Nobody does it like Bubba

By David Nyhan, Globe Columnist, 8/16/2000

LOS ANGELES -- When I went to buy the papers at my hotel Friday morning, the big fellow dressed in black sat alone on an overstuffed leather sofa in the marbled-and-glassed lobby of one of Beverly Hill's poshest spots.

His hands and arms shook constantly, the handsome face was puffed out so the fineness of the features was bloated into caricature. He sat wordless as a tourist family posed their kids on his armrest, and I immediately recognized the Parkinson's tremor and the Parkinsonian mask. It was Muhammad Ali. He's been beaten and battered and laid low by a disease no one ever licked. But he is still The Champ.

Monday night I saw another battered champ in action. Bill Clinton's Victory Lap began late and ran long, but the Silver Fox tricked the networks into putting Hillary's speech on prime time, and then he hijacked an extra half-an-hour of East Coast prime for his own.

''He did it again,'' was the reaction of many Democrats and admiring politicians to another vintage Clinton oration. The crowd loved it. The TV people stayed with it all the way, despite the visual allure of the riot police firing gas and rubber plugs at the rowdy protesters assembled outside at the rock altar of ''Rage Against the Machine.'' When TV bean-counters ignore the eye-candy of LA cops sweeping up the rabble, you know they've made a judgment about what their audience wants to watch.

They wanted more of Bill. From the moment he began striding down a barren underground hallway, marching toward his legacy with a handheld TV camera tracing his prizefighter's arrival at ringside, Clinton had his audience nailed. It was Rocky, it was Elvis not leaving the building but coming back for a bravura performance, it was drama, it was show-time. It was Clinton.

Just another star turn from the best professional politician since FDR. Not since FDR's dozen has a Democrat served out eight full years. The president who waltzed his way through 40 minutes of triumph came into his valedictory with a 61 percent job approval rating - seven points higher than Ronald Reagan's when the Gipper purred his artful convention farewell in '88.

You look at the text, and, like every Clinton speech, it is not great literature. Delivery is what makes Clinton unique. He delivers an emotional wallop so consistently that his enemies gnash their teeth at how he gets away with it. Clinton unrolled a lip-chewing, voice-breaking recap of the hard luck stories he heard in '92, then an expiation of his economic successes in a handful of phrases that seemed far more coherent and persuasive than whatever Gore has stumbled through along the trail. Has there ever been a president with such a lusty appetite for the job?

We got used to presidents rusting out. Gerry Ford and Jimmy Carter looked shopworn in defeat, Ronald Reagan lost to the mists of Alzheimer's, and Clinton scuffed and scorned and impeached and then, Houdini-like, out of his shackles, out of the shark-tank, soft-shoeing back on stage, rasping out thanks ''from the bottom of my heart, for the honor and blessing of a lifetime.''

He is a man of vast appetites, not all of them salubrious, but clearly his appetite for the job has not diminished. What's he do after Jan. 20 next?

''He told me at breakfast one day he'll become a golf pro and go on the Senior Tour and make some money,'' shrugs Boston Mayor Tom Menino. With a seasoned pol's knack for handicapping, Menino said Al Gore will be OK; he's no Clinton, said the mayor, but then nobody is. ''Gore will be OK when he gets off this glide path he's on and realizes he's in a fight. We're all better when we face up to it, that we really want the job.''

So nobody does it like Bubba. Millions wish he could come back for four more years; millions wish him consigned to toast in purgatory, or lower. He redefined his party; he redefined himself a dozen times while we watched and tried to follow what he was doing. He is the Muhammad Ali of our age, a politician who retires not undefeated, but yet never truly beaten.

He won't quit, he won't stop, he confounds his enemies and his critics in the Fourth Estate. He is bigger than the job. He'll remain bigger than either of the pair who want to succeed him. To the end, he teased his audience. His text read, ''Remember, whenever you think about me, keep putting people first.''

More than half of the people I polled thought he pronounced it ''Whatever you think of me ...,'' which conjures up all sorts of Freudian slippage and Monica-esque reverberations. ''You heard what you wanted to hear,'' said one veteran speechwriter. And maybe that's Clinton's secret: You hear what you want to hear.

David Nyhan is a Globe columnist.