The Surprising Thing About Bill

We want transcendence in a politician, something juicy--and Clinton delivers

By Garrison Keillor

(TIME, November 21) -- One guy wore a "15%" pin on his lapel, like a store manager at the January white sale, and the other guy stood up with his face shining and talked in tuneful cadences about education and giving people an opportunity, and that guy won, so let it be a lesson for the next time. People don't vote for you on the basis of a discount.

The appeal of President Clinton was underestimated after the 1994 election, in the steady beat of Republican drums from their encampment on the Whitewater River, but there is, after all the trash is said, something basically attractive and likable about the man and the way he reaches out to people, and when you compare him to his detractors, he is charisma itself. You look at him at the lectern, and you look at the sweaty young Republicans in the back of the room with the ball-bearing eyes and the WHO KILLED VINCE FOSTER? banners, and it's not a hard choice whom you'd rather go have lunch with.

Sometimes politics comes down to a simple question of who's more likable. Democrats tried to portray Ronald Reagan as Dr. Strangelove, but he was a charming man who twinkled at people, and there's your explanation for the Conservative Revolution. It wasn't about ideas.

A politician has to be able to stand up and tell his story. You can't elect him by lining up big blocs of voters behind him--Women, The Workers, The Sensitive & Moody. He has to speak in his own voice, talk about his mother, make sense as himself. He can't speak the speech that the speech committee wrote for him. Classic American stories are about individuals transcending the group, and we look for transcendence in a politician, something surprising and juicy.

Mr. Clinton is full of surprises. He is a President who reads books. He is a sweet talker, a man who can stand up without a text and tell you what he is thinking. He has the dignity of someone who has always known who he is. His is a genuine heroic American story, and when people see the boy in the picture reaching for President Kennedy's hand, they know whose boy that is. He has risen and fallen and risen again, and his latest comeback may be his most heroic of all.

And yet here is a man who, the minute he puts toast in the toaster, people start complaining about its being too dark. If he offers compromise, he is a waffler, and if he doesn't, he is arrogant. If he deceives the press, he is a liar, and if he doesn't, he is a bumbler. He is constantly disenchanting his admirers, and yet he has so many die-hard enemies that if you wrote a book saying he was programmed by the kgb in 1969 to be the father of Madonna's child and run the Cali cartel using Elvis (who is in Antigua) as intermediary, you would have yourself a best seller.

But the American people have hope for this man. They want to see him do some good and avoid doing great harm and accomplish things through negotiation and compromise and be able to pick up a phone and call his opponents and be gracious to them.

Republicans, I must say, are in danger of becoming the party of Uncle Harrys, the uncle with the big eyebrows who came over for a big Sunday dinner and grumped about the damned liberals. Even with his mouth full of pot roast and mashed potatoes, he was bitter about liberals because they were running the country into the dirt. The Republicans, once the party of hardheaded realists and independent thinkers, have become the party of people with a grudge, like the Christian Coalition, a powerful political machine that no more represents Christians than the Elks Club represents large animals with antlers.

American voters tend not to vote for angry people, just as they don't vote for naked ones. They are not anxious to have a revolution, thank you very much. The Republican Congressmen who talked revolution were ignored for years, as Congressmen generally are. (You sit in a committee hearing room, the ranking minority member of the Subcommittee on Meat Loaf, and you fulminate against the government for hours, to an audience of lobbyists from the the Ground Round Institute, the Onion Chopping Board, the American Bread Crumb Federation, and nobody ever hears about it.) But in the blaze of glory that attended the Republicans' rise to power in 1994, their speeches were widely noted. Their tirades against regulatory agencies suggested a frontier-boomtown mentality: make your pile any way you can, enjoy your brains out, to hell with everybody else. They played patriotism like a $29 accordion. They were loudly contemptuous of the President of the United States. They looked for all the world like the long-aggrieved minority out for vindication. This did not go over well on television. When the Republicans were seen as the Party That Shut Down the Government Because Newt Gingrich Was Miffed Because He Had to Sit in the Back of Air Force One, that was the end of Senator Dole's chances.

The American faith holds that the important distinctions are between individuals, not between groups. Class does not tell the story; neither does political affiliation. Between two siblings a vast, unbridgeable gulf might exist, whereas between male and female, white and black, straight and gay, Eastern and Western, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, there are no absolute differences. You and I, whoever we are, are together on the raft drifting down the Mississippi, the sky full of stars, islands drifting by, snatches of music, the mournful calls of distant steamboats, and even though I know I should, I will not turn you in to the authorities. Peace.

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