He's Sorry, So Sorry

By Rick Horowitz

This side -- even that side -- of John Travolta, nobody does it better: the earnest gaze, the teary voice, the overbite. When it comes to saying "I'm sorry," Bill Clinton is Brenda Lee in a business suit.

The question is: Is he just getting it out of his system, or is he practicing for the big one?

Let's tote. Before he'd spent three full days in Africa, the prez had already acknowledged and regretted America's role in the slave trade. ("We were wrong in that.") He'd already confessed to decades -- centuries? -- of ignorance and neglect of an entire continent. Already owned up to our willingness to play footsie with dictators, and to our insistence on viewing African nations through a Cold War lens.

By the time his little road show had started adjusting to the time zones, The Leader of the Free World had begged forgiveness for everything but El Nino, the Chicago Cubs and that dancing baby on "Ally McBeal." And he was just getting started.

Sure, carped the critics (and my own tiny whiny voice was in there somewhere) -- he's happy to apologize for things he had nothing to do with, to apologize for someone else's behavior. How about confessing to his own sins for a change? Those allegations of certain sexual transgressions, for instance, allegations that have been met so far with an astonishing display of ducking and dodging, bobbing and weaving, hairsplitting and stonewalling and mudslinging and privilege invoking and --

And now foreign traveling. Change the neighborhood, change the subject.

But then there was his visit to Rwanda. He went to Rwanda, where genocide happened while the world did nothing, and he called it genocide. He did that, and he took some measure of personal responsibility for what occurred there.

"All over the world," he told a crowd of survivors, "there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed by this unimaginable terror."

"People like me," he said. And maybe his telling of the tale wasn't exactly accurate; maybe the people sitting in offices "appreciated" the depth and the speed of the killing all too well, but held back from committing to the effort that might have been required to stop it.

Nonetheless, it was a failure he was admitting to, his own failure. None of the standard "mistakes were made" formulations here. "People like me."

The crowd applauded. And the thought occurred: If he can admit to this, to being passive in the face of the death of hundreds of thousands of innocents, can't he admit to the dime-store stuff?

He can't stay on the road forever, can he? Eventually he has to come home, if only to pack his bags for the next trip. With every day that passes, though, Washington looms larger and darker. Washington, and the bunkers and the barricades. In Africa, he frequently looks joyous. There's none of that waiting back home for him, not as long as this thing hangs over him.

So why not get rid of it?

Why not confess to the crude advances and the unwelcome gropings and the ill-advised liaisons? One of his alleged ladies claims she once warned him of what looked to her like sexual addiction. Maybe it's time for him to shed a tear and admit to his embarrassing "problem."

Did he try to cover it up? Who wouldn't? Who wouldn't try to protect a loving wife and a trusting daughter from having to hear such awful news? Maybe it's time to admit to not thinking clearly, to caring so much about his family's feelings that he stumbled over the line.

If he simply comes clean and asks for mercy, the gotcha games are over; there's nothing to investigate. They're not going to impeach him for it. He can climb out of the bunker and start living again.

People love apologies -- and this man was made for "Oprah."

3/29/98