He did give a few good speeches, off the cuff, early on in the campaign. But that was when his back was against the wall and the trailer-park Baptist in him got the better of the Rhodes scholar. He’d let fly, get a rhythm, raise goose bumps, bring tears. After that, though, most everything was either written or rote. And Clinton, whose real character flaw is that he is a lawyer, tended to take the written language more seriously, more literally (and more gingerly), than any self-respecting politician should. Part of it was conscious and pragmatic: “He knows he can’t get away with that high-blown, flowery Kennedy stuff,” says a political adviser. “It plays to the worst side of his image, the slickness. He knows he has to keep it simple, and will err on that side.”
But there’s more to it than that. Great oratory is the product of tension and passion. It needs good guys and bad guys, justice and injustice. It exhorts the righteous to battle. Bill Clinton isn’t comfortable with anything so rude: he is a conciliator, a pacifier. He polishes rough edges (the source of much of his reputed “slickness”); great oratory thrives on them. From his childhood, when his most important role was to calm a drunken stepfather, Clinton has seen tension-anger, and perhaps passion, too-as terrifying and barbaric. He was forced, always, to hope for the best in an impossible situation-and his hopes would inevitably be nurtured by the sad, chastened kindnesses that tended to follow Roger Clinton’s drunken sprees. The possibility of redemption was a constant dream, and settled in close to his core. Indeed, the president got into some trouble two weeks ago when he refused to completely dismiss Saddam Hussein, the Mother of all Stepfathers: “I believe in deathbed conversions,” he told The New York Times to his immediate regret.
And so, Clinton spoke of renewal last week rather than revolution or reform. Renewal is a curiously neutral word; it has no enemies. It challenges exhaustion, not evil. It is much gentler, rhetorically, than John Kennedy’s torches and trumpets. Because of his youth and looks and cadences, the new president invites-indeed, has begged-comparison with Kennedy, but they are very different sorts. Kennedy was more percussive, bellicose: he was ready to “pay any price, bear any burden” to defend liberty. By contrast, Clinton’s most powerful image was botanical: to “force the spring.” He posed “challenges” rather than proposing crusades. It is impossible to imagine John Kennedy, the ultimate existential gunslinger, speaking of watching “a child’s eyes wander into sleep.” He would find it terminally sappy. At the same time, one can’t imagine Clinton saying, as Kennedy once did, “Life is unfair.” He knows that, but would find it too coarse and cruel to admit publicly.
Clinton is odd that way, relentlessly sunny and corny and lachrymose. His tastes-in music and poetry, in junk food-betray a populist sentimentalism that the elegant, sophisticated Kennedy would probably find crude. Clinton isn’t clever, as Kennedy was. He isn’t cool. He lacks irony, hates cynicism. His favorite Beatle was Paul. He is a fierce competitor, but not a hater. He has a temper, but it doesn’t last long. He doesn’t carry grudges. He has practically no patience for the dishing, maneuvering, gossip and infighting that always exist near the heart of power. “It just isn’t done in his presence,” says a veteran of the presidential campaign. Indeed, a prominent-and skilled-Washington politico lost his shot at a top White House job because Clinton (and chief of staff McLarty) thought he was too caught up in palace intrigue.
Hillary Clinton, apparently, polices the palace. She has the ability-and perhaps the responsibility-to analyze the strengths and weaknesses of the hired hands; the president will follow her recommendations, tempered by mercy: “OK, but don’t rub his face in it,” he’d often say when an aide had to be demoted during the campaign. His job is to keep the family calm and functioning: no backbiting, no sniping, no carping and, unfortunately, not much passion either. His idea of heaven is wall-to-wall nice, a perennial Renaissance Weekend, filled with high-minded seminars, the appearance of candor and the absence of visible scar tissue. He won’t find it in Washington. Already, it seems, the president senses that in his new town even his allies don’t buy his values. In the one edgy passage of his Inaugural, he blasted the capital as “a place of intrigue and calculation,” where “powerful people … worry endlessly about who is in and who is out, who is up and who is down, forgetting those people whose toil and sweat sends us here.” He’s right and one hopes this isn’t just a warning shot, but a battle he’ll pursue-not just for the country’s sake, but for his own.
