Yokel no more.

• Author: Douglas, Susan
• Position: Bill Clinton in mass media

Remember when Bill Clinton was, according to the pundits and the news media at large, a bumbling rube, a spineless, clueless, left-wing twit, the dumbest stump ever to inhabit the White House? My goodness, was that only eight weeks ago? How time flies.

Even the conservative Center for Media and Public Affairs documented that in his first four months in office, 64 per cent of all references to Clinton by network-news reporters were negative, as compared to 41 per cent for Bush during the same time period. But all that's changed -at least for now. Gone are Time cover stories on The Incredible Shrinking President and such headlines as A Question of Competence. The man who, pre-David Gergen, couldn't sneeze without getting bad press is now, as Juan Williams put it, "a terrific political animal" and, as Charles Krauthammer noted, "a problem solver."

What happened? Presumably under Gergen's tutelage, Clinton has learned how to give the press what it wants: neocon policies preserved under the occluding, malodorous shellac of symbolic politics. Finally, Clinton has learned how to pose, and with whom. In Japan, he walked around imitating the Pope, with his arms outstretched as if he could embrace and protect the world, while Hillary sported her latest Princess Diana look. And Clinton learned how to toss little rhetorical bouquets to the ever-present microphones as he said, in an off-camera aside everyone knew was being recorded, "We need to rescue the people."

And rescue them he did. He flew home early from Hawaii to survey the flood damage in the Middle West and to be photographed hugging some deserving, white, middle-America victims, and then went off to pose with the Joint Chiefs while announcing his sellout on gays in the military. All this prompted Juan Williams to gush, "Compassion is Clinton's best card." Only Carl Rowan was a spoilsport, asking why other Americans in desperate need of Federal funds for jobs and housing - those in our inner cities - weren't getting the same hugs, the same compassion. Geez, Carl, get with the program.

The pundits and the news media are now desperately clinging to Clinton like a life raft, and this is not surprising given the other big stories of the summer. Coverage of the floods, immigration, and gays in the military convey a deep panic about national identity, national direction, and the durability of our social fabric. There is a powerful symbiosis between these images of disarray and Clinton rising...