Michael Rogin

‘AT&T Welcomes the World,’ announced the giant sign above the Global Olympic Village at Olympic Centennial Park. Although international corporations had built the park to call attention to themselves, ‘sponsor footprints’ like the AT&T tower ‘were not just advertisements’, explained Billy Payne, chairman of the Atlanta Committee for the Olympic Games: they showcased ‘state-of-the-art technology’ that ‘people will be seeing for the first time’. The Coca-Cola Corporation built its Olympic City entertainment centre at the northern edge of the park. CNN headquarters – the property value of which increased by 26 percent with the building of the park – lay just to the south-west. On 27 July, film footage carried by CNN displayed first the AT&T Welcome to the World, then beneath it the flash of a bomb.’

William Jefferson (‘Bill’) Clinton is not the man from Hope for nothing. And the major story in the American media this election year recounts his resurrection from the politically dead. Indeed, Clinton’s rise is matched in American history only by the equally spectacular fall of George (‘Desert Storm’) Bush, the collapse that put the Arkansas Governor in the White House in the first place. Newt Gingrich rode the Contract with America to victory in 1994, giving Republicans their first control of the House of Representatives under a Democratic president since 1946, and their first control of both houses of Congress since 1952. There are two ways to understand what happened next. From one perspective, the Gingrich revolution was a failure. Emboldened by Gingrich’s attack on medicare and the environment, his effort to finance a tax cut for the rich with the resources of middle America, and his forced closing of the federal government, Clinton finally stood up for principle. Having followed in the footsteps of Millard Fillmore (1850-3), arguably the most obscure and feckless president in American history, whose record of failing to veto an Act of Congress for hundreds of days Clinton was on the point of surpassing (and who had been denied renomination by his own party), Clinton transformed himself into Harry Truman, who turned the 1946 Republican triumph into a Democratic victory two years later.

There he stands, mounted on a pedestal, booted, spurred and bigger than life, his enormous, holstered six-shooter set just below the eye-level of passers-by, welcoming travellers to Orange County. He used to straddle the entrance to the John Wayne International Airport; now, so as not to suffer the weatherbeaten fate of the original, the cowboy statue has sought protection from the elements and taken shelter indoors. Florence has David, also transferred from open to inner space; Orange County has John Wayne.

On a drive through the family estate in 1935, the married President, Franklin Roosevelt, starts up a romance with his cousin. The two imagine moving after he leaves office into a cottage he is planning to build on what they affectionately call ‘Our Hill’. The President’s secretary, who lives at the White House (and has lived with the President since he was Governor of New York), thinks her boss will be moving into the cottage with her. The President’s wife, another cousin, stays in her own fieldstone cottage on the estate when she is there without her husband. At his Inauguration she wore the ring given to her by the woman with whom she is in love, the woman she will later install in a White House bedroom across from her own. The First Lady’s passionate attachment to her woman friend has cooled, however, supplanted by her feelings for a radical student leader young enough to be her son. When the President’s wife meets her young man at a Chicago hotel during his furlough from the Army, the Counter-Intelligence Corps bugs their adjoining rooms; video technology would have provided pictures of her stroking his forehead while he slept.