Divided We Stand

On a frigid evening three days before Halloween, when Democratic presidential contenders are making earnest pitches to sparse crowds in Iowa and New Hampshire, a throng gathers outside the biggest nightclub in Washington, D.C. A fortress rimmed with police cars, tents, and even concession stands, the club called Dream is awash in spotlights, its entrance cordoned off like the Kodak Theatre on Oscar night.

Young urbanites still living high off the '90s -- white men in red power ties, black men in silk shirts, tall women shivering in short dresses -- lift their arms for security checks in a practiced gesture, like flipping their car keys to a valet.

In the plushly paneled interior, a pulsating chant fills the room: "Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill . . ."

An enormous DJ peers over his stomach: "Ain't no Bill here yet. Now it's time to chill out and party."

A singer tries and fails to steal the people's attention and thanks God for the opportunity, but the throb returns: "Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill . . ."

"He's not here yet," the DJ scolds.

On the cusp of midnight, bodies press against one another so tightly that some people jump atop the bar, as if squeezed into flight.

"Y'all need to cheer," the DJ suddenly screams. "Bill is here."

"Bill, Bill, Bill, Bill!"

Bill Clinton is here for a reason, and that reason is George W. Bush. At a stage in his career when he can spend his days golfing, speaking for enormous fees before corporate trade groups, or writing his memoirs, Bill Clinton is raising money for the Democrats -- tens of millions of it each year -- and honing the party's arguments like a coach who yearns to get back into the game himself.

"You know, I never had any money before I left the White House, and now I'm making plenty," he drawls, as the crowd screams its approval, only guessing what may be coming. "And you know," he says, drawing out his words, "I never thought the new president would be so good for me."

There is laughter, then quiet, as Clinton reels off all the people for whom the new administration hasn't been so good. It's a long list, from schoolchildren to factory workers to families trying to elevate themselves. He lowers his voice again, sermonlike, and tells his people why they're here: "You want us all to go forward together. . . . You want to live in a country that's a good model for the world. . . . You want a world where we're making more friends and fewer terrorists. . . ."

And at the end, the trademark Clinton gush: "I love you, and I'm grateful to you for being here. This is for you, God bless you."

Leaving Dream that night, bedazzled young Democrats float back to their Japanese-made sedans vowing to do anything to defeat George W. Bush -- as long as they could replace him with Bill Clinton.

FORMER PRESIDENTS USED TO RIDE into the sunset in a golf cart, promising to spend time with their families before embarking on stately memoirs. Jimmy Carter offered a new wrinkle, donning a tool belt to build affordable housing and circling the globe to monitor elections. But not since Theodore Roosevelt has there been a former president so much in the national bloodstream as Bill Clinton. And Clinton, unlike Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, is blocked from running again.

But he remains a potent force. Twelve years ago, he gazed at his wife, Hillary, and promised the voters: "Buy one, get one free." In 2008, Hillary may well look them in the eye and make the same promise. And a Clinton restoration would hardly be unprecedented. It happened, after all, in the Bush family.

Clinton also lives on politically because of the man who replaced him. George W. Bush tailored his 2000 campaign not to Al Gore but to Bill Clinton: Bush was the fresh breeze that followed the Republicans' stormy impeachment. He was resolute where Clinton was flexible, "honorable" where Clinton was flawed. The two have become cultural bookends -- Bush an emblem of traditional roles acted without a flicker of introspection, Clinton an emblem of striving ambition with seemingly no checks on his appetites.

The only president preceded and succeeded by a father and son, Clinton sticks in the middle of the Bush dynasty like a feathered arrow in the heart. It's difficult to discuss the Bushes without discussing Clinton.

Neither the Clintons nor the Bushes are famous for ideological purity. George H. W. Bush never really cottoned to tax-cut economics, thus infuriating the right. Clinton was always willing to throw cherished Democratic positions overboard to keep his administration afloat. George W. Bush ran as a small-government isolationist and became one of the biggest spenders in presidential history -- even before paying for wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. And while Democratic presidential contenders have been calling for reductions in American forces in Iraq, Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton recently called for increases.

And yet the differences between the Clintons and the Bushes seem so vast, so fundamental, that the United States could never be whole without both of them.

While their differences in policy may not be as pronounced as so many voters think, their differences in culture are probably greater. Red America and Blue America might better be called Bush America and Clinton America. And rarely have the personal lives, personalities, and approaches to governing of two families triggered such intense admiration -- and such desperate dislike.

Start with Bill and Hillary Clinton's marriage, a union that would probably merit several chapters on its own when The History of Marriage is written. Based on common intellectual pursuits, political ambitions, and respect for each other's professional skills -- but not, at all times, faithfulness -- the Clinton marriage has been a national discussion point for more than a decade. Neither spouse plays anything like a traditional role, with Bill the empathetic but troubled partner, Hillary steadfast and driven. They try but often fail to present a unified front -- a reassuring signal to some professional women that partners can maintain separate identities. But the mere idea of spouses pursuing separate agendas offends traditional values of loyalty and supportiveness -- values that are sacred to many. To them, the Clintons offend the very idea of marriage.

George W. and Laura Bush present an extreme contrast, a marriage so traditional it could be embroidered onto a sampler. She stands loyally beside her husband, just uncomfortable enough in the spotlight to be visibly striving to do her duty. Stories about how she dislikes politics only emphasize her sacrifice -- she's postponing the life she wants so that her husband can fulfill his destiny. And those whispers that she occasionally reads him the riot act at home? They only point up how well she maintains her poise in public. But to some professional women in Clinton America, Laura Bush's sacrifices pinch like a corset, not because the choices weren't hers, but because they were steered by a moral system that urges those particular sacrifices on women alone.

If differing gender roles begin the Bush-Clinton cultural divide, different approaches to politics and the world expand it.

Bill Clinton's "third way" politics -- intended to craft a productive middle ground between two ideologies -- are rooted in his personality. After all, who better to cajole warring factions into agreement than a famously earnest, creative, sympathetic figure who can seemingly understand all viewpoints at once? But is it really necessary to understand all viewpoints? In Bush America, there's little obligation to pay any attention to the ones you dislike.

When the debate moves from the domestic stage to the international stage, the obligation is even less. When George W. Bush declared in the 2000 campaign that America wasn't going to be the world's policeman, he didn't mean the United States was going to stay out of everyone's way: He meant to express his disapproval of Clinton's efforts to bring peace to Haiti, Northern Ireland, Bosnia, and Kosovo -- places where there was little benefit for the United States, in Bush's opinion. And Clinton's sweat-soaked efforts to bring peace to the Middle East were overweening as well: Why force peace on governments that can't come to grips with it?

In Bush America, a belief in the United States' superiority to other countries should be visible to every schoolchild: America is the "city on a hill," as Ronald Reagan often described it. And the United States has achieved a lifestyle that is the envy of the world partly because it is isolated and has insulated itself from the mess of the rest of the world. No US president should think in terms of what's best for the world; such thinking dissolves the focus on purely American interests.

These positions are as rooted in Bush's personality -- and as tailored to his skills and limitations -- as Clinton's third-way politics are to his. To people in Clinton America, George W. Bush isn't simply crafting a foreign policy that places America's interests above world opinion; he's playing out his own ugly-American act. His lack of foreign travel is noteworthy, stunning even, for someone whose father was a diplomat, globe-trotting vice president, and president of the United States. A child born into that kind of family really had to try in order to live a life as America-centered as George W. Bush's has been.

And so the divide deepens, in strange and intensely personal ways. To Bush admirers, Bill Clinton's embrace of the world is born of ego, not policy, and certainly not a concern for American interests: It wasn't enough to be president of the United States; he wanted to be president of the world. That very style -- swooping into villages, talking to people in Irish bars -- is redolent of ego above all else.

To Clinton admirers, it's Bush, not Clinton, who's expressing egotism -- the flawed egotism of a small man who lacks curiosity and thus pretends that what he doesn't know isn't worth knowing.

THE TERM "CULTURE WARS" STARTED appearing with growing frequency in 1992, the year that Bill Clinton took on the first President George Bush. Clinton withstood a credible report of a long-term affair with lounge singer Gennifer Flowers, a blowup that ended when he and Hillary appeared on 60 Minutes to acknowledge pain in their marriage but also to plead for privacy. In the interview, Hillary belittled the sentiments expressed in the soapy country-music standard "Stand by Your Man," prompting a rebuke from singer Tammy Wynette.

That was also the year that conservative challenger Pat Buchanan vowed a "holy war" against those who opposed traditional values and Vice President Dan Quayle lamented the TV character Murphy Brown's having a child out of wedlock. Hollywood struck back, and the Clintons, fueled with advice on presentation from their TV-producer pals and campaign cash raised at Barbra Streisand concerts, rode a wave of tolerance into the White House. Or was that election only about the economy? A new culture was taking root at the White House, but no one was sure if it commanded the support of the majority or not. Thus, rather than a gradual acceptance, the Clintons invited a backlash.

Donna Brazile, a former Clinton campaign aide who managed Al Gore's 2000 run, says, "The cultural wars are now defined as having taken shape and form during their eras," referring to both Bush presidencies and to Clinton's.

That's surely true, but the genesis was probably earlier: Most historians believe the American "culture wars" began in the late 1960s. But it wasn't until 1992 that the '60s generation was ready to compete for the White House. Presidents and first ladies from the Eisenhowers through the first Bushes shared certain qualities: Husbands who were World War II-era veterans, wives who chose not to work and to raise children and endure the then-mandatory socializing to advance a husband's political career.

The great changes of the '60s started on campuses. Part of it was political -- a Vietnam-bred distrust of traditional institutions like the military and corporations -- and part was cultural, with an all-male, gently aristocratic mainstream shaken by the arrival of women, some minorities, and growing numbers of less affluent students who didn't hide their ambitions behind suit jackets and good manners.

Bill and Hillary Clinton met at Yale Law School, where they were avatars of the new culture -- slightly pushy, nakedly ambitious, often contemptuous of tradition. She was fresh from a famously angry commencement address at Wellesley College, he from a Rhodes Scholar year at Oxford University, where he was so eager to make political contacts that he kept a Rolodex of friends.

The very same years the Clintons were in New Haven studying law, George W. Bush was across town at the undergraduate campus. The scion of generations of Yale men, Bush took refuge in those institutions that revered tradition, the fraternities and the famous Skull and Bones club. Yale had been a paradise for Bush's lanky father -- an athletic and academic star -- and George W.'s position in the class of 1968 was almost a birthright. But this new Yale wasn't an oasis for George W. His fraternity hijinks may once have bonded him with future leaders of his generation; in the late '60s, they marked him as out of touch with his generation.

Graduation began a two-decade journey of finding himself, lasting well into his father's vice presidency. He righted himself in the more conservative '80s, as Texas friendships and family connections paid off in lucrative business deals. And he learned politics on his father's campaigns, ultimately winning the governorship of Texas in 1994, the year of the great Clinton backlash.

Unlike Buchanan or Quayle, George W. Bush didn't dedicate his political life to restoring traditional values, though his born-again Christianity had steered him closer to Southern evangelicals than his parents. Still, the culture wars had their own pull: As with the Clintons, Bush was dragged into action without much of a desire to be a combatant.

A fundamentalist Christian in a traditional marriage; the son of a prominent family who partook of the advantages of upper-class privilege; a teetotaler for whom a late-blooming sense of discipline allowed him to find peace in rectitude -- Bush's life story alone made him the scourge of Clinton America.

he crowd that gathered in the Washington club Dream that night in October was a pretty fair slice of Clinton America. Largely young professionals, many of them blacks or white ethnics for whom careerism was a form of self-realization, many not married, others experiencing the pushes and pulls of two-career couples, they identified closely with Clinton and couldn't hide their dislike of Bush.

Far more prevalent in the Northeast than the South, these denizens of Clinton America resent the entrenched privilege that seems to take refuge in traditional values. To them, it's not surprising that Bush wants to preserve traditional values. Those values, as applied by conservative Republicans, underpin a hierarchy that puts people like the Bushes on top.

Of course, the other half of America, largely in the South and West, doesn't see it that way. Bush Americans see Bill and Hillary Clinton as people who want power as an end in itself -- not to protect and preserve the United States but to promote their own agenda. And if the stakeholders of that agenda aren't as obvious as with '60s-style Democrats, who more aggressively courted the unions, immigrants, and the poor, then it only proves how selfish these two are: They want power to benefit whomever they choose to woo.

If it isn't obvious whom the Clintons are for, it seems clear to their critics whom they are against: the military, for one thing. Sitting in her office at Valley Farm Credit in the military town of Martinsburg, West Virginia, loan officer Cheryl Chappell is concerned about the messy situation in Iraq -- but she doesn't blame George W. Bush. "If it weren't for Clinton," she says automatically, "the military would be much better off to perpetuate the war effort."

Bush may not have bettered the personal conditions of military families any more than Clinton -- veterans' leaders have similar complaints about both -- but in the eyes of many people in Martinsburg, Bush represents military values and Clinton does not. And to many of these denizens of Bush America, fighting to preserve Americans' interests is a prime military value: Bush has done that in Iraq. For them, God and country go hand in hand. And the personal is political.

Susie Puffenburger, who works with Chappell at Valley Farm Credit, says of Bush: "I'm sure he has oodles of bad qualities, but I think the moral issue is just huge in my eyes. If you're against abortion, it's a big thing to me. And I think he is a Christian, and that's important. And he's a good family man."

ack when George H. W. Bush was a candidate, the Bushes were not the favorites of religious conservatives. Shy talking about his religion, the elder Bush never did learn the language of born-again faith and redemption.

But what gave George H. W. Bush even a tentative claim to be Ronald Reagan's heir as standard-bearer of the religious right was his family: He may not have talked their talk, but he led a life that televangelists and conservative radio hosts could admire.

In a multigenerational family saga that might have been culled from the pages of an airport novel, the Bushes offered a touch of aristocracy, military heroism, and marriages based on common background that endured for decades and produced sprawling lawns full of children and grandchildren.

Barbara Bush still rules this roost, as perhaps the nation's leading symbol of female empowerment through traditional means. The fact that she asserts power through her husband and sons is somewhat beside the point: Her nurturing elevated them, and so her moral claim on them is always greater than theirs on her. She rebuffed her husband's enemies even when he, nice guy that he was, forgave them. When her eldest son proved to be a slow learner, she spent hours each day showing him flashcards, so he'd learn the words by sight.

Daughter-in-law Laura Bush is much quieter and in some ways less accomplished -- the family unit she nurtures is smaller. But she's also a symbol of strength and an example for women dealing with husbands they love but who disappoint them. When George W. turned 40, still drinking and unsuccessful in business, she dragged him into Bible study and told him to shape up or ship out. Within 14 years he was president of the United States.

The fact that she and her mother-in-law still walk a step behind their men, proudly bolstering their egos, gives them the dignity of female sacrifice without actually giving up much: The Bush wives share fully in their husbands' success, enjoying the status of their husbands' jobs.

But in Laura Bush's generation, unlike Barbara's, there are many women who've chosen to identify with their own careers. And in recent years, gender politics has become a treacherous intersection of the personal and the political. There are Republican wives who identify with their careers, like Marilyn Quayle and Lynne Cheney, but they usually have to make up for it by being crusaders for traditional values. There are Democratic wives like Tipper Gore who are primarily devoted to nurturing their families, but they have to make up for it by highlighting a formerly taboo social issue like mental health, to remove any air of '50s-era repression.

In this miasma, Laura Bush and Hillary Clinton stand out like beacons.

"Laura Bush doesn't have to open her mouth -- she communicates loud and clear what she thinks is a woman's role," says Elizabeth Sherman, a researcher at the Center for Public Leadership at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. "These cultural issues are just huge. I think they've helped Bush and they've helped Clinton. They work both ways."

In fact, Laura Bush has quietly raised as much money for her husband's reelection as has Vice President Dick Cheney, whose job has a heavy fund-raising component. She does it in part by creating a vivid contrast with Hillary Clinton. She visits cities to promote her dual causes of literacy and American history, then hosts a political fund-raiser at which she avoids partisan politics entirely. Her reticence -- her refusal to inject herself into the debate -- flatters both those who respect ladylike reserve and those who worry about pushy spouses exerting unelected influence.

But if women are judging the Bushes, it's George W., not Laura, who's under the microscope. In the eyes of some anxious professional women, it counts against him that he seems to want a wife who nurtures him at the expense of her own professional interests; it counts in Bill Clinton's favor that he married a woman with strong ambitions of her own.

Sherman, who comes from a conservative Southern background, is married to a former Republican congressman from Oklahoma, and is writing a book about women in politics, has traveled some of this path herself. To both men and women, she says, the Clintons represent a cultural attitude of "just doing your own thing," to which traditionalists reply: "With these people, anything goes. They don't respect the bedrock morality that we do."

The revelation that Bill Clinton conducted a sexual relationship in the Oval Office with an intern deepened both of these impressions. The surprise, to many, was that professional women largely stuck with Clinton: Their appreciation of a man perceived as respecting women as professionals overrode any judgments about the appropriateness of his affair or his infidelity.

For some women, the scandal caused them to identify even more strongly with the Clintons, as partners in a marriage unmoored by traditional gender roles and struggling to survive on respect alone. For them, moral judgment loomed as a deeper threat than moral turpitude. Messy personal lives somehow became a sign of freedom from traditional boundaries.

Sherman describes the Clinton cultural philosophy as a string of '60s mantras: "Be all you can be. Follow your stars. Equal rights for everyone. We have to respect all people."

upporting the idea that people should live up to their highest aspirations is good politics, though naturally more appealing to those with less, and those on their way up, than to those who already have all they want and are afraid of losing it.

Extending the same support to the world is more problematic, because the United States is the nation with the most and the greatest fear of losing it.

Bill Clinton's foreign policy was a mix of intervention and diplomacy, subject to differing interpretations. His promotion of global free trade -- a signature achievement -- can be viewed many ways: as a boon for world economic growth; as a Trojan horse to advance US interests at the expense of workplace conditions in the Third World; or even as a reward to traders everywhere at the expense of workers everywhere.

But few can misread the spirit with which he sold it to the Third World -- with open arms, stressing the importance of international development like the loving patriarch of a family of nations.

Clinton is remembered as perhaps the only political figure who could speak equally persuasively to people of all backgrounds, from Wall Street tycoons to tenured academics to racial minorities. He brought the same combination of empathy and salesmanship to his negotiations with prospective allies. And people outside the United States, where Clinton was very popular, viewed his strenuous style as a show of respect.

Alan Lepp, a staff attorney at the US Court of Appeals in Chicago who studied extensively in China, remembers watching President Clinton on C-Span as he spoke to students at Beijing University: "He was sitting before this large assemblage of students; it's set up with Clinton at one podium and [then Chinese president] Jiang Zemin at the other. Clinton spoke, and, if I remember, he talked about Taiwan, Tiananmen Square, Tibet. He did it in a tactful way, appealing to their common aspirations in this wonderful, relaxing way. You couldn't help but watch with amazement as this dynamic, charismatic symbol of youth connected with these students. It was mesmerizing for me. I'll never forget it."

Four years later, Lepp recalls flipping on C-Span and seeing George W. Bush talking to students at China's Qinghua University: "Bush was reading his speech, and he was lecturing the Chinese. He was saying, 'You need political freedom like we have.' He spoke a lot about religion. He spoke about his personal faith. I was offended because most Chinese grew up without any religious tradition. I found myself struck by his rigidity, his stiffness, his argumentativeness. He wasn't able to engage the students like Clinton. It was a difference in style. That's just what it is."

Style or substance? In Bush America, there's something a little suspicious about a US president who wows students in a communist nation. And to religious Christians, the absence of faith in China is not a local tradition to be tolerated; it's an act of repression to be condemned.

Bush's disinterest in how he's viewed outside the United States -- those macho declarations like "Bring 'em on" and "good riddance" when talking about foreign enemies, which raise hackles even in friendly countries -- has made Bush the hero of barroom stories in red-state America. It's not a big leap to see Bush standing up for America the way Sylvester Stallone does in the Rambo movies or the way Clint Eastwood cuts down the miscreants in Dirty Harry.

ill Clinton was the first American president whose career ended prematurely because of the 22d Amendment, which passed in 1951 and limits presidents to two terms. Dwight Eisenhower and Ronald Reagan also were barred from running for third terms, but Eisenhower was in his 70s and had suffered heart attacks, and Reagan was almost 80; Clinton, despite having narrowly prevailed in an impeachment trial, was still in his political prime.

When the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, struck the United States, incurring unusual sympathy in some parts of the world and hatred in others, Clinton's admirers couldn't help but wonder how he would have handled the emergency. Later, after President Bush made it clear that he believed unilateral expressions of force would strike fear into the regimes that harbored terrorists, critics painted a countervision of a worldwide coalition dedicated to rooting out terrorists.

At many junctures, Clinton's contrasting image hung over Bush. When the president refused to bend under withering criticisms, his resoluteness conjured memories of Clinton's various about-faces; when Bush's boorish remarks alienated allies, they raised memories of Clinton's intelligence and aura of good will.

Clinton himself seemed aware of the comparisons: In speech after speech, including his talk at the nightclub Dream, he declared that Americans could never arrest, capture, hold, or kill everyone who hates them -- "We have to start making more friends."

As the Democratic contenders fight one another for the right to take on Bush, Clinton seems to be helping all of them at once. He's itching to see Bush defeated, but realizes the vehicle for his own comeback won't be fully charged for four or, if a Democrat wins this year, eight years.

Much steadier as a senator than first lady, Hillary Clinton sought to showcase her commander-in-chief manner over the Thanksgiving holiday in Afghanistan and Iraq. She performed admirably but was upstaged by a familiar foe. George W. Bush's secret Thanksgiving in Iraq reversed a several-month decline in his approval ratings. Visiting American soldiers, he donned mufti and brandished a big photo-op turkey.

Bush showed he's still the star of the show -- and knows how to crash a Clinton party. Seemingly well positioned for 2004, he even has an heir in mind, his more cerebral brother Jeb, now the two-term governor of Florida.

Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton would probably run for president no matter who else was in the race, but another Bush and Clinton clash now seems written into the American culture the way genes get coded and passed down through the generations. The clash goes forward, with each new character adding a wrinkle or correcting a flaw in his or her patron. It's a clash whose nature seems boundless, turning the personal into the national, and changing the way the nation faces the world.

Peter S. Canellos is a Boston Globe deputy managing editor and Washington bureau chief.