From a profile of Stephen Greenblatt in today's Guardian.
In 1995, in the early days of the Monica Lewinsky scandal, the literary scholar and cultural theorist, Stephen Greenblatt, had a momentary encounter with Bill Clinton at a White House reception. Clinton recalled being made to learn Macbeth at school. "Don't you think," said Greenblatt, "it's a play about someone compelled to do the morally disastrous?" "No," said Clinton, "it's a play about someone whose immense ambition has an ethically inadequate object." This insight, captured in such a "marvellous phrase", dazzled Greenblatt into thinking the president had missed his vocation as an English professor, especially when Clinton went on to quote reams of Macbeth by heart. Some time later, though, watching the TV news, he heard Clinton praise the late King Hussein of Jordan as a man "whose immense ambition had an ethically adequate object". Clinton's marvellous phrase, it turned out, was no more than multi-purpose rhetoric. "It suddenly occurred to me," Greenblatt recalls, "that although the phrase was marvellous, it was also somehow off. No one with immense ambition has an ethically adequate object. I realised that Clinton had chosen the right vocation after all!"
(Cf Lukacs on the reification of the subjective faculties, which receives its most 'typical' embodiment in the journalist, who must refashion his thoughts as sale-items:
it is precisely subjectivity itself, knowledge, temperament and powers of expression that are reduced to an abstract mechanism functioning autonomously and divorced both from the personality of their ‘owner’ and from the material and concrete nature of the subject matter in hand)