Clinton and Carter, A Tale of Hope and Lust : Transition: The baby-boom President and his constituents meet on a common ground: middle age.

Back in 1976, I was briefly involved in the uproar surrounding an interview that Robert Scheer (now national correspondent for the Los Angeles Times) and I conducted with Gov. Jimmy Carter for Playboy during that year’s presidential campaign. We had asked Carter a simple question about tolerance and it ended up as a parable about small-town frailties and lust in his heart.

Following the commotion, I was asked why I thought Carter had volunteered the remarks. I said I thought he’d stretched too far in trying to relate to a new constituency, to the two of us--a couple of ‘60s antiwar city slickers, representing a hip magazine whose younger readers, Carter thought, he needed to reach. Sure, I knew we’d gotten a scoop, but I argued that I’d been just as interested in a remark Carter had made before he mentioned his heart problem:

“I never knew anything except going to church,” Carter said in his soft drawl. “My wife and I grew up in innocent times.”

This is by way of introducing another encounter, 16 years later. A few weeks ago, with another journalist, Peter Ross Range, I journeyed to Little Rock to speak with another Southern governor, Bill Clinton, also a Democratic candidate on the verge of an election. This time the interview was for TV Guide, and was to be about the role television had played in the campaign--and might play in the new presidency.

When our interview was postponed because Clinton had lost his voice, Range and I went to nearby Hot Springs. While Clinton may have been born in Hope, he was raised from the age of 7 in Arkansas’ equivalent of Las Vegas, a rollicking resort town that tolerated gambling and bordellos until 1967. In the ‘20s, rival Chicago gangster bosses came down for the waters, put themselves up at splendid hotels and agreed not to rub each other out for the duration. I flashed on young Bill Clinton, growing up amid the honky-tonk, keeping peace with an abusive stepfather.

The next day, waiting for Clinton in the governor’s mansion, I reflected that the candidate, in addition to his sax-and-shades gig on “Arsenio,” had been interviewed by the guys at Rolling Stone, had bantered with radio jock Don Imus, had done Elvis for Charlie Rose and a stint on MTV. Range and I came from the urban north, but who was the city slicker here?

Clinton showed up late, smiled and plopped down to talk, at ease despite the campaign raging outside. We spoke at length about the extraordinary TV campaign and about TV in his, and our, lives. He went over the allotted time, making his press secretary crazy. As we spoke, I saw that his hair was the same color as ours--baby-boomer silver--and that his language and reference points were ours, too. I also saw that there was no possibility, none, that he would make the kind of headline-making slip that Carter had. Older now, we all knew the stakes.

So it was mildly surprising, considering the early events of his campaign, that he used this interview as the occasion to admonish Hollywood for too much gratuitous sex and violence, to say that he was appalled and mortified by some of the explicitness on TV. I caught myself wondering, in an odd deja vu, if he wasn’t stretching to relate to us--two middle-aged guys in coats and ties, fathers like him, representing a magazine he assumed to be squarer and more mainstream than the hip media he’d dealt with. Which certainly closed the circle for me.

But then I thought about the road our baby-boom generation had traveled, some of it in zigs and zags away from our starting point, some of it a round trip. I thought of the mix so many of us have had in our lives--Oxford and Arkansas, TV Guide and Playboy, peacemakers and peace activists, family men and carousers, good deeds and good times--and I knew one thing for sure: Bill Clinton did not grow up in innocent times. And that may make him a better President. I know he believes in a place called Hope. But I have a hunch he believes in Hot Springs, too.