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And no wonder. No President has mentioned the American People as incessantly as President Clinton. (We talk about him an awful lot too.) He presents himself by turns as the American People's benefactor, slave and towel-snapping locker-room pal. In his rhetoric the American People, for their part, serve alternately as a goad, an inspiration, a shaming device and, of course, an excuse. "I need to go back to work for the American People," he notoriously said on Jan. 26, and then refused to discuss the Lewinsky scandal for almost seven months. Too busy. The American People's work really fills out a day.
And last week the phrase was never far from the President's lips. It was like a bad case of hiccups. "... when the feelings of the American People become apparent...the American People made their voices heard...the support of the American People...stand up and fight for the interest of the American People..." That's just one 10-minute speech!
Even the American people are starting to invoke "the American People"--read the letters column in your local paper. And why not? It is a phrase perfectly suited to the time. It is irresistibly pompous, containing seven luxurious syllables as against only three for its pedestrian synonym "the public."
More important, it is invaluable as a way of voicing an opinion without voicing an opinion. "The American People won't support ground troops," Senator Trent Lott said about Kosovo last week. What he meant was that he won't support ground troops. But it sounds so much better when the American People say it.
The problem, of course, is that the American People don't exist, not in any unitary sense and certainly not as our pols and pundits pretend. This is a tiny problem, though. The phrase exists, and in the postmodern politics of the Clinton era, that's the important thing. Politicians used to be called opinion leaders, but that burden has been lifted from them.
Now they follow the voice of a phantom only they can hear, drowning out the receding whispers of conscience or principle, overwhelming the demands of reason and argument. And the American people don't seem to mind.