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Every President ages in office -- and soon baby boomers will glimpse their own mortality in the new care lines on Clinton's face, in the slow droop of his jowls and in his Sisyphean struggles against the thickening of middle life. "I look at Clinton in his dumpy running shorts," sniffs marketing consultant Judith Langer. "He symbolizes the baby-boom generation: they think health, but they don't always resist that chocolate-chip cookie." In the waning days of the campaign, Clinton's reading glasses (for baby boomers the scariest word in the English language is suddenly bifocals) began to make a frequent appearance on the nightly news. As for the Vice President-elect, Al Gore, just 19 months Clinton's junior, the passage of the years will probably be reckoned by the growth of the small bald spot in his still dark brown hair. For what is Gore profited, if he shall gain the second highest office in the land and yet be tempted by Rogaine?
At a moment when the American libido seems to oscillate between Puritanism and rampant exhibitionism, how significant is it that for the first time in more than 30 years the nation has elected a President with sex appeal? The last six Presidents -- Bush, Reagan, Jimmy Carter, Gerald Ford, Richard Nixon and Lyndon Johnson -- combined do not conjure up enough erotic energy to fill a single room at the No-Tell Motel. Forget Gennifer Flowers -- this is not the moment to descend into the muck of her sleazy allegations. Rather, the swooning and the cooing on the rope lines during the last breathless days of the Clinton campaign were unavoidably reminiscent of Kennedy. In Louisville, Kentucky, the scene seemed out of Beatlemania. Women screamed when Clinton reached for their hands as loudspeakers blared out the Fab Four singing, "When I saw her standing there." Cheryl Russell, editor of The Boomer Report, a monthly newsletter on consumer trends, captures a new dimension in the national psyche when she confides, "Every woman I know is having sex dreams about Bill Clinton. We're finally getting a President our own age who we can imagine having sex with. I don't recall anyone having sex dreams about Michael Dukakis."
If Reagan was shaped by Hollywood and Bush influenced by the prep-school verities of his youth, then for Clinton the seminal moments probably came at Oxford and Yale. He was there during the early, heady days of one of the most influential social movements of his lifetime -- the birth of modern feminism. Hillary is part of that legacy; few men of an older political generation would feel comfortable with wives who earned far more than they did. Sometimes lost < amid the Hillary hype is a larger truth: Clinton, like many baby boomers, feels comfortable around intelligent women. Politics has always been a locker- room sport, but in the Clinton campaign the role of women transcended tokenism and approached equal power.
For all their activism, the Clintons are apt to play a surprisingly modest role as national tastemakers. They are far more likely to reflect baby-boomer trends than to shape them. Sure, there are fearless forecasts from marketing gurus. "Elvis memorabilia is going to go up to a whole new level," predicts Brad Edmondson, the editor in chief of American Demographics. "Remember Ronald Reagan and jelly beans. Jimmy Carter and peanuts." He may be right; too bad Graceland (privately owned) is not traded on the stock exchange.