Last week the Postal Service issued the Elvis stamp; this week, Bill Clinton will be inaugurated a the 42nd president of the United States.
This combination of circumstances is not exactly an accident.
Even before Election Day, people were wondering what sort of Elvis a President Clinton might be. "Clinton's Elvis has little to do with the transcendent aspects of the King." Richard Goldstein wrote in October for the Village Voice, "and much to do with what made that cat from Tupelo a star. Elvis played to the girls with his hips, his hair and his eyes. He set a style for male sexuality that was at once ecstatic and needy--a far cry from the strong, silent type."
For that matter, some people were wondering if a President Clinton would be any kind of Elvis at all. Waiting for Clinton's victory speech on election night, Steve Perry, editor of Minneapolis' City Pages, was drawn into a fantasy that can hardly have been his alone.
"The statehouse doors open," Perry thought, "and here's Bill--in a white rhinestone jumpsuit!...I imagined him stepping to the microphone, that trademark Elvis curl playing around his lips, hinting at once at an arrogant faith in his own power and secret available to all who believed."
Perry went on to see Clinton stripping off the disguise, as it were, that he'd worn throughout the campaign, revealing himself "a bold progressive"--as if beneath that jumpsuit were the old rebel threads of the '50s rocker. But then Clinton does appear, in the flesh, "spouting the same old neo-liberalisms," and perry hit a bum note as the dreams ends (so soon!): "He's no Elvis." Aw...
Well, it's unlikely the rest of the country is going to give up on the metaphor quite so easily. Not long ago in these pages, Ian Shoales named Elvis Presley "America's secret angel": That means there must be a certain unspoken understanding of Elvis as the embodiment of everything good about the country, and also as the devil in disguise. It's about time a president was judged on the Elvis standard, and vice-versa.
The metaphor of Clinton as Elvis is powerful because of a sense that we may be able to catch what we want from this man, what we hope for and what we most fear, if we think of him as Elvis Presley rather than merely as himself. But which Elvis? Elvis contained multitudes, he contradicted himself every time he opened his mouth or took a step He was the boy unafraid of his own difference from everyone around himself, ready to claim his territory and stand his ground; he was the man who would do anything to be accepted. He broke every rule, then begged Richard Nixon to make him a narcotics agent. He embraced the values of family, clan living, faith and charity, and rotted from the inside. He was the sexiest thing America had ever seen, and was pleased to play the sap, a girl toy, your teddy bear.
Elvis Presley is our most extreme embodiment of possibility and disruption, of renewal and defeat. Surrounding Elvis is an aura of irreducible glamour and desire, an American mirror, a mirror that gives back horror and grace, success and failure, pride and shame. It's no wonder that, in one way or another, America now asks if Bill Clinton will be singing "Anyway You Want Me (That's How I will Be)" or "Hound Dog." The identification of Bill Clinton with Elvis raises real questions, not only about who Bill Clinton is, but about who we are; that's why the identification is made.
With the answers ahead of us, though, it's worth looking back on the strange roles Elvis Presley has already played in the election just past. After all, while columnist Dave Barry is surely right when he says that "If Elvis were alive today, he'd probably be dead by now," in no presidential year was Elvis Presley so inseparable from the action as in 1992, a clean 15 years after his death.
Following the conventions, a George Bush sample record--presidential speeches cut up into spurious pronouncements and fitted with a rhythm track--was released under under the title "Hard Times," and credited to "fresh Bush and the Invisible Man." Framed by alternating choruses--a harsh male chant of "Hard times, hard times' and a rhapsodic female "We can change the world, we can change America"--the phantom president offered such nostrums as "Take-two-aspirin-and-call-me-after-the-election." It was funny, but when Bush was made to cry "I-SAW-ELVIS!" it was spooky, because you knew he had.
The Elvis year and the presidential year began on separate tracks that soon converged. The Elvis year made its first real headlines in February, in the National Enquirer: "His own stepmom reveals shocking truth at last--ELVIS & HIS MOM WERE LOVERS!"--a titillation more or less matched in August by Dayton Daily News cartoonist Mike Peters, who rendered Bush campaign faxes on Bill Clinton's supposed fear of "bimbo eruptions" as the latest issue of the "GOP Enquirer": "CLINTON CARRYING ELVIS' LOVE CHILD."
Soon after the Enquirer hullabaloo, Molly Ivins was rating presidential hopeful Paul Tsongas "minus-zero on the Elvis scale"; by the spring, interest in the Postal Service's Elvis-stamp election seemed to overwhelm public concern for the primaries themselves. What the intensity of the national joke-cum-struggle over the choice between older and younger Elvis images demonstrated was, among other things, a profound dissatisfaction with the presidential candidates actually on view; the Elvis election was more fun, and in some distant way more meaningful, than the real one. Thus when Ross Perot emerged to fill the vacuum Elvis' ghost had revealed, Perot was not only himself, steely-eyed Mr. Fixit: he was also the weirdest Elvis stand-in anyone had ever seen.
The weirdest, but not, in this political year, the most eager. In March, the press corps' nickname for lifelong Elvis fan Bill Clinton was a human-interest joke on a slow day ("Elvis with a calculator" was one of the better variations); as the primary season wound down with Clinton, far behind both Bush and Perot, the sure winner of a seemingly worthless prize, a wan version of the Big E's lazy grin seemed nearly all he had left. When Clinton closed a talk show interview with a verse of "Don't Be Cruel" it sounded like a loser's plea.
Then came the great shift. Perot's campaign collapsed, Bush fell back, and Clinton surged, as if truly warming to his alias. By mid-July one "Elvis Aron Presley" was listed in press handouts as the "Entertainment Coordinator" of the Democratic Convention ("He reportedly died in 1977," read the official convention bio.)
Sen. Al Gore began his speech accepting the vice-presidential nomination with the confession that he'd "been dreaming of this moment since I was a kid growing up in Tennessee--that one day, I'd have the chance to come here to Madison Square Garden and be the warm-up act for Elvis."
As Bush accepted his own party's nomination in August, his attacks on his rival were themselves couched in bizarre Elvisisms. Clinton was on all sides of every issue, Bush complained: "He's been spotted in more places than Elvis Presley." "I guess you'd say his plan really is 'Elvis Economics'," the president continued: "America will be checking into the 'Heartbreak Hotel.'"
Out on the hustings, Bush repeated these lines for weeks--even as the GOP hired an Elvis impersonator to dog the Clinton-Gore campaign bus with offerings of baloney sandwiches--but they had a petulant, even vaguely jealous tone, like 1950s bluenoses sniffing at "jungle music" and "Elvis the Pelvis." In early October, with Clinton holding a strong lead and press references to his campaign plane as "Air Elvis" now not exactly a joke at all, Bush still could not let go. His Clinton, or his Elvis, had turned into a tar baby. "I finally figured out why (Clinton) compares himself to Elvis," the president said--though Clinton never had. "The minute he has to take a stand on something, he starts wiggling." The tone was sour, you could almost hear Elvis' ghost objecting (Elvis always hated the word "wiggle"), and even Clinton finally felt free to join the conversation, as much as fan as candidate. "Bush is always comparing me to Elvis in sort of unflattering ways," Clinton said on Oct. 12. "Well, I don't think Bush would have liked Elvis very much."
It was a charge Bush couldn't porkrind and it raised the question of why Bush would risk alienating masses of working-class white Southerners (translation: Reagan Democrats) with remarks that in fact disparaged a cultural hero as surely as they did Bush's own opponent. The answer is at once simple and mysterious.
The simple part is this: Slap Elvis on anything and you'll be noticed. Elvis in a campaign speech is a guaranteed soundbite on that night's news, maybe even a headline in tomorrow's papers. But if Elvis is a hook, he--or it--is also a hook already lodged in millions of hearts. You're guaranteed a response when you pull the Elvis cord, but there's no guarantee what the response will be.
For Bush it may have backfired, in a small way. for Russell Feingold it exploded--in a big way. Running third in a three-way primary race for the Democratic senatorial nomination in Wisconsin, he ran a TV ad featuring an Enquirer-style "ELVIS ENDORSES FEINGOLD!" headline. The idea was to counter charges against himself ("Don't believe everything you read"); the spot turned Feingold into the Elvis candidate.
The next day everyone in the state suddenly knew his name--and that he had a sense of humor. Feingold won the primary in a landslide. His new opponent, incumbent Sen. Robert Kasten, a down-the-line Reaganite, swiftly got on the air with an Elvis impersonator denying that Elvis really endorsed Feingold. Kasten missed the joke; Feingold went into the final stretch of the race slightly ahead. Appearing with Feingold at Milwaukee's Mecca Arena a few days before the election, Bill Clinton brought the crowd to a hush: "The next to last concert Elvis ever sang was right here in this arena. Now, it's well-known that I commune with his spirit regularly, and just as I walked in here today, he said, 'I'm for Russ Feingold, not Bob Kasten.'" A few days after the election, Feingold was asked whether Elvis had truly supported him. "Well, he never said otherwise," said the senator-elect, whose favorite Elvis song is "Don't Be Cruel." "I think Mr. Presley, to the extent that he's involved with politics, stayed with us to the very end."
And then there is Clinton himself. Back in June, when electoral college surveys divided the map of the states between Bush and Perot and noted flatly that "Gov. Bill Clinton is currently not a factor in the race," Clinton had nothing left to lose. He took his saxophone to the Arsenio Hall show, put on a pair of dark glasses, and blew "Heartbreak Hotel." I think this incident will ultimately come into focus as the moment in which Clinton turned the race around, stepping forward as if to say, All right. Who cares. Let's rip it up.
It was the first time in the campaign Clinton was more Elvis than calculator. The spirit of freedom in Elvis' best music is a freedom of self-discovery; this night, Clinton accepted the gift. Playing the old song as best he could, he was more fan than star, more himself than Elvis, but perhaps just Elvis enough.
(Some of this material appeared, in very different form, in the New York Times {Oct. 27, 1992}. Greil's favorite Elvis song is "Reconsider Baby.")