Path: bloom-picayune.mit.edu!snorkelwacker.mit.edu!americast.com!americast.com!americast-post Newsgroups: americast.twt.news From: americast-post@AmeriCast.Com Organization: American Cybercasting Approved: americast-post@AmeriCast.com Subject: A new president we must pray for Date: Wed, 4 Nov 92 16:16:30 EST Message-ID: \SE A;NATION;ELECTIONS '92;PRUDEN ON POLITICS \HD A new president we must pray for \BY Wesley Pruden \CR THE WASHINGTON TIMES "Let the word go forth," a young John F. Kennedy said on his inauguration a generation and a light year ago, "that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace . . . " Some of those words sound a little hollow this morning, but the torch (if not the earth) moved last night. Bill Clinton at 46 is older than JFK (43) in 1960, or Teddy Roosevelt (42) in 1908, but not by much, and he'll be the first president born after World War II. This is not necessarily reassuring to those of us of the generation preceding the baby boomers. We have never known a president younger than we are. We're not comfortable with the idea of having to explain World War II, which was the central fact of our young existence. JFK was an authentic war hero as well as an authentic political hero, and he was Mr. Clinton's idol when he became the first president born in this century. JFK was a good Democrat, but his views and concerns, closely examined, would seem strange and even wrong to many of Mr. Clinton's generational colleagues. This, too, makes some of us uneasy, but it thrills others who have waited 12 years for their turn at the federal trough. "There's a momentous possibility in the offing," says Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at the University of California at Berkeley. (Many of the guests at the private parties last night in Little Rock were lobbyists from Washington.) No one, perhaps not even Mr. Clinton himself, yet knows who he actually is, but if he's the moderate conservative he says he is (most of the time), he'll arrive with a Congress that only his veto can contain. Voters in several states returned liberal incumbents, with term limits. (Maybe Mr. Clinton can figure it out.) Generational differences make George Bush difficult for many young Americans to understand. The questions about Mr. Clinton's draft-dodging, which merely puzzle the men and women in his generation, infuriate most of those of the preceding generation, nurtured on the everyone-does-his-share patriotism of the World War II years. Nevertheless, Bill Clinton won it, and he has a right to expect the good wishes of every one of us. Conservatives have a particular duty to disdain the example of the sore losers among the Politically Correct of academe and in the media who never conceded the legitimacy of the Reagan victory in 1980. The people's gift of the presidency to Mr. Clinton, however arrived at, is as legitimate as that to Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Lincoln - and to Hayes and Harding and Carter. He, like so many of his generation, was educated by teachers whose hearts rarely beat in time to the music on the pages of American heroism. They were taught, often by the isolated and the embittered, not that theirs was a nation that could overcome all obstacles in the path to the American dream, but that the dream was stolen from the wretched of the earth. Just as the presidents produced by earlier generations were shaped by the conquest of paradise, the opening of the continent and war that followed upon war, Bill Clinton was shaped, for better and worse, by the civil rights revolution, the anti-war coalition, the feminist movement, and above all by the intolerant secularism that seeks to destroy the traditions that sustain the spirit. The new president-elect, like others of his generation, is an expression not so much of Western culture as of the American popular culture. Abraham Lincoln is remembered as having walked miles to borrow the Greek classics to read by the flickering light of a candle; Bill Clinton put on shades to toot the sax for Arsenio Hall. Presidents who, like Mr. Clinton, were put in office by a minority of the voters, often feel the majority looking over their shoulders and reach timidly for the levers of power. For his sake, and for the sake of all of us, Bill Clinton can't do that. He must decide who he is, and quickly, and all of the rest of us must pray for him no less than for ourselves, and wish him well. This article is copyright 1992 The Washington Times. Redistribution to other sites is not permitted except by arrangement with American Cybercasting Corporation. For more information, send-email to usa@AmeriCast.COM