Somehow, No. 2 Doesn’t Compute

The Spot is growing.

Maybe even galloping. That Rogaine better kick in before the millennium. Tipper says I’m paranoid, but I’m not. Everyone is out to get me. Nothing is going perfectly.

I mean, look at him. It’s unbelievable. The president looks positively lean. He’s happy. He’s relaxed. He’s popular. The Republicans are scared of him. He’s got all his hair. And look at me. I’m portly - I mean, senatorial. I’m tense. I sweat when I make speeches and I look ruddier than Bill. The Republicans are after me. Bob Woodward is after me. He’s worse than paparazzi!

I don’t get it. You-know-who plops a hot tub on the South Lawn in the middle of a sexual-harassment scandal. And I’m the one they’re picking on. Even Quayle is getting better press than me.

I mean, did Gephardt call for making the rescue of the environment the central organizing principle for civilization? So how come my tree-hugging friends are dissing me on the front page of The New York Times? It makes me want to punch a hole in the ozone layer!

All that garbage about soft money and hard money didn’t stick to Bill. He sold everything in the White House that wasn’t nailed down and got away with it. But me, I’ve got to worry about that zombie attorney general checking into independent prosecutors. Finally she comes out of her daze and runs out of loopholes, just in time for my campaign?

And none of the usual techniques are working. Damage control ain’t what it used to be. We tried the “everybody does it” routine. We even tried the old gambit of dumping a lot of documents on the press a couple days before the hearings start and then saying it’s old news.

And those Buddhist nuns - am I the only one in America who doesn’t find them adorable? I don’t get it. Those Buddhists do not give me inner peace. CNN was barely covering the Thompson hearings until those buzz-cut holy people in yellow blankets turned up.

I’m sick of all those stories suggesting that Bill Bradley is the new Mr. Clean because he wants to reduce the role of money in public life.

I tried to distract attention from the Senate hearings by going up to New Hampshire and wearing a plaid shirt and talking about the age of possibility.

I made a joke at Dartmouth about how it was so cold the last time I was on campus, people thought I was frozen stiff. Get it? Frozen stiff?

I mean, I’m doing my best. I told the students a lot of important stuff. I told them that we now have the ability to affect the Earth itself. Well, don’t we?

I told them that we have dramatically transformed the relationship between human civilization and the Earth. Well, haven’t we?

I told them the three factors in that were the rapid growth of population, the still-accelerating scientific and technological revolution and the set of philosophical assumptions associated with the modern era that have caused many to discount obligations to the future that were once taken for granted. Well, aren’t they?

So why is everybody attacking me? So it turned out I made 86 fund-raising calls from my White House office after I said I’d done it only on “a few occasions.” So I said the event at the Buddhist temple was “community outreach,” not a fund-raiser. So $120,000 in soft money contributions personally solicited by me got moved to hard money accounts. So I change my story a lot. The problem is, I’m just not as smooth in my own defense as the President. I haven’t had the practice. Anyway, I thought smooth was bad.

It’s so ironic. When Bill and I first hooked up in 1992, I was supposed to provide the respectability and Governor Slick was supposed to provide the electricity. Now, because of those stupid fund-raising calls from the White House, everybody thinks I’m as slippery as Bill. Just less lovable.

Maybe that’s why Bill is acting like Oprah at our lunches and teaching me to learn to recognize feelings in myself. He’s trying to teach me to pay attention to my empathetic instincts as a way of learning about the real agendas of the American people.

I want to let the inner Prince Albert out. Of the can. Get it? I want my speeches to go from causing pain to feeling it.

I’ve got to figure out a way to change the subject. A foreign trip, maybe. But Hillary keeps hogging those funerals. With my luck, I’ll get Mobutu.

xxxx