THE GLAD-HANDER

By LANCE MORROW

If genius is the ability to hold in the mind two mutually contradictory ideas without going crazy, then Americans have had a brilliant year. The U.S. has just elected a man who it thinks either 1) may turn out to be one of the great Presidents or 2) may find himself spending a lot of his second term talking to his lawyers. Knowing that they had lost, conservatives began bitterly dreaming of Clinton--and/or his wife--being frog-walked out of the White House by a special prosecutor in a year or two.

A confusing moment. In the campaign of 1996, Bob Dole became almost an irrelevance. The real struggle was between the two versions, almost Manichaean, of Bill Clinton: the President bound for Rushmore, or the incipient felon. Both scenarios are speculations about the future, as all elections are. For the present, the American voter found a way between the two extremes (best hope, worst fear) by acquiescing to what seemed, on balance, the least unsatisfactory of the candidates.

It is true that Americans were relatively bored by the campaign, an interminable nonstarter that sounded most of the time like an argument going on in some other part of the house. In the midst of relative prosperity and peace and the incumbent reign of Bill the Bridgebuilder, Americans heard muffled partisan voices that did not seem entirely focused or even important (Clinton having artfully stolen many of the Republican issues). A lot of Americans, without the prospect of the noose to concentrate the mind, passed through the political months in a doze. They ignored the conventions and the presidential debates in record numbers, and given the low nutritional content of those events, may have been right to do so.

A voter who had press credentials and a ticket on Air Force One--riding as the magazine pool reporter in the great plane's Newt Gingrich Memorial Steerage Compartment, back behind the Secret Service, where they keep the crates of live chickens, the goats and the journalists--might have hoped to see the flesh and blood of democracy up close, but spent his time instead fantasizing a kind of Super Bowl that would pit the Soccer Moms against the Deadbeat Dads.

Backstage on the campaign, there were little fascinations: such as learning that there was a Secret Service agent who placed his hands firmly on the presidential hips and steered the Chief Executive from behind as the President went hand shaking down a rope line, the agent occasionally swatting the President on the right thigh as a jockey would a racehorse. ("It's code," another agent said cryptically when I asked.)

Or seeing that Bill Clinton was the most intensely physical flesh presser since Lyndon Johnson (and he's in better shape than L.B.J. was). Clinton plunged in ecstatically--a nightmare for the Secret Service, whose taut, grim faces and darkly frisking eyes contrasted almost hilariously with the happy, dazzled faces of the faithful. Clinton's long, curiously angled fingers (like those of E.T.) reached yearningly, heliotropically, blindly into crowds (swat! swat! on the thigh), from which he emerged flushed and dazed and looking 10 years old. Assembling trivia, one noticed that Clinton, a big man, wears enormous suits that produce a kind of doofus-Armani effect, a huge unvented, shoulder-padded Frankenstein jacket and flopping trousers that gather at the ankles. Clinton's head, handsome from certain angles, took on a big-jawed Joe Palooka look if he turned slightly to the side; and then with knobby chin and brightening nose, he could seem a cross between W.C. Fields and Tip O'Neill--distinctly subcharismatic.

When there were no hands left to shake along the rope line, Clinton glad-handed the police and anyone else he could find, almost reeling, staggering backward, to find more people to grasp, like a little boy scraping the last of the ice cream out of a bowl, his spoon clattering on the china. The President even beamed at me and looked as if he wanted to embrace me, until he saw the notebook in my hand--whereupon his eyes jumped away.

Clinton, of course, will campaign no more. Not for himself anyway. He has his last elected office, probably. Long ago, with his political guru Dick Morris, Clinton had thought to erase the distinction between governing and campaigning. Each activity, they decided, was an indispensable function of the other. Clinton was a master at campaigning. It was the other part that sometimes gave him trouble. What now?

Americans struggled to decide whether to embrace the Good Clinton or repudiate the Bad Clinton. They were distinctive sides, his Jekyll and Hyde. Which was the real one? Both?

The best part of the good side could be intensely moving--if you got past the stage of feeling merely seduced. At moments (one evening in Louisville, Kentucky, for example, at a kind of torchlight rally outside the old Louisville Slugger factory) Clinton's fluent, fervent idealism seemed to open a door--a sentimental one, perhaps--upon a sweeter, better side of America, the side full of promise: the quality he means to suggest when he talks about the Hope of his Arkansas childhood. Whatever his defects, which are manifold, he seems to have no violence in him, no hatred, but rather, a good heart. And beyond that, an immensely sophisticated and cunning political gift that may add up to greatness.

The Bad Clinton, of course, is a devious, unprincipled, opportunistic, promise-anything, craven, lying, manipulative antiself capable of any treachery in the service of his own ambitions. (They said the same thing about Franklin Roosevelt, by the way.)

Bob Dole, after a long career of service, seemed the aging end of his World War II generation, trudging confusedly through the last mission. Clinton, who emerged from the traumatically divided Vietnam generation, embodied both the most idealistic and the most meretricious, greedy and disgraceful qualities of his contemporaries.

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.