Bubba's Uncle Warren.

Flashback

To know nothing of what happened before you were born is to remain ever a child--Cicero

Now that Bill Clinton is out of office--albeit in a way that brings to mind the apocryphal song "How Can I Miss You If You Won't Go Away?"--the question of his place in history inevitably arises. No doubt it will be years before a consensus emerges, but a comparison to his predecessor Warren G. Harding may suggest an answer. So far the parallels have been frigtheningly close.

Like Clinton, Harding was a man of humble small-town origins, a fact he used for political advantage. A Baptist layman and an enthusiastic amateur musician, he pursued an undistinguished career in Ohio state government, until he ran for governor in 1910 and lost, at which point his political career seemed to be over. Six years later, however, he was a United States senator, and the keynote speaker at the Republican Party's national convention. Four years after that he was nominated for President.

He won the nomination because he was an affable man with a knack for public speaking and no inconvenient principles. He had ducked crucial Senate debate's on Prohibition and women's suffrage, for example, and deliberately obfuscated his position on the League of Nations. This ambiguity made him attractive--or at least acceptable--to party regulars eager to regain the White House.

Harding's rhetoric was that of a second-rate John Kennedy--"We must have a citizenship less concerned about what the government can do for it and more anxious about what it can do for the nation"--but he seemed to offer a new generation of leadership: No previous President had been born after the Civil War. Harding's influential show-business friend, Al Jolson, campaigned for him across the country.

A handsome charmer of a man, notorious among his aides for plunging into any available crowd to shake hands, Harding won in a landslide. Although there were no opinion polls to document a "gender gap" his victory rested in part on the votes of women newly enfranchised by the Nineteenth Amendment. (He was the first President of his party to support women's suffrage.)