jus’ what kind of good ole boy is president billy?

Southerners are the only Anglo-Saxon Protestants in America who have to worry about “the ones who give us a bad name.”

In the old days, our worries centered on 350-pound sheriffs named Vonnie or Beverly who split heads and infinitives on camera. Next, we were saddled with Jimmy Carter, the “nukier” scientist and authority on diarrhea who was mistaken for a redcap.

Now, Bill Clinton, the divine afflatus of co-dependency, is President of the United States ‘R’ Us. I’m happy to report that there is very little about him that is Southern. In fact, I can detect only two regional characteristics. First, food.

As he eats his way into William Howard Taft’s custom-made bathtub, giving rise to the fear that he may drop dead in the prime of nice, alarmed pundits will trot out all sorts of Freudian theories and Rabelaisian allusions to explain why he’s digging his grave with his teeth. The truth, however, is very simple.

To a Southern Baptist, eating is the only sensual pleasure that is not a sin. Gluttony is one of the Seven Deadly Sins but they’re Catholic so they don’t count. The low-church groaning board has driven out the high-church groaning bed, and every good ole boy knows the path to righteousness.

Then there’s the South’s other oral tradition: Talking. As Clinton continues losing his voice, going hoarse at closer and closer intervals until it’s completely and permanently gone and we really need the manic sign-language lady that Democrats always include on the dais, remember that good ole boys are America’s original wonks. They always have an encyclopedic knowledge of something or other--guns, cars, Civil War cavalry strategy--and hold forth on it until there isn’t an unglazed eye in the house.

If Southern men talk a lot, it’s because they have spent 300 years explaining the South to the rest of the country. First they had to explain slavery, then segregation, then their objections to the civil rights movement. And now backpedaling former firebrands like George Wallace are explaining what it means to have “mellowed.” Given three centuries of men talking the hind legs off a mule, the end result was bound to be Bill Clinton.

OTHER THAN WHAT HE DOES WITH HIS MOUTH, OUR NEW AGE TRIBUNE COMES ACROSS AS COMPLETELYun-Southern. For one thing, he believes in “getting in touch with your feelings”--middle-aged spreadese for the hippie credo of “let it all hang out” that shaped his youth. But Bubba don’t hug men. He greets his friends by punching them in the heart in a perfect simulacrum of CPR. To Clinton’s oft-repeated campaign priority, “I think it’s important to touch as many of the American people as we can,” Bubba replies, “Sheesh.”

There is something oddly rootless about the whole Clinton family; their from is on a par with Oakland’s there. Mama Virginia Kelley ought to look like Belle Watling, could look like Belle Watling, and on good days almost looks like Belle Watling, but in the last analysis, she looks like Everymadam--especially the ones from Terre Haute who crop up in the novels of James Jones.

Brother Roger is a dead cert to make Billy Carter seem in retrospect to have been as polished as Lord Chesterfield, but Roger’s final disgrace, whatever it is, will happen in a nightclub, not a gas station: he is a creature of rooms without clocks. The heart of a true Southern ne’er-do-well beats under the bib of his overalls, but Roger’s beats under a cover charge.

Hillary, of course, is from Chicago, which may explain what really drives her--not yuppie careerism, but the knowledge that she’s a Yankee wife. Knowing that people are saying, “Why couldn’t he have married one of our girls?” has been known to do terrible things to Northern women, and it looks as if it’s happened again.

Time magazine’s Margaret Carlson effused that when The Billary were in law school together, Clinton “couldn’t keep his mind--or his eyes--from wandering over to the smart girl in the flannel shirt and thick glasses.” He is reported to have told his mother, “I won’t marry a beauty queen,” which is another way of saying, “I won’t marry a Southern girl.”

Why?

He may have felt threatened by the sexual incorrectness it would have entailed. Romantic legend has endowed the Southern woman with so many tempting but conflicting charms that she’s a human candy store. The man who presses his nose against this window finds himself wanting a hot Melanie: a woman so good in bed that she will have an orgasm if he just looks at her, yet who is also sweet and submissive, with a yen to be dominated. His common sense tells him that women who are good in bed tend not to be sweet and submissive, and that women who are sweet and submissive tend not to be good in bed, but a Southern woman can make a man want both.

Marrying a Yankee, particularly one in flannel shirts and thick glasses, cuts this Gordian knot and allows Clinton to avoid the rigors of Southern masculinity.

CERTAIN THINGS ABOUT CLINTON ARE NOT ONLY UN-SOUTHERN BUT NON-Southern. Incredibly, he does not even know what his name is. He may have found his inner child but neither he nor his mother can say for sure whether it was christened William Jefferson Blythe III or William Jefferson Blythe IV. Mama was quoted as saying she thinks Bill was the IV, though she might have made a mistake. In other words, she isn’t sure if his father was William Jr. or William III.

This is anthropologically impossible. Southerners are so obsessed by genealogy that we see a family tree under every bush. Historical societies, quiet enough places in other parts of the country, do a land-office business in Dixie, where dusty-fingered women looking for still more ancestors stand in line to read rare pamphlets with titles like “The Pathetick Historie of Sir Gillaume de Fornays, Who Was Hanged, Drawed, and Quartered, With a Commentarie on his Colonial Descendants in the Carolinas, by Bishop Fornay of Pluckley.”

The typical Southerner has no trouble rattling off the name, rank and serial number of antecedents all the way back to the 17th Century. That the Clintons forgot a numeral in the preceding generation is strange enough, but what really astonishes is whose numeral it was.

Tennessee Williams did not exaggerate. The South is Big Daddy country. The psychological dominance practiced by ole Colonel Portnoy, who seduces with bourbon instead of chicken soup, is why the South is full of middle-aged men holding forth in curiously whining voices about “what my Daddy said.” Daughters are equally susceptible to our drawling Agamemnons. Margaret Mitchell could not keep her fingers off those magic keys, f-a-t-h-e-r, giving us not one but two Electra-fying father-daughter relationships: Gerald and Scarlett O’Hara and Rhett and Bonnie Butler.

Name changes are not undertaken casually in Big Daddy country. Fifteen-year-old Billy Blythe’s decision to become Bill Clinton would have been seen as a betrayal of his dead father, but he did it anyway. According to the official story, this noble adolescent made a conscious decision to surrender his patronym to placate Roger Clinton and bring unity to a troubled household, but the name-change petition he filed in 1962 tells a different story: “(He) assumed the name of William Jefferson Clinton and has used the name for almost 12 years and his school records and his friends all know him by the surname Clinton.”

More interesting than the discrepancy in these stories is what both versions leave out: Roger Clinton’s reaction to the name change. He was a Southerner, too. No matter how irascible he was, he would have said: “You keep your Daddy’s name, Bill. He was a fine man. If you’re half the man your Daddy was, you’ll be all right.” He would have said it drunk or sober, whether he meant it or not, because these are the words that roll unbidden off every Southern tongue when the subject is fathers.

The South’s maxim, “If you’re half the man your Daddy is, you’ll be all right,” is a dubious blessing. The halving imagery can be deleterious even under the best conditions, but Bill Clinton was a posthumous son, saddled with the knowledge that his father vanished from the face of the earth before his own existence began: he wasn’t before I was . It’s the difference between desertion and bereftness, and growing up in Big Daddy country can only add to the anxiety.

A drunken stepfather makes a convenient villain, but I’ll bet Roger Clinton played no part in the name-change drama. I submit that Billy Jeff, who already had the inner resources of a Carnival cruise social director, could not cope with the anxiety of being half of a ghost. Letting others define him, he oozed gradually into his Clinton identity, and then made it official by severing his connection to the ghost’s name in public records.

If the American Constitution is all sail and no anchor, Bill Clinton is all therapy and no insight. Public records can’t banish anxiety. When Hillary refused to give up her father’s name, Bill’s anxiety returned in the guise of, “Your wife is twice the man you are, so she’ll be all right.”

Next, when the people of Arkansas objected to Hillary’s feminist habit of calling herself Rodham, she gave in and changed it to Clinton-- exactly what Bill did in high school --thereby triggering his anxiety a second time.

Now his anxiety is back again. This time his wife is calling herself Hillary Rodham Clinton, which puts him one misprint from nervous collapse. Sooner or later, newspaper editors are going to slip her a hyphen, and then it will be a whole new name game.

As Hillary Rodham-Clinton, she will drag Bill into the same nomenclatural bedlam already occupied by First Friends Harry Thomason and Linda Bloodworth-Thomason. You can’t call them Mr. and Mrs. Bloodworth-Thomason because he’s not a Bloodworth and she’s more than a Thomason. Nor can you call them Mr. and Mrs. Thomason because there is no Mrs. Thomason.

If Hillary takes on a hyphen, there will no longer be a Mrs. Clinton, just as there was no Mrs. Clinton that other time, when she kept her daddy’s name.

IT TOOK JIMMY CARTER TWO YEARS TO MAKE PEOPLE WONDER IF HE HAD A screw loose, but it has taken Bill Clinton only two months.

His lumbering, endomorphic exterior suggests an easygoing good ole boy with his chair tilted back against the gas-station wall, but when his mask slips he displays the querulousness of a neurasthenic on the sun porch of a Swiss sanitarium.

His eagerness to go anywhere, pay any price, bear any burden to force the spring is not the idealism of Woodrow Wilson at Versailles but the hysteria of Sally Field at the Academy Awards, blinking back tears and gasping, “You like me, you really like me.” As long as Clinton is campaigning he can reassure himself that people like him, but when the campaign stops, so does the reassurance. Ensconced at last in the White House, but painfully aware that 57% of the electorate had voted for somebody else, he needed another kissy fix right away. Did people like him, really like him? He had to find out somehow, so he set out to test our love.

It might have looked like Panderbear, but, in fact, it was Masobear. His headlong plunge into the issue of gays in the military during his first week in office was described as “puzzling,” “baffling,” “reckless,” “obsessive” and “self-destructive.” Next, he tackled the deficit issue by floating the idea of cuts in Social Security, which Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan called a “death wish.” Then he risked a national panic with his attempt to lift the ban on immigrants infected with the AIDS virus, which was soundly defeated by the Senate. And now he is threatening, via his supine relationship with Sin Tax Hillary, to force millions of smokers into nicotine-withdrawal fits to see if they love him enough not to storm the White House and stick his head on a pike.

If you are interested in reading an exquisitely detailed analysis of Bill Clinton’s psychology, get hold of the British suspense novel “Before the Fact,” by Francis Iles, on which Alfred Hitchcock based his movie “Suspicion.”

The movie, as you recall, ends happily when Cary Grant saves Joan Fontaine’s life, thereby proving that he wasn’t trying to murder her as she had suspected. But in the book, the husband really does intend to murder the wife, and she knows it. The strain of wondering when and how he will do it becomes too much for her, so she lets him kill her to relieve the tension.

Natalie Shainess verifies this mentality in her 1984 book about masochism, “Sweet Suffering”: “Few human beings find ambiguity comfortable, but for the masochistic person it is nearly unbearable. She would rather transfer her inner discomfort into a sure loss than to remain in a limbo of uncertainty. She experiences a release upon ending the suspense.”

So does Masobear. His now-famous ROTC letter to Col. Eugene J. Holmes thanking him for his help in evading the draft is a case in point. He didn’t have to write it; he had gotten what he wanted out of Holmes, and he must have known that muzzy soul-searching would not sit well with a soldier. But he was compelled to write it to make sure that Holmes still liked him, really liked him. But Holmes hated him, really hated him--that’s why he released the letter.

Fasten your seat belts. The Wonk, the Dither and the She are upon us.