Chameleon in the White House.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Pundit Watch - Column

A bubba or not a bubba? That is the question. Throughout the press and punditland, this moniker reappeared in such headlines as NICE HAIRCUT, BUBBA and Pat Buchanan's comment that "Cristophe is not Bubba's barber," to dramatize the gap between Beverly Hills and Little Rock, Cristophe and Joe Sixpack, the "before" Bill Clinton of Hope and the "after" Bill Clinton of Hollywood, the populist candidate and the pretentious, out-of-touch President.

There is no doubt that the haircut story, as stupid and inconsequential as it was, was one of the most damaging of Clinton's early Administration because the press was able to transform it instantly, as Tim Russert of Meet the Press did, into a "metaphor" for everything that's wrong with the White House. And the main thing that's wrong, according to the nation's pundits, is that we don't really know who Bill Clinton is and what he stands for.

It's true that Clinton has been, to put it mildly, less than impressive in recent weeks, what with his flip-flopping over Bosnia, his junior-high-school jokes about Rush Limbaugh and Bob Dole, which he had to take back, and his failure to get a summer jobs program through Congress when, in many cities, a stupefying 48 per cent of black teenagers are out of work.

But The Haircut and "Travelgate" have blown other stories off the pundits' agenda--such stories as Clinton's efforts to reverse Ronald Reagan's firing of unionized air-traffic controllers, which struck a lethal blow at organized labor in the 1980s. Heard any applause for this on the talk shows, or for the Administration plan to halt the development of hazardous-waste incinerators, or for its more aggressive stance in the United Nations on international human-rights violations?

Here's why--and the answers come from the pundits themselves.

Bill Clinton has allowed himself to become a floating signifier, unfixed, indeterminate, arousing a host of anxieties about gender, class, and sexuality. How could a real man--meaning, of course, a heterosexual one--patronize what The McLaughlin Group characterized as "his wife's beautician"? Is he a man, or as Evan Thomas called him, "a wimp"? Is he a regular Joe or a member of the power elite? And how dare he muddy the boundaries between these categories?

It was the class cross-dressing that really got to the press. Here's a guy who, as Juan Williams put it, sold himself as "just plain Bill and here he is with this $200 haircut." Pundits from William Safire to Nina...