Cat got your lip? - Bill Clinton's annoying personal habits - Column

National Review, June 7, 1993 by Andrew Ferguson

Am I missing something, or has Bill Clinton given up lower-lip-biting? I watch our President's every TV appearance, and as the hundred days drew to a close I sensed a slight change in deportment. Photo ops came and went, and not once did I see him bite his lower lip. Perhaps this is a retrenchment, or a bow to political reality, or a reappraisal arrived at after careful consideration of a variety of viewpoints - or perhaps, as the White House would say, my premise itself is mistaken, and the President has never bitten his lower lip.

But that clearly isn't true, for the lower-lip-bite is one of Clinton's signatures, an act of self-definition as unmistakable as a Jack Benny doubletake or a Jimmy Carter eye-boggle. I consulted a videotape of our President's most extensive recent public appearance, his solo press conference of April 23. Every other trademark was abundantly in evidence. He smiled when there was nothing to smile about. He crinkled his eyes and chuckled even though nobody had said anything funny. He paused thoughtfully when he clearly wasn't thinking. The minutes ticked by. And then, three-quarters of the way through the allotted time, he called on a pretty reporter - and at last the front teeth slipped out and dug into the lower lip ... but only for a fleeting moment before they disappeared. The President quickly recovered by doing a lurk Douglas jaw flex.

That's it - a 45-minute appearance and precisely one lip-bite. There were moments in the campaign - recall the presidential debates - when Clinton's lip-biting grew so frequent, so intense, you wanted to call a medic. It was a gesture of innocence and humility. At the pulpit of a black church, let's say, as the congregation swelled in a typhoon of Amens and adulation, the candidate would raise his head and bite his lower lip for a full quarter-minute or more, his eyes glistening, his countenance sending a silent message heavenward: Not my will, but Thine, be done.

And it worked. After the uneven performance of the first hundred days, Clinton is said to want to recreate himself yet again. Which makes this abandonment of the lip-bite doubly puzzling. Why the lip-bite, and not the sling-cut, two-button suits that make the presidential paunch look like the prow of the Santa Maria? Even odder, while the lip-bite is deleted, for whatever reason, from the President's vocabulary of sign language, his equally rehearsed, similarly transparent hand gestures remain in full force.

These too are signatures of the Clinton persona. Most famous, perhaps, is the JFK Air Jab. The Air Jab takes two forms: index finger forcefully, even accusatorily extended, as in Ask not ..."; and thumb pressed flat behind the fist, with the fleshy tip protruding. Here the forcefulness seems tempered, its explosive capacity held in check. It is indispensable for underlining the word "bold."

The President, of course, is a pro-business Democrat, so in selecting other hand gestures he has borrowed from the world of commerce, specifically from Lee Iacocca, whose television ads taught an entire generation of public speakers to count using their thumb first. Ticking off the virtues of the K-car, Iacocca always led with the thumb. The effect was no-nonsense; it also deflected a potential problem, which was that the K-car didn't have any virtues. No matter. Since Iacocca, only sissies count using the index finger for number one. Nissan owners probably count that way. The President does not.

In the quintessential Clinton gesture, the President uses two hands. Fingers splayed, shoulders hunched, he brings his hands to the center of his chest, to his heart, metaphorically to the core of his being. Sometimes the hands are loosely cupped before either pectoral, calling to mind the old sexist joke about the girl with arthritis in both hands. It is a semaphore of trustworthiness, usually employed when he is saying something untrue. In the April press conference, when he said that "almost all" of his proposed tax increases "come from the highest-income people in our society," his hands folded toward his heart. "It is not merely that these things that I'm saying to you are untrue," his hands seem to say. "They are untrue in a deeply intimate way that is essential to who I am as a person." It takes two hands to handle a whopper.

Like the lip bite, this repertoire of fists and jabs and sweeping arms may soon be up for reappraisal. There was a moment in the press conference when the studiedness broke down, and all the hand gestures erupted at once. He was defending the North American Free Trade Agreement. "This is an idea battle," he said. The hands moved inward. "Not every one of these things can be distilled simply into politics." The thumbs popped up; then the fingers jabbed the air in confusion. "A lot of these things honestly involve real debates over ideas," he said, "over who's right and wrong about the world toward which we're moving." His arms swept out, then back. It was the finest moment of his Presidency, for he was saying something incontestably true. He looked like a man who was drowning.