Art & Creativity Quote by Sidney Blumenthal

“Profile in growth” is a columnist’s neat bit of narrative laundering: it takes a presidency widely remembered for improvisation, scandal gravity, and policy triangulation and reframes it as character development. Blumenthal isn’t just describing Clinton; he’s selling a plotline. “Profile” borrows the prestige of political biography, the genre that implies close observation and sober judgment. “Growth” borrows the moral language of self-help, suggesting that the mess was formative rather than disqualifying. Put together, the phrase invites readers to grade the administration on an arc, not on individual acts.

The subtext is defensive but strategic. Clinton’s presidency is hard to summarize without the detours: the personal controversies, the relentless investigations, the late-90s culture-war machinery. Calling it “growth” tacitly asks the audience to see those crises as pressure that produced maturity - a redemption narrative that deflects from the underlying question of judgment. It also smuggles in a generous standard: growth implies an earlier deficit, yet turns that deficit into evidence of potential.

Context matters because Blumenthal was not a distant observer. As a journalist-turned-Clinton confidant, he occupied the porous boundary between reporting and advocacy that defined a whole era of media-politics symbiosis. The intent, then, is less to excavate Clinton than to stabilize Clintonism: to argue that the presidency wasn’t merely survived, it was refined - and that the reader should remember it as an upward line rather than a series of compromises and explosions.