Salon
7 February 2000
10) Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address (January 27). “We remain a new nation,” Clinton said. “As long as our dreams outweigh our memories, America will remain forever young.” “Could Reagan have said it better?” asked a friend, and the answer is, no, he couldn’t have said it better, or half as well. Reagan couldn’t have brought off the Dylan reference as if it had come to him out of the air. And I doubt if Reagan would have done what Clinton did just a paragraph earlier—when, caught in the coded metaphors of American speech, he had a Founding Father (“When the framers finished crafting our Constitution, Benjamin Franklin stood in Independence Hall and reflected on a painting of the sun, low on the horizon. He said, ‘I have often wondered whether that sun was rising or setting. Today,’ Franklin said, ‘I have the happiness to know it is a rising sun’) name a house in New Orleans. Or, as another friend said, “Cue the Animals.”