"Washington Diarist" Jeffrey Rosen in the New Republic, November 11, 1996:

Given the contradictions at the heart of Clinton's presidency, what is it, precisely, that I admire about him? The answer, I suppose, is his character. Clinton's defining impulse, after all, is not insincerity but a surfeit of empathy: he earnestly does believe in the possibility of reconciling contradictions that can't be logically reconciled: Reagan with Roosevelt, racialism with color-blindedness, family values with civil liberties. But, as Clinton demonstrates in his moving speeches to black churches, a Whitmanesque capacity to embrace contradictions isn't always a vice in a balkanized age. I suppose, in the end, that I also admire Clinton's intelligence and his passion for argument, which vindicates the Madisonian premises that Ronald Reagan's success called into question. Clinton ... reassures us that a first-rate education isn't necessarily a disqualification for leadership in American democracy.

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