The Real American Dilemma

By Richard Stengel

Warren Beatty once said every American boy grows up knowing that he can decide he wants to be President or that he wants to fool around--though that was not the more graphic term he used. I do not think Mr. Beatty--who knows something about both sex and politics--meant this only literally. The point is that from the time you're in junior high you understand there is a choice: you can live your life as though you know you will someday have to testify about yourself at a Senate confirmation hearing, or you can say, The hell with it. I'm going to have a good time, and I don't care who knows. Of course, a problem can arise when a young man decides he wants to be President and fool around, but we'll get to that later.

What I think Mr. Beatty is really talking about is the old American duality of hipness vs. squareness. The words have changed over time--coolness vs. geekiness, fly vs. fool--but the concept is as venerable as the separation between church and state. Growing up, every American boy has to figure out whether he wants to be like Huck Finn or Tom Sawyer, Mickey Mantle or Roger Maris, Dennis Rodman or Michael Jordan, John Lennon or Paul McCartney.

As a country, we've always romanticized coolness. The founders were the original rebels with a cause, and the leather jacket of hipness was passed down from Natty Bumppo to James Dean to Leonardo DiCaprio. Bill Clinton lived this duality. He was not exactly a heartbreaker at Hot Springs High. He was a burly 6-ft. 2-in. kid who played not on the football team but in the band at half time. Even though he ran for virtually every class office (not generally a sign of hipness), he emulated Elvis Presley, the king of bad-boy coolness, and drove around in a pickup truck with AstroTurf in the back to cushion his real or imagined assignations.

Like any good baby boomer, Bill Clinton wanted to have it both ways. He tried to be hip and square at the same time, and in a way he succeeded. At Oxford he protested against the Vietnam War (cool) and wrote a letter thanking a ROTC commander for helping him to avoid the draft and "maintain my political viability" (square). He's a President who wears blue jeans and cowboy boots (and looks good in them), revels in intricate discussions of domestic policy and may have an extracurricular love life.

Perhaps Bill Clinton is a new paradigm: the Chief Executive as hipster. (His idol, John Kennedy, was probably the first, but no one knew at the time how swinging Kennedy's private life actually was.) It will be interesting to see what happens in the presidential race of 2000. Will candidates advertise that they are as pure as the driven snow, or will they say, I've had some wild times, haven't you? Already, Governor Roy Romer of Colorado and Mike Bowers, a leading contender in the Republican primary for the Georgia governorship, have acknowledged affairs with longtime aides. The voters in both states don't seem to care much.

But such a shift may be less of a new paradigm than the old politics of personality. I suspect that if Newt Gingrich were in Bill Clinton's cowboy boots, the American public would be saying, Pack up your bags. Even today, Gary Hart, who was once Warren Beatty's presidential candidate, would probably not get the benefit of the doubt that Bill Clinton is receiving. There was something holier-than-thou about Hart that folks just didn't cotton to. Bill Clinton comes across as a struggling sinner and never implies that he's better than the people who voted for him. At his press conference last week Clinton noted that critics could affect his reputation but not his character. Pretty cool.

In a curious way we're more likely to forgive cool guys than squares. At least they never promised to toe the line. That's why we're so harsh with ministers who fall from grace, like Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart. Mark Twain once said that a man, if he's any good, never gets over being a boy. We like men in whom we can see the vestiges of the boy. You can still make out the flirtatious teenage horn player in Bill Clinton. Newt Gingrich--who last week deemed Clinton an "illegal man"--despite his love of dinosaurs, probably seemed like a mini-adult even when he was in short pants.

Coolness and squareness both have their excesses. The problem with some cool guys is that they hold on to their rebelliousness long after it's romantic. The problem with some squares is that they lose the boy inside them altogether. But perhaps we're moving past the old dichotomies. Soon they'll become meaningless distinctions like mind and body. In Silicon Valley nerdiness is cool. Using drugs, once a sign of coolness, is considered square. Isn't it better, after all, to be a mixture, a cool square, a square cool guy?

In his new movie, Bulworth, Warren Beatty implies that the obsession with presidential sex is just a diversion from the much more significant issues of money, race and class. Most people seem to agree. Beatty once admitted, sure, he'd have liked to have been President, but then he would have missed out on a lot of fun. Now, he might be figuring, he wouldn't have had to.