Remember, Mr. Clinton, ‘Fame Is Fleeting’

We are led to believe that we are now going to witness the most exciting finish to a U.S. presidential race in history. Political pundits, who less than a week ago were writing and saying Bill Clin ton had a lock, are now sagely saying it will be a close race and George Bush might pull out a victory. (When you don’t know much about what you’re talking about, your greatest fear is you might be wrong.) Foreign embassies have flashed word home that Bush may survive. (Our foreign friends hope the incumbent will survive so they won’t be put to the trouble of trying to gauge the whims of some hick from Arkansas.) And Bush, never one to let any scintilla of good news rest unused when it can be overblown, has spent the last few days confidently proclaiming victory.

A friend in the Bush Administration who has been calling me a lot lately--he’s looking for a job--happily called today, saying Bush was going to pull this out, so I could suspend my inquiries about his future employment.

Rationally, hope should be based on faith and, therefore, when St. Paul wrote his famous epistle, he spoke of faith, hope and charity. Had he been an American, hope would have preceded faith. Or, maybe, it’s just that we don’t need any faith in order to hope.

The cause of all this tumult was a poll announced on Wednesday, claiming that Bush had drawn within 2% of Bill Clinton. It turned out to be a tracking poll and, without boring you with technical aspects of polling, it probably shouldn’t even have been reported.

Polls are frames out of a motion picture and when you stop the film and try to analyze each frame, you lose the motion. That’s what a tracking poll does and, given the vast amounts pollsters charge for this, I have never seen much value in it. I mean, what you get is a picture of a man progressively raising his hand and it isn’t until the sixth or seventh day of tracking that you can guess whether he is going to hit someone, scratch his head or just wants to go to the bathroom. Such is our obsession with polls.

My guess--I haven’t taken any polls--is that Clinton has about a 10-point lead and could win more comfortably, since all this hoopla about the closeness of the race probably has frightened his supporters enough that they will be sure to vote. He will benefit as well from a shrinkage of Ross Perot’s vote.

Perot will retire from the race with sole possession of the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde trophy, an accolade that many have struggled for in U.S. political history. His control of this honor in the future seems every bit as secure as Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak.

And so, we will have President Clinton, elected in a landslide, a man of the people who will right the wrongs created by 12 years of Republican greed and mismanagement. A knight on a white horse for whom everything is possible. The king is dead, long live the king! Hope is a wonderful thing.

I hate to be realistic twice in one article, (it’s not American) but just as tracking polls are irrelevant, what will be called Clinton’s “mandate” is irrelevant as well. He should realize that he, like Bush, has won as the lesser of two evils; that he has no power, no romance with the American public, unless he can earn it in office. On that score, Clinton, like Bush four years ago, has overpromised, made conflicting statements about his priorities and left the people with little to go on as to his real intentions.

In South America, there is a joke that an Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and tries to act like an Englishman. A man who has earned the moniker “Slick Willie” has a similar identity crisis. He should remember that, no matter how many people voted for him, he must still create a clear picture of who he is or he will be in trouble. This is something Bush had difficulty with.

It is ironic that, in the year of the outsider, we are electing a President who has spent every year since his law-school graduation in 1974 either running for office or serving in office. I believe Eric Sevareid once observed that the difference between men and boys in politics was that men wanted to be elected to do something and boys wanted to be elected to be something. There was always question about Bush on this point, and one wonders about Clinton as well.

I would hope Clinton could benefit from Bush’s experience, but I doubt it. By Wednesday morning, he’ll be told that he is John F. Kennedy, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas Jefferson all rolled into one. It is not power that corrupts, it is ego.

In ancient Rome, victorious generals returning from battle were celebrated. There was dancing and elaborate feasts and, of course, a parade in which the general drove his chariot as young women threw flowers in his path.

Next to the general stood a slave, dressed in white, whose job it was to periodically whisper in the general’s ear, “Fame is fleeting.” I hereby whisper these words to you, President Clinton; if you don’t remember it, you’ll wind up no better off than Bush.