click here to return to the Calico Cat homepage

Why Clinton didn’t speak at Reagan’s funeral

According to Matt Drudge, Clinton is angry that he wasn’t invited to speak at the funeral. ( CLINTON DISAPPOINTMENT: LEFT OFF FUNERAL SPEAKERS LIST)

"President Clinton really held out all hope the funeral would be a nonpartisan event, like Nixon's was," a top Clinton source said on Tuesday morning. "He's angry and disappointed neither he nor President Carter have been asked to speak, as of yet."

The top source says Clinton has been critical that both Bush presidents will address the crowd gathered at National Cathedral.

If you’re anti-Clinton, then you’ll probably enjoy reading Poor Bubba at Grouchy Old Cripple in Atlanta.

It’s old news (yes, four days is old in the blogosphere), but after watching the national funeral service on Friday, it’s easy to see why Clinton wasn’t on the eulogy list.

George W. Bush got to speak for the simple reason that he’s the current President. If Reagan had died four years earlier, Clinton would have spoken.

George H.W. Bush was invited to speak because of his close personal relationship to Reagan. They worked together as President and Vice President for eight years. When the senior Bush’s voice cracked and it looked like he was almost going to cry, you knew it wasn’t staged, it was genuine heartfelt emotion. Clinton didn’t have a close personal relationship with Reagan. When planning a funeral, you normally invite friends of the departed to give the eulogies, not someone who only met him once or twice.

The other two world leaders who gave eulogies were Margaret Thatcher and Brian Mulroney. In my previous post, Ronald Reagan, the Great Liberator who freed the slaves of communism, I wrote about the great praise heaped upon Reagan by Thatcher and Mulroney. Clinton wouldn’t have given Reagan such great praise.

No, I’m not saying that Clinton would have badmouthed the Great Liberator. He previously had some very nice words to say about Reagan at the dedication of the Ronald Reagan Building in Washington, DC. (Link via Green Fire Burning, which is critical of the decision to leave Clinton off the speaker’s list—read if you’re looking for an alternative point of view.) Clinton even talked about Reagan’s contribution towards world freedom and ending the Cold War:

Since President Reagan left office, the freedom and opportunity for which he stood have continued to spread. For half century, American leaders of both parties waged a cold war against aggression and oppression. Today, freed from the yolk of totalitarianism, new democracies are emerging all around the world, enjoying newfound prosperity and long-awaited peace.

But if you care to read the whole speech, you will see that it was a blatantly political speech in which he used the tie-in with Reagan to promote his own policies. He didn’t give Reagan any credit in the economic arena. And if you examine the above quote very carefully, you may note that it’s not even clear that he’s giving Reagan proper credit for ending the Cold War. Saying that he stood for freedom and then freedom came is not quite the same as saying that his policies directly brought about the freedom.

Clinton’s words of praise fall short of those of Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher compared him to Abraham Lincoln, and gave him credit for “transform[ing] a stagnant economy into an engine of opportunity.” Thatcher and Mulroney both clearly stated in their eulogies that Reagan was right and those who disagreed with him were wrong.

Furthermore, Reagan had a more important relationship with Mulroney and Thatcher, who were the leaders of our two closest allies. Clinton was just one of fifty governors during the time of Reagan's presidency.

And that, in a nutshell, is why the Reagan family didn’t invite Clinton to speak. There was another former U.S. President who had a close personal relationship to Reagan, and two other former world leaders who hold Reagan in much higher esteem than Clinton.

posted Saturday, June 12, 2004

0 Comments: