The TV Watch: ‘Clinton’ on PBS Shows an Era That Feels Close Yet So Far

It’s remarkable, really, how little resonance that Clinton sex scandal has today. The White House intern who shook the world is barely ever mentioned in the 2012 presidential campaign. If her name comes up at all, it’s as an asterisk to Newt Gingrich. Critics like to point out that while Mr. Gingrich was leading the Republican charge to impeach President Bill Clinton in 1998, he was concealing his own extramarital affair with Callista Bisek, the young Congressional staffer who is now his third wife.

The Monica Lewinsky imbroglio is nonetheless at the center of a two-part, four-hour documentary called “Clinton” that will be shown Monday and Tuesday on PBS. It’s a long, solemn and supposedly reflective look back at the life and times of Bill Clinton that feels as if it were made the day he left office in 2001.

Amid all the furor over the Starr Report, Linda Tripp and a stained blue dress, it was hard back then to see what really mattered. Eleven years on “Clinton” doesn’t try to find out. The documentary is still too distracted by the Starr Report, Linda Tripp and the stained blue dress.

The film breathlessly chronicles every misstep and triumphant comeback of Mr. Clinton’s picaresque career in order to rue the damage his lifelong recklessness did to his reputation and his legacy. (Though actually, despite all that happened between 1992 and 2001, the former president is doing just fine.)

What the film doesn’t do is give viewers a more compelling reason to go back and relive that epoch. The film hits all the familiar Clinton milestones — childhood in Hot Springs, Ark.; abusive stepfather; Oxford; courtship of Hillary Rodham; the Arkansas gubernatorial races; Gennifer Flowers; Travelgate; Somalia; Whitewater; etc. — without exploring the deeper happenings that turned out to have had a more lasting impact on the world.

Yet two of the major cataclysms shadowing our times, the Sept. 11 attacks and the 2008 credit collapse, have roots that reach back to the Clinton administration.

The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center, which turned out to be a dress rehearsal for Sept. 11, isn’t included in the narrative. The rise of Osama Bin Laden and the failed missile strikes against Al Qaeda training camps in 1998 are noted in passing and presented almost as a pesky foreign policy crisis that briefly distracted Mr. Clinton from the more enduring Monica Lewinsky scandal.

And there is no mention whatsoever of the repeal of the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, one of several fateful steps that the Clinton administration — in concert with Republicans — took in the name of deregulation. Some policies, like making home mortgages more accessible, helped fuel the economy, but they also heedlessly left Wall Street and other financial institutions free of adult supervision. With the help of the Bush administration that followed, those actions opened the way to derivatives trading that led to the collapse of Lehman Brothers and a domino line of multibillion-dollar bailouts to prevent the implosion of the world’s financial system.

Put it this way: Robert E. Rubin, the former Treasury secretary, is one of many Clinton administration alumni interviewed on camera, and while the PBS crew spoke to Mr. Rubin in 2010, he wasn’t asked about Glass-Steagall or any of the other decisions that he helped design and that after the 2008 credit debacle look so shortsighted. Mr. Rubin went on to become a top official at Citigroup and earned more than $100 million over 10 years — until Citigroup also teetered on the edge of self-destruction and had to be rescued with a $45 billion bailout.

Instead, Mr. Rubin is asked about the administration’s 1993 budget proposal to cut spending and raise taxes. “Twenty-two million new jobs were created,” Mr. Rubin says proudly. “Productivity went up. Incomes rose at all levels. And, for the first time in 30 years, we had a federal surplus.”

A lot of former allies are allowed to present themselves in the best possible light, without any hindsight, cautionary notes or credibility checks, including Dick Morris, a political strategist and former Clinton adviser who fell out of favor, had a change of heart and is now a contributor to Fox News.

“I said to him, ‘The problem that presidents have is not the sin, it’s the cover-up, and you should explore just telling the American people the truth,’ ” Mr. Morris recalls telling the president. (In Mr. Morris’s recollection Mr. Clinton was humbly grateful for his sage advice but didn’t have the nerve to follow it.)

Lucianne Goldberg, the literary agent who helped Linda Tripp entrap Ms. Lewinsky, is quoted at length, as is Michael Isikoff, the investigative reporter who first got wind of the White House affair. So are many of the journalists and biographers who made their reputations by chronicling how Mr. Clinton lost his.

Joe Klein, the author and journalist who wrote “Primary Colors,” a roman à clef about the Clintons’ first presidential campaign, is cited more than most and is also given the last word.

He disagrees with historians and former aides who say Mr. Clinton squandered his gifts and hobbled his potential for greatness. “I don’t know if you can say of a president who served us well and improved our material good that it was a wasted opportunity,” Mr. Klein argues. “And it was sure a lot of fun to watch.”

“Clinton” is fun to watch too, but mostly it’s a wasted opportunity.

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After diabetes diagnosis, US celebrity chef feels heat

US cooking star Paula Deen, self-proclaimed "Queen of Southern Cuisine" famous for her dishes smothered in butter, has met a storm of outrage after revealing she has diabetes and is hawking a drug to treat the disease.

Deen, who famously showed off trademark high-fat, high-calorie meals including such creations as a hamburger wedged between a doughnut, was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes three years ago -- but continued her show on the Food Network promoting what critics slammed as an outrageously unhealthy diet.

Detractors have lambasted the jovial cooking host in a country that is battling an obesity epidemic. According to recent studies one-in-three adults in America are obese, as are one-in-six children -- a grave, growing problem despite efforts to combat it with healthy eating campaigns.

Further sullying her image, however, 64-year-old Deen came out last month as a spokesperson for the pharmaceutical giant Novo Nordisk and its diabetes treatment Victoza, hawking the drug in a new campaign "Diabetes in a New Light."

Fellow US cooking celebrity Anthony Bourdain, a chef and host of Travel Channel show "No Reservations," took to Twitter to vent over Deen's decision.

"Thinking of getting into the leg-breaking business, so I can profitably sell crutches later," he quipped on the popular microblogging site.

Amid the US obesity crisis, Bourdain has laid into Deen before, due to her high-fat creations calling her "the worst, most dangerous person to America."

Known as "The Lady," Deen has become something of an institution for her heavy, no-apologies approach to cuisine, with a decade-long cooking show, 15 cookbooks, a well-known restaurant in Savannah, Georgia and a profitable lines of cooking wares sold in stores and online.

She has garnered a reputation for heavy, rich, fried southern dishes -- cooking up a combination of almost anything with the most butter, cream, sugar.

On savory dishes, she famously piles high the meat, heavily salted, drawing accusations of being in cahoots with giant meat firms that have in turn been blamed for rising cases of diabetes in the United States in recent years.

Her move to join "big pharma" and tout a diabetes drug has caused an uproar, not least because US authorities had approved the treatment Victoza in January 2010 despite evidence of a link to thyroid cancer. It also costs hundreds of dollars a month, compared to similar, less expensive options.

"I am here today to let the world know that it is not a death sentence," Deen said in announcing her diabetes diagnosis.

There was, however, little sympathy for her from fans and critics alike.

She had waited "three years before revealing she had developed diabetes -- three years of serving up ever-more carb-and-fat laden meals, dragging her legions down with her. And then, voila! She has the "magic bullet," ready for them to pop in their mouth," wrote one outraged viewer on an Internet forum.

Those closest to her meanwhile reportedly jumped ship over her decision to campaign for the dubious diabetes drug -- her publicist Nancy Assuncao Sanchez is said to have quit over the move.

Even her sons are apparently "furious" with her. The New York Post said Deen's children Jamie and Bobby -- the latter also hosts a cooking show called "Not My Mama's Meals" -- were worried that switching from a successful treatment to the new drug, for the sake of some millions of dollars in the endorsement deal, could endanger her health further.

Her defenders, however, pointed out the problem was not with Deen.

"She is not responsible for how people eat," insisted one commentator Gary Finger, on a blog for USA Today, saying she was simply geared towards giving people what they already wanted.

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