COLUMN RIGHT/ JAMES P. PINKERTON : Great Wedding Doesn’t Make Good Marriage : The party’s over; time for Clinton to work on vows, commitment, vision.

Bill Clinton had a great inaugural. What does that mean for his presidency? Nothing. As Lincoln might have said, you can’t schmooze all the people all the time. Ask Jimmy Carter. Or George Bush.

Wednesday, the President reiterated many of his campaign themes: for change, opportunity and service; against drift and division. Such optimistic, inclusionary rhetoric, delivered with evident sincerity, is Clinton at his best. But the vague language, muffling the clatter of broken campaign promises, is Clinton at his worst. Inclusion is no substitute for vision.

Tolstoy wrote that all happy families are alike. Clinton’s inaugural celebration of the American family was happier than most: The new President knows how to make people feel good. With seemingly every Hollywood star except Arnold Schwarzenegger in Washington, Clinton still made room for the “faces of hope”--AIDS victims, Vietnam veterans, homeless activists.

“Too often, each of us fails to feel one another’s pain or see one another’s promise,” Clinton said Sunday. The vocabulary of the human potential movement and the lyrics of Simon & Garfunkel--”And too seldom do we move to build bridges over troubled waters”--are proof that the torch really has been passed to a new generation.

Clinton’s inaugural reunited politics and popular culture, healing an unhealthy divide that had grown wider in the last decade. The appearance of rapper LL Cool J on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial sends a signal that the music of the mean streets can join the mainstream. When the MTV generation fights for invitations to the White House, that’s a sign that American democracy has indeed been renewed for another four years.

Clinton’s goal is to create a New Age civic virtue, based on the baby-boomer faith in embrace, esteem and empowerment. But Clinton has a more immediate problem: He has no plan. His campaign message was powerful: I am not Bush; I am “a different kind of Democrat.” Now, though, Bush is in Houston; it’s Clinton’s deficit and Clinton’s everything else. The bright lights shining on the bully pulpit have bleached the bold colors of Clinton’s “New Covenant” agenda. So airy is Clinton’s attachment to his promises of deficit reduction, welfare reform and the line-item veto that he virtually abandoned them before he was sworn in. And yesterday’s call for “sacrifice” was a coded dismissal of his pledge of a middle-class tax cut.

Aware that he won with just 43% of the vote, Clinton is stretching his inauguration over an entire week, trying to include everyone. Campaigning is fun, but it’s no substitute for governing. While he can hug people, he can’t hug their problems.

Clinton’s address was full of Kennedy cadences and pseudo-Sorenson phraseology. J.F.K., however, had a strategy for getting America moving again. Clinton’s ideology is empathy. Right now he’s confusing adrenalin with accomplishment, but he’ll eventually discover that you can’t go home again to Camelot.

Meanwhile, it’s business as usual in Washington, with corporate dollars financing the parties, the limos and even some members of the new Administration. Many Democrats are already forgetting that they were elected to change Beltway culture, not reinforce it. The new White House chief of staff, Mack McLarty, does not burn with the desire to, as his boss said, “make change our friend.” In denying that the presidential transition was slow, McLarty admitted something much more damning. Quoted in the Wall Street Journal, he outlined aspirations that make Calvin Coolidge look Promethean: “We expect to be at our desk, ready to receive phone calls and return phone calls.” Only Zoe Baird, the Leona Helmsley of the Clinton Cabinet, is not having a good time.

This morning, the real work begins. If he’s unable to “reinvent government,” what’s Clinton going to do? Spend more? Tax more? Regulate more? That’s what Bush did. If Clinton’s domestic policy style conceals a lack of substance, in foreign policy, Clinton lacks even the style. He was slow to realize that when he speaks, the world, including the Haitians and Saddam Hussein, is listening. So Clinton spent all week denying that his foreign policy would be different from Bush’s. Suddenly conscious of the need for continuity, Clinton had to ask Bush National Security Council staffers to stay on.

All of this makes me, a veteran of four inaugurations, think not of Washington, but of Hollywood. At the end of the movie “The Candidate,” the Robert Redford character--a blow-dried, giant-slaying Clinton prototype--escapes from the crowd after his victory and asks a question that I suspect is echoing around the White House today: “What do we do now?”