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Or seeing that Bill Clinton was the most intensely physical flesh presser since Lyndon Johnson (and he's in better shape than L.B.J. was). Clinton plunged in ecstatically--a nightmare for the Secret Service, whose taut, grim faces and darkly frisking eyes contrasted almost hilariously with the happy, dazzled faces of the faithful. Clinton's long, curiously angled fingers (like those of E.T.) reached yearningly, heliotropically, blindly into crowds (swat! swat! on the thigh), from which he emerged flushed and dazed and looking 10 years old. Assembling trivia, one noticed that Clinton, a big man, wears enormous suits that produce a kind of doofus-Armani effect, a huge unvented, shoulder-padded Frankenstein jacket and flopping trousers that gather at the ankles. Clinton's head, handsome from certain angles, took on a big-jawed Joe Palooka look if he turned slightly to the side; and then with knobby chin and brightening nose, he could seem a cross between W.C. Fields and Tip O'Neill--distinctly subcharismatic.
When there were no hands left to shake along the rope line, Clinton glad-handed the police and anyone else he could find, almost reeling, staggering backward, to find more people to grasp, like a little boy scraping the last of the ice cream out of a bowl, his spoon clattering on the china. The President even beamed at me and looked as if he wanted to embrace me, until he saw the notebook in my hand--whereupon his eyes jumped away.
Clinton, of course, will campaign no more. Not for himself anyway. He has his last elected office, probably. Long ago, with his political guru Dick Morris, Clinton had thought to erase the distinction between governing and campaigning. Each activity, they decided, was an indispensable function of the other. Clinton was a master at campaigning. It was the other part that sometimes gave him trouble. What now?
Americans struggled to decide whether to embrace the Good Clinton or repudiate the Bad Clinton. They were distinctive sides, his Jekyll and Hyde. Which was the real one? Both?
The best part of the good side could be intensely moving--if you got past the stage of feeling merely seduced. At moments (one evening in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, at a kind of torchlight rally outside the old Louisville Slugger factory) Clinton's fluent, fervent idealism seemed to open a door--a sentimental one, perhaps--upon a sweeter, better side of America, the side full of promise: the quality he means to suggest when he talks about the Hope of his Arkansas childhood. Whatever his defects, which are manifold, he seems to have no violence in him, no hatred, but rather, a good heart. And beyond that, an immensely sophisticated and cunning political gift that may add up to greatness.
The Bad Clinton, of course, is a devious, unprincipled, opportunistic, promise-anything, craven, lying, manipulative antiself capable of any treachery in the service of his own ambitions. (They said the same thing about Franklin Roosevelt, by the way.)
Bob Dole, after a long career of service, seemed the aging end of his World War II generation, trudging confusedly through the last mission. Clinton, who emerged from the traumatically divided Vietnam generation, embodied both the most idealistic and the most meretricious, greedy and disgraceful qualities of his contemporaries.