Clinton Relishes Working Vacation

On what almost certainly is his final presidential outing to this cozy island, Clinton has raised money for his wife’s Senate campaign at two private homes, slipped away to Hyannis Port to boost a Kennedy and ventured over to tony Nantucket, to the home of Smith and Elizabeth Bagley (she’s a former Clinton ambassador to Portugal), for another Hillary Rodham Clinton fund-raiser.

Which raises these questions: When he arrives for a long weekend at Martha’s Vineyard and, within two hours, flies off-island for a fund-raiser, is Clinton on vacation or at work? And what does vacation mean for a man who loves politics as much as he does golf, and is better at it?

To be sure, Clinton has found time for golf here. On Saturday, he spent about five hours on the Farm Neck course--and was captured on videotape so frustrated with a drive that he threw down his club, swore and spun 360 degrees in anguish. For golfers maybe that’s part of the fun.

He made his de rigueur stop at the Bunch of Grapes bookstore, hooking up with daughter Chelsea in Vineyard Haven and stopping for ice cream (a double scoop of raspberry and peaches ‘n’ cream at Mad Martha’s), and ran into the seemingly ubiquitous actress Mary Steenburgen, who also greeted him at the tiny Martha’s Vineyard airport on Friday.

Celebrity encounters have been on the low end this summer, although Carly Simon was entertaining at one of the Sunday fund-raisers, a bash given by Hollywood’s Harvey Weinstein and Dirk Ziff, a publisher of technical textbooks.

It has been well-documented that the president is trying to drink in every last moment of his dwindling tenure: At least two foreign trips are on his agenda this month alone, to Nigeria and Colombia. Another is contemplated to Vietnam, not seen by any American president since Lyndon B. Johnson visited during the U.S. war there. To the end, Clinton is pushing his domestic and economic agenda on a recalcitrant Republican majority in Congress.

And seemingly every weekend and one or two evenings during the week he is campaigning for Democrats. Just last weekend he was in Rhode Island raising money for Rep. Patrick J. Kennedy.

But no political evening has had quite the mix of business and pleasure--or panache--as the one he spent Saturday at the compound of the Kennedy family in Hyannis Port. He headlined an $800,000 fund-raising dinner for Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, the eldest of Robert F. and Ethel Kennedy’s children and the lieutenant governor of Maryland. She is considering a race for governor two years from now.

It was an evening of commitment to the ideals of public service instilled in a generation by the examples and memories of John F. Kennedy and his brother Robert. It was an evening of political gab and hand-grabbing.

Indeed, a standoff of sorts ensued when the president, intending just to shake a few hands on the way to his table, began reaching for every hand in sight: The crowd wouldn’t sit down until he did, and he wouldn’t take his seat until there were no hands left to shake. And there were about 800 hands in the crowd. Finally, Joe Kennedy, the former congressman, moved to end the standoff with an impromptu speech poking fun at his own abbreviated political career. The program was already running an hour late.

It was an evening of poignancy and evolving symbolism: The fund-raising dinner, a staple now of American politics, was held on a vast lawn. There, Townsend summoned mental pictures that evoked a political genre of so many years ago as she recalled how the family had played countless games of touch football, kick the can and capture the flag.

And it was an evening of wit.

Mark Shriver, a Kennedy cousin (his mother, Eunice, is the late president’s sister) who introduced his uncle Ted, who introduced his niece Kathleen Townsend, made the point that the dynasty all began with the patriarch, Joseph Kennedy Sr.

It is Kennedy family legend, said Shriver, a delegate in the Maryland Assembly, that the formula for success in politics is “90% hard work and 60% grandpa’s money.”

To which his uncle, the senator, added: “We all wish my father had worked a little harder.”

(The senator couldn’t resist a cushion-shot at the presidential candidate across the political aisle, telling his niece: “The only thing that bothers me is you getting elected on the basis of a famous family name.”)

But it was the president who seemed to be having the most fun:

“Ethel,” he said, directing his remarks at Townsend’s mother, the hostess for the dinner, “you may have to put me up tonight, and if so, that would tickle me.”

Why?

“Ethel’s been sending me these raunchy Valentine cards for years and I’m completely in love with her, and I keep trying to get some tabloid to write something sleazy about it.

“But the reason you may have to put me up tonight,” he explained further, “is on the way out, Hillary said, ‘You’re going to this fund-raiser for Kathleen tonight.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ And she said, ‘And last week, you went to one for Patrick.’ I said, ‘Yes.’ She said, ‘And a couple of weeks ago, you went to one for Teddy.’

“She said, ‘But it’s your wife that’s running for senator from New York in 90 days, where it costs $30 million-plus to run.’ She said, ‘Maybe they’ll just put you up tonight.’ ”

(Never mind that the party to which Clinton spoke on Friday night in Nantucket brought an estimated $125,000 to his wife’s campaign and two parties here on Sunday night were expected to collect $400,000 more.)

The gentle humor aside, the president carried with him a serious message, one that turned thoughts back nearly four decades as he sorted through the optimism of 1961 and the prospects of economic and social progress of the Kennedy and early Johnson years.

“You need to nourish and cherish this moment,” he said. “I have waited for 35 years for my country to be once again in the position to build the future of our dreams for our children. . . . Do not blow this election.”

So is this any way to spend a vacation?

No and yes.

“This year we’re not really having a vacation,” said Joe Lockhart, the presidential press secretary who, as the most senior White House staff member on the trip, was serving as chief of staff. “He’s enjoying himself, but this is work.”

But then he suggested that sense of pleasure Bill Clinton seems to get from his thoroughly political life, asking: “On a Saturday night, what possibly could there be to get out of it, other than that he enjoys talking with people, being with people, listening to them?”