LAME DUCK

By TAD BARTIMUS

The television set was on and Bill Clinton was speaking. And then he wasn't. Somebody had hit the mute button.

"I wish he'd just go away," one teen-ager said.

"You can't believe a word he says," added another.

"All politicians lie – why listen to them?" chimed in a third.

Not a single person in the room objected to turning off the President of the United States.

Bill Clinton has been on television a lot lately, presiding over all those ceremonial things presidents like to do when they're surrounded by folks of good cheer and buffered from the White House press corps.

The President has looked chipper and trim, well-dressed in his business suits and tuxedos, handing out awards, singing Christmas carols, applauding artistic icons at the Kennedy Center honors gala, welcoming the new millennium. After seven years of watching him, most Americans know exactly how he'll behave on such occasions: the sincere smile; tears in his eyes when a choir sings; the nodding of his head and pursing of his lips when the event reaches its crescendo.

But it feels like few Americans are paying any attention anymore, especially the kids.

"It's all song and dance," a young voter says.

"Smoke and mirrors," volunteers another.

Embarking on the last year of his presidency, William Jefferson Clinton seems almost irrelevant to the lives of ordinary citizens he's twice taken an oath to serve. He came into office with enormous promise; he risks leaving it with enormous failed potential. Sadly, many Americans don't even seem to care.

Television turns our public figures into extended family. Like every president since John F. Kennedy, Bill Clinton's face and demeanor are as familiar to us – maybe more so – than our own relatives. But when he destroyed his credibility and was impeached he became the distant cousin who broke the law but beat the rap, the family embarrassment. We're stuck with him until he finds a new job but that doesn't mean we have to like him, or look him in the eye, or take his advice on how to live our lives.

On Bill Clinton's watch the stock market has hit an all-time high, unemployment is at its lowest level in decades, the air is cleaner and the rivers clearer; there is more national optimism and opportunity than ever, we are mostly at peace and even the bald eagle has been taken off the endangered species list.

But this president's slavish devotion to perception as reality, which helped get him elected, has backfired. Initially we perceived him as a man who'd learned from earlier mistakes; now we perceive him as a man who'll never will, even as he tells us once again that he has. Live by the spin, die by the spin.

Bill Clinton had hoped to leave a legacy of statesmanship; instead, he's bequeathed us more cynicism. His name has become synonymous with liar, cheat, phony. When the Senate didn't convict him many Americans thought he'd gotten away clean. But has he?

Daughter Chelsea is across the country at Stanford University, forging her own new life. Wife Hillary has moved to New York to run for the U.S. Senate and live in a house that looks like it ought to be in Little Rock. His parents are dead, his brother is busy with his own family. Nearly all the loyal minions who orchestrated his election have peeled off to cash in. Even Vice President Al Gore has distanced himself from his mentor.

Bill Clinton has one more year to talk his way into history. Will anybody be listening?

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