THE GLAD-HANDER

BILL CLINTON CHANGES TO PLEASE, BUT THE LARGER TRUTH IS THAT AMERICA IS A CHAMELEON NATION

If genius is the ability to hold in the mind two mutually contradictory ideas without going crazy, then Americans have had a brilliant year. The U.S. has just elected a man who it thinks either 1) may turn out to be one of the great Presidents or 2) may find himself spending a lot of his second term talking to his lawyers. Knowing that they had lost, conservatives began bitterly dreaming of Clinton--and/or his wife--being frog-walked out of the White House by a special prosecutor in a year or two.

A confusing moment. In the campaign of 1996, Bob Dole became...

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