case Bangladesh ever gets any. I had a hard time picturing this in Compton or the South Bronx. Also, the crack fad was raging just then. Enormous drug deals were being transacted in the nation's slums. Was scarcity of capital really at the core of America's poverty problems? When Clinton finished talking about microcredit, I said, "I've just been to Bangladesh, where I toured the Grameen ..."

There was a sudden great changing of subject.

P. J. came away from the interview with doubts about Clinton's coolness as well:

Was the whole saxophone thing just an affectation? And the Ray-Ban Wayfarers and the bluesman's snap-brim fez too? Would Clinton really go out on the Truman Balcony and blow some bebop if things got rough during his White House sojourn? Or ... was Clinton a band geek? Maybe he got the saxophone because the tuba was already taken. Even in the sixties there were such people—sycophantic mama's boys who tended toward pudge and hung around the career counselor's office asking "You got any of those Rhodes scholarship application things?" These fellows tended to marry the girls who helped them with their law-school homework, move back to town, and turn out to be real operators.

The whole thing is classic O'Rourke-- smart, funny, and perceptive.