Is Bill Clinton For Real?

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Then there are the rumors about womanizing that have dogged Clinton for years and resurfaced in sensationalist tabloids last week. Clinton called the stories "lies" but, asked point-blank by a New Hampshire television interviewer last week, "Have you ever committed adultery?" he replied, "If I had, I wouldn't tell you." He admits that his 16-year marriage has gone through some troubled times but says it is now solid. Friends, and even some foes, note that no one has ever been able to pin down anything.

Perhaps the most distressing aspect of the Clinton boom is a suspicion that it is largely an artificial creation by the press. Journalistic pundits are constitutionally incapable of confessing that they have no idea what will happen in a presidential race; they are irresistibly driven to impose some sort of structure on the most shapeless contest. Last year many were looking for someone to cast as the principal rival to presumed front-runner Mario Cuomo. They came up with Clinton partly because he seemed the perfect foil to a Northern Big Government liberal: a Southerner who took many moderate stands -- on education and welfare reform, for example -- and talked constantly about the "responsibility" of people who receive government benefits to do something in return.

Then, too, many journalists had repeated until it became conventional wisdom the idea that the Democrats have lost five of the past six presidential elections largely because they had become identified as a party of the poor, blacks, labor unionists, radical feminists and other special interests. Supposedly they could win again only if they chose a candidate moderate enough to win back middle-class voters, especially Southern whites. That idea was promoted most assiduously by the Democratic Leadership Council, a group headed in 1990-91 by none other than Bill Clinton. When Cuomo finally decided just before Christmas not to run, pundits of this school were pretty much stuck with hailing Clinton as the new front runner by default. Some who had complained endlessly about the interminable length of past campaigns are even beginning to grumble that this one may be over almost before it begins.

But Clinton can not be dismissed as a mere creation of journalistic fashion. Many Democrats did not need the media to tell them that their standard-bearer should be someone who cannot be attacked as a McGovernite liberal. Reporters on the early campaign trail have been struck by the number of party activists who volunteer that this time around they are looking for "electability" far more than liberal purity in a nominee. Clinton got himself cast in that role largely because he could present solid credentials: as a canny politician who has run in 18 elections (counting primaries and runoffs) in the past 17 years and lost only twice; as a Governor with a genuine, though far from unassailable, record of accomplishment; and as a candidate who says things the nation is not accustomed to hearing from Democrats -- support of the death penalty, for instance.