CLINTON IN THE RYE

By JEFF GREENFIELD

Ever since Bill Clinton strode onto the national stage, armchair shrinks have had a field day labeling him an adolescent, a man defined by all-night bull sessions, fast-food orgies, raging hormones and peripatetic curiosity.

Now, as the President's re-election strategy becomes clear, we are finally realizing just which adolescent Bill Clinton really wants to be: it turns out he is Holden Caulfield. Near the end of J.D. Salinger's classic novel of teenage angst, which Hillary Clinton bought a copy of during the Clintons' 1993 summer vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Caulfield explains what the "catcher in the rye" means:

"I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye, and all," he says. "Thousands of little kids, and nobody's around--nobody big, I mean--except me. And I'm standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff--I mean, if they're running and they don't look where they're going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them. That's all I'd do all day. I'd just be the catcher in the rye and all."

Now consider what Mr. Clinton has most visibly been doing all year: meeting with parents to deplore gratuitous sex and violence on television; pressuring Big Media into accepting a ratings system and a V-chip technology to let parents control what their kids can see on the tube; embracing school uniforms and curfews; plunging into tobacco row with a machete to stop cigarette companies from luring the young with Joe Camel and the Marlboro Man.

What all these moves have in common--and there will be a parade of such initiatives from now until November--is that they are designed to cast the President in effect as the energetic young man standing in the rye, protecting our children from running over the cliff. It is a strategy designed to recast the image of government: instead of the supercilious bureaucrat with mountains of paper and regulations, government now becomes the safety-patrol volunteer, the lifeguard, the friendly cop on the beat buying a lost child an ice cream cone before calling his worried parents.

Ann Lewis, the Clinton-Gore campaign official who has perfect pitch on presidential spin, puts it this way: "Parents think it is a good idea that government helps them do this important work. To be on the side of parents, especially in households where everybody is squeezed for time and money, this is the right place to be."

This is exactly why Mr. Clinton finds himself in the right place on the smoking issue. In years past taking on tobacco might have been seen as a classic case of Big Government regulators trying to get their mitts on a legal product. For parents today, however, cigarettes are simply another powerful danger tempting their kids--like drugs, gangs, dirty rap lyrics and steamy soaps on afternoon TV. With Mom and Pop working longer hours--assuming Mom and Pop live under the same roof--it's not hard to see why they might welcome the idea of the government stepping in to help. Conservatives have for years effectively derided liberals as champions of the "nanny state," but when it comes to unsupervised children, government-as-nanny doesn't sound all that bad.

Ironically, it was Bob Dole who suggested last April that voters ask themselves which candidate they would most trust to care for their children. It was his attempt to cast himself as the responsible adult in the race. He never dreamed that the Clinton campaign had already decided to offer up a young, energetic President standing between their children and the abyss beyond the rye.