January 21, 1997

A Day of Celebration, With Political Woes Left Behind for a Day

By FRANCIS X. CLINES

---

---

ASHINGTON -- When the trumpet blast of a preliminary fanfare burst upon the inaugural air, Chief Justice William Rehnquist removed his snappy-looking winter cap, all the better to swear in President Clinton for another term.

Out in the audience massing westward from the Capitol, Johnnie Cochran Jr., O.J. Simpson's criminal defense lawyer, searched out his VIP seat, having finally completed his unofficial photo ops with fawning citizens who mobbed him in passing.

By then a scalper named Nassau Scotty, from Levittown, N.Y., had departed the scene, having sold $1,000 worth of the nominally free inaugural tickets and having no need of the ceremony himself. "This was nothing compared to four years ago," he groused. "I got $20 a pop then, today $12.50, $10. It's better when there's a new president."

This proposition was hardly entertained by the throng that happily attended the second Clinton inaugural oath, a 75-minute ceremony that suspended all other events of government. Even Speaker Newt Gingrich, on the eve of the grueling ethics sanctions he faces from the House, was a mere face in the crowd, listening passively as the president spoke to the nation from the bunting-draped West Front of the Capitol.

Later, Gingrich clinked champagne glasses with the president at the inaugural luncheon in the Capitol's Statuary Hall and even professed to discern "a sense of bipartisan excitement" in the air. The mood seemed closer to one of bipartisan standoff, however. Only minutes after the oath, two rival House leaders went on television to fill air time before the luncheon and were soon debating the relative scandal merits of president and speaker as the government is renewed.

The city at large seemed to want little of that on Monday as it settled into a parade mood of national triumph, a mood proclaimed clarion clear from the Capitol steps in the singing of Jessye Norman. Her powerful voice echoed down the Mall and rang among the capital office warrens. "Oh, freedom!" she exulted on a day that saw the sunshine strengthen with the festivities.

"Great singing, and I'd say O.K. speech," one college student declared in hurrying from the Capitol oath to the parade route on Pennsylvania Avenue. For all the glittering marching groups to follow, the crowd's enthusiasm bubbled up early the instant Chelsea Clinton and her first parents exited their limousine to walk the last two blocks to the reviewing stand.

Miss Clinton stood out, her smile unguarded, her hair atumble. She was as unabashedly excited as any other teen-ager along the way, doffing her topcoat to wave more easily to the crowd and pointing at individuals as the VIP stands came into view and she seemed to spot personal friends.

"I came on my own from Cleveland," said one parade watcher, Jerry Watkins. "Just got in the car last night to try and see the president. I been thinking of it ever since he shook my hand last summer when he came through on his campaign."

Watkins said he was not a party worker, merely an impulsive citizen. "There's still time for him," he said as the president headed for four more years of incumbency with even supporters like Watkins sensing the need for clearer definition from him. "He can still leave his mark, his legacy, I think."

This point was echoed by others. "I'm behind Bill Clinton all the way, but I was kind of shocked when he signed that welfare law," said Harriet Saft, who cared enough about the welfare overhaul to hand out protest handbills outside the Capitol swearing-in party. "I mean, I know people -- disabled, legal aliens and others -- who are going to be hurt by that law."

One Clintonite who had waited through 12 Republican White House years to cheer the sight of a Democratic president was back in the crowd for the second inauguration, his expectations lowered. "It's different this time, I'd say sad in comparison with four years ago," said Michael McDonagh. "With what he's done on health care and welfare, I'm disappointed. So there's not the same spark now."

But the dominant mood was far from bittersweet, with people buying up Clinton souvenirs and hot chocolate along the parade route. The crowd's array of bobbing headgear seemed itself a patriotic tribute, from ten-gallon hats to at least one checkered burnoose. The inaugural verse that puzzled some in the Capitol crowd when read by Miller Williams, the invited Arkansas poet, included a couplet worthy of the parade route: "How does our garden grow? With waving hands, all hardly in a row."

At the Capitol oath-taking, there seemed a wary respect for the president from the array of ranking Republicans. One of them, Sen. Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, one of the president's chief doubters and tormentors through the two years of Whitewater hearings, studied him from eight rows behind, rubbing his hands ceaselessly in the cold as Clinton was sworn in once more despite the hearings and all else in his way.

Clinton seemed determined to have a grand time, from ceremony to simpler turnings. In the morning, he beamed and nodded as if being personally serenaded by the soloist at the Metropolitan AME Church who offered a booming rendition of "His Eye Is on the Sparrow." At lunch, he seemed to find special comfort in dwelling not so much on victory as on the unbroken tradition of the day. "We been doing this a long time," he told the politicians and guests gathered before the nation's stony-staring ancients in Statuary Hall.

With a one-day reprieve from the West Wing workday, some Clinton aides seemed downright frisky in the light of another inaugural day. "Isn't this fun?" asked Doug Sosnik, the president's re-election political director and now his new counselor, darting down a Capitol staircase as if running off to the circus. "We're going to be talking about That Bridge," he added with a certain battle-weary playfulness.

The president mentioned That Bridge only twice as he talked of "time and chance" in the nation's history and searched ahead. "We will sustain America's journey," he vowed, his voice echoing out beyond a clutch of pundits down below him in the front rows to ordinary Americans beyond.

"I can be president, the first Mexican-American president," 17-year-old Ruben Cano insisted with startling flatness from his place in the crowd. The honor student from Las Cruces, N.M., was finding a life lesson in his first visit to Washington, invited as a civics prize for his involvement in student political affairs. "First I will be governor of New Mexico," he declared, more determined than smiling. (And who could doubt him openly, with that photo in mind of a teen-age Bill Clinton taking the measure of President John F. Kennedy?)

His mother, Ida Cano, was first in the crowd to endorse Ruben. "That Clinton," she said, "the part where he said it's not government's fault, but the people who must do the work, that I understand.

"I got off welfare and worked as a stoop laborer to put my kids through school," she said, patting Ruben on the back, finding something very personal in all the resolve of Inauguration Day.