![]() ![]() If you send your armed forces around the world on missions of mercy, they'll go soft, be useless when sent out to kill. Operation Restore Hope is a dangerous precedent, they say. There are are toasts, laughter, promises, hopes. ![]() He comes to Washington and is wined and dined and fawned on by seekers of jobs and status. Utopia is at hand.Ĭlinton comes out of a church in Little Rock with his hand on the head of a little boy. Powell for State, Marian Wright Edelman for attorney general. People dream dreams of a dream cabinet, Colin L. He moves in an aura of approval and expectation and something like joy from people who figure however bad he might be, he'll be better than the incumbent. Obviously he can do no wrong he can do nothing of an official nature in the here and now. Then he explains the famine in Somalia by sampling other peoples' sandwiches and showing how warlords intercept the food deliveries. He sits in a booth with a father and son, counsels the father on small business help and then asks the son, "You're not going to eat your fries?" - and dives in. ![]() He can laugh at himself, as when he is satirized on "Saturday Night Live" in an uproarious spoof that has him dispensing policy in a McDonald's - a pit stop on his daily jog - and eating everyone else's food. Dispatching armed men by this time seems as unavoidable as sending in the National Guard to a riot-torn ghetto.īill Clinton is a kind of magical, mystical figure in the country now. It would have become unthinkable not to send in troops to tame the warlords and the warring gangs, to divest crazy teenagers of their AK-47s. The pictures of the skeletal tots, the prostrate mothers, the blank-eyed men with the starting ribs would have gotten worse. In fact, Bush may have been displaying some of the noblesse oblige that was implicit in his post-election promise to go out "in style." It's easier for an outgoing president to send troops to a foreign land than for an incoming one who has pledged himself to focus unrelentingly on domestic questions. There's some grumbling around the edges: Why did he dump what could be a quagmire on an incoming president? The answer is he didn't. What he has done in ordering troops to Somalia has been greeted with the respect it deserves. He's not a lame duck when the troop transports take off. The dispatch of soldiers to a far shore snatches him back from the limbo he has occupied since Nov. The one thing that is not tentative, the huge, inescapable fact, is that George Bush is still president of the United States. "Hello," he says, "my name is Marlin Fitzwater." It's been that long since he held a regular briefing. In the White House press briefing room, before a large audience, the White House press secretary introduces himself slyly. She's heard all the new rumors, can't vouch for any of them. She used to work in the building during Jimmy Carter's day, and she may be back. The riveters chatter.ĭown the White House driveway strolls Madeleine Albright, of Clinton's National Security Council transition team. Outside the White House, the sounds of carpentry predominate. It's a world of clusters and pods and paths, the new lexicon invented by the Clinton transition teams. ![]()
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