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The book on Clinton says he is a chameleon. It is true. But the larger truth may be that Clinton is the President of what has become a chameleon nation.
After all, in 1994 the American electoral map lighted up all Gingrich and Republican and Limbaugh, the color, supposedly, of an angry white man's face. Two years later, the political complexion has a different glow entirely. The emotional and political atmosphere changes overnight; convictions tend to be transient in a post-ideological age, devolving into mind-sets, or mere waves of sympathy.
Ulysses Grant once explained his military success by writing, "The fact is I think I am a verb, instead of a personal pronoun." Bob Dole was all pronoun, and because the Republicans achieved a transient resonance with the country's mood in 1994, Dole and other conservatives statically thought that was that: a "revolution" accomplished. Clinton is all verb. Dole had no instinct for the nation's chameleon qualities. Clinton is the verbalizing chameleon of all time.
What is the presidential model Clinton thinks of? Ronald Reagan, whose snappy salute and jaunty "Morning in America" manner Clinton imitated in the campaign? F.D.R. as governmental All-Daddy? Warren Harding in his small-town corruptibility? The John Kennedy that Clinton met in the Rose Garden in the summer of 1963? Clinton arouses in some Americans the kind of visceral, irrational hatred that Richard Nixon did--an interesting phenomenon that suggests some powerful, if negative, identification. Some politicians, for reasons almost mysterious, tap into deep subterranean streams of popular passion. Demagogues certainly do. Huey Long did.
Maybe Clinton, as a Southern populist of great political gifts, should be located in that slightly dangerous Southern tradition. Maybe it is not J.F.K. who is Clinton's model and political ancestor, but Lyndon Johnson.
It is said that in order to understand a man, you should examine the world as it existed when he was 19 or 20 years old--at the moment he became alert and autonomous as a man. That would be 1965 or 1966 for Clinton, still in the idealistic beginning of Lyndon Johnson's presidency, before Vietnam overwhelmed and destroyed it. It would be an irony if Clinton were L.B.J.'s heir, given Clinton's antiwar history. But maybe in his improvisational populist paternalism (chastened by deficits, of course) and sympathy for the unfortunate, Clinton would like to be Lyndon Johnson without tears--Johnson without Vietnam.
Second marriage, according to Johnson (Samuel, not Lyndon), is the triumph of hope over experience. A second term--sticking with the same man, renewing the vows--is a victory for what seems to be the adequate and the familiar. Despite the election results, the relationship between Bill Clinton and America remains wary. It has almost a film noir quality, as if the nation feared that it has married a disquieting stranger capable of horrible things. Or perhaps they will live happily ever after. The script is still being worked on.