It's going to be very hard to Clinton to overcome. It's hard to see that now. Twenty years from now I think the answer will be clear. Well, I think they, along with everything else that's gone on in these last decades really, has weakened and diminished the presidency. I'm not sure the culture would have accepted that.
Respect demands a certain kind of idealization and a distancing even.
And I think we've lost that not only because of the movies but because of the whole way the media treats the president nowadays, and I worry that if we needed to do something as a nation, I'm not sure we feel that sense of authority coming from a presidency. Well, it's even interesting going back to George Washington, which was mentioned earlier. When Parson Weems brought that popular culture book in which he claimed that George Washington said I'll never tell a lie, which wasn't true, he felt that the country couldn't stay together unless it idealized its president. Now, we've obviously come a long way from that. But to another extent maybe we can't follow a leader unless there's some measure of belief and trustworthiness in that leader, and to the extent that not only the movies but our popular culture is demeaning that day by day, we're losing some sense of that resonance, I think.