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 almost an irrelevance. The real struggle was between the two versions, almost Manichaean, of Bill Clinton: the President bound for Rushmore, or the incipient felon. Both scenarios are speculations about the future, as all elections are. For the present, the American voter found a way between the two extremes (best hope, worst fear) by acquiescing to what seemed, on balance, the least unsatisfactory of the candidates.
It is true that Americans were relatively bored by the campaign, an interminable nonstarter that sounded most of the time like an argument going on in some other part of the house. In the midst of relative prosperity and peace and the incumbent reign of Bill the Bridgebuilder, Americans heard muffled partisan voices that did not seem entirely focused or even important (Clinton having artfully stolen many of the Republican issues). A lot of Americans, without the prospect of the noose to concentrate the mind, passed through the political months in a doze. They ignored the conventions and the presidential debates in record numbers, and given the low nutritional content of those events, may have been right to do so.
A voter who had press credentials and a ticket on Air Force One--riding as the magazine pool reporter in the great plane's Newt Gingrich Memorial Steerage Compartment, back behind the Secret Service, where they keep the crates of live chickens, the goats and the journalists--might have hoped to see the flesh and blood of democracy up close, but spent his time instead fantasizing a kind of Super Bowl that would pit the Soccer Moms against the Deadbeat Dads.
Backstage on the campaign, there were little fascinations: such as learning that there was a Secret Service agent who placed his hands firmly on the presidential hips and steered the Chief Executive from behind as the President went hand shaking down a rope line, the agent occasionally swatting the President on the right thigh as a jockey would a racehorse. ("It's code," another agent said cryptically when I asked.)