P. J. O'Rourke has an article in the current Atlantic Monthly that attempts to make sense of the Clinton presidency. His basic conclusion is that Clinton isn't really the 60's hipster people make him out to be because of his sexual appetite. O'Rourke's feeling is that the presidency is by its very nature as far away from the sixties as you can get, despite whoever is in the White House.
He frames his thoughts around the one time he interviewed Clinton. He had traveled to Little Rock in 1992 and was conducting an interview of the then governor with Jann Wenner, William Greider and Hunter S. Thompson for Rolling Stone Magazine. O'Rourke has just caught Clinton in a gaffe about policy when:
"There was a sudden great changing of subject. And doubtless there have been many such sudden changings of subject in subsequent interviews with subsequent interviewers who just happened to know something about socialized medicine, voluntary service of a mandatory nature, random shuffling of government bureaucracies, incoherent foreign policy, gays in the military, peace in the Middle East, and the rest of the issues, policies, and programs of an eventful Administration during which nothing much was accomplished."
"The problem, it seemed to me on that day, was that Clinton is a little haphazard at picking what to care about and whom to share it with. (This turned out to be, as insights go, an understatement.) He had made an unlucky Vulcan mind-meld with me on the subject of Bangladesh. And then he turned to Hunter Thompson, of all people, and said with wholehearted fervor, 'We're going to put one hundred thousand new police officers on the street.'
"I was up all night persuading Hunter that this was not a personal threat. Well, with Hunter one is going to be up all night anyway. But that was not a cool thing to say to the good Doctor, or a hip thing. Churchill was cooler than that. FDR was hipper. And if they had made this mistake, they would have noticed, and would have bowled for the spare. Churchill would have bought drinks until dawn. FDR would have swapped cigarette holders and let Hunter play with his wheelchair. Clinton went home to the governor's mansion, probably to check polling data."