THE INAUGURAL BILL

By Roger Rosenblatt

Odd that the republic chooses to renew itself in the dead of winter. From George Washington's first Inaugural in late April 1789 the ceremony was pushed back to early March, and from F.D.R. to the present it has been locked in this hard, white burial vault of a month. The Dakotas, frozen thick for weeks, sent an ice wind east for the occasion, but it thawed a bit by Monday. The government bundled up before the fluted columns like an ice sculpture at a wedding--an impressive, preposterous construction molded to take one's mind off the reality that the in-laws loathe one another and that the formal wedding-cake couple will soon be sweating in the sheets.

All official ceremonies are falsities, of course, freeze-frame displays of institutional continuity. (A nickel, please, for every TV commentator who used the phrase "orderly passage of power.") But this Inauguration Day seemed more of a pretense than usual--the disjuncture between what was going on and what was really going on starker, like one of those neo-Freudian sophomoric plays of the 1950s in which characters speak their lines, then say what they are thinking under the lines.

And the reason was Clinton. Try as one may, it is very hard to like this President very much.

He is an astonishingly quick study. He is sweet and graceful with small audiences. He works like a horse. He can weep on demand. He has spasms of inspiration. He blows up at the right people at the right times. He is capable of the grand and tasteful gesture. He is the student-government president who was elected overwhelmingly because no one else in school could do the job as well, or no one else wanted it--thus the opinion polls approving of his "performance." Yet he gets under people's skin as perhaps no other President ever has.

For some reason he evokes less warmth than much stiffer predecessors like Carter and Bush and more publicly offensive men like Johnson and even Nixon. There are still plenty of people around who would fall on their sword for Nixon. Who besides James Carville would do that for Bill?

Certain political journalists may go mad if he is not deposed in the next couple of years. In the past few weeks alone, in a sort of limp-up to the Inauguration, observers such as Jacob Weisberg, Garry Wills and Maureen Dowd have scowled at his scandals, his personal treacheries and alleged philandering. What Clinton does to Joe Klein and Bill Safire shouldn't happen to a dog. None of these first-class intelligences are normally subject to fits of rage or blue funks, but when it comes to the man from Hope, whoa Nellie.

The purpose of Inauguration Day is to cover over that sort of animus, and there is no better city in which to do that than Washington. Packed like a bright graveyard with slabs of marble and men on horseback, Washington is a ceremony waiting to happen. It is also the ideal urban setting for the great stone wall. One reason the movie of All the President's Men was so scary was that it captured the crumminess behind the wall, not unlike the Watergate burglary itself. Think of that splendid moment when a TV screen showed Nixon being sworn in for his, hmm, second term while the Woodstein typewriter clacked at his door.

With Clinton the feeling is not that the White House is about to be brought down on his head, though that may happen, thanks to his own "gates" and Ms. Jones. And it no longer has to do with antagonism toward Hillary. The invisible bumper sticker of the second campaign read: RE-ELECT ONE, GET ONLY ONE. When Ike was inaugurated in 1953, Robert Lowell brooded that it was a sign that America had "the mausoleum in her heart." There is nothing that gloomy in the way people feel about Clinton; it seems subtler than that--a low-fever resentment that one cannot find for him the necessary melding of respect and affection.

Respect, in fact, seems to be offered as a substitute for affection. In 1790, Edmund Burke criticized the ardent rationalism of the philosophes during the French Revolution for not valuing "public affections." With Clinton everything feels like buying and selling; the people give up power and extract services; the President receives power and provides services. Even in the one situation where he seems most himself--singing and praying in black churches--he comes off as an out-of-things white boy who has had to find a likable identity in someone else.

In a way, the Inauguration and the President were made for each other. Both had a fine sense of appearances, and both stirred up suspicions of unappealing realities. And both were natural beginners, embodiments of the American musical theatrical dictum that everything old is new again.

Reflecting the insistent innocence of the day, his dreadful speech climbed the familiar ladder of lettuses: Let us "set a new course." Let us "have a new spirit of community." Let us build "a new land of promises," and so on. But few were paying attention. Chief Justice Rehnquist wished him "Good luck" the way one does a hitchhiker after a lift, then drives away fast.