At Play on Clinton's Field

摘要

A Sitting president must hate watching the candidates who are trying to take his job as they signal all the ways in which they are better men than he. John Kennedy promised vigor, after eight years of footage of Ike on the golf course; Jimmy Carter promised he would never lie to us; George Bush promised a kinder, gentler nation, which prompted Nancy Reagan to mutter, "Kinder and gender than who?" Bill Clinton promised to feel our pain, unlike the Preppie President who had never appeared to suffer so much as a toothache. And so the candidates in both parties take the field in the year 2000 carrying banners that proclaim, in a variety of codes and scripts, that THEY ARE NOT BILL CLINTON, defining themselves by who they are not before they can tell us who they are.