Word: rallentando
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...brilliance consists in this: second terms are famous for being times of dreary brownout. In music it is called rallentando, a gradual slackening of tempo, a winding down. Dwight Eisenhower's presidency, for example, slipped into senescence in the late '50s. The jinx falls especially on those Presidents who return to the White House on landslides--Richard Nixon, for example, who annihilated George McGovern in 1972, and then, less than two years later, was forced to resign, a step ahead of the Senate's tar and feathers. Lyndon Johnson's great victory in 1964 over Barry Goldwater did not make...
Presumably Clinton, with 49% of the vote this time, is less subject to the Law of Rallentando. Still, experience argues against the idea of a President's even attempting a second term...
What's needed to ward off incipient rallentando is a big, distracting counternoise, a Zarathustra crescendo. No one would wish Bill Clinton to achieve exactly the second-term salvation--if that is the word--that history arranged for Franklin Roosevelt. F.D.R.'s second term represented a fairly dramatic falling off from the brisk exuberance of the first. Roosevelt tried to pack the Supreme Court, with humiliating results. The Great Depression ground on. Abroad, the international order began to disintegrate. America split bitterly over what, if anything, to do about it. All of this set the stage for F.D.R. to transcend...
...cigarettes, or filtered either. They play poker sometimes, or blackjack, and one throwback even asks for a Jack Daniels. A group clusters around the seats behind and plays a game of Jeopardy on a laptop computer -- in answer to which the candidate's press staff, quite justly, chants in rallentando: "Boring, boring, BORING!" The journalists all have toys White never imagined -- cellular telephones, laptops, tiny portable television sets, all the magic paraphernalia connecting them to the New World that America has entered...
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