At issue was Clinton's testimony regarding an affair with a White House intern, originally given during a deposition in a later-dismissed sexual harassment case brought by one Paula Jones, a secretary employed by the state of Arkansas during Clinton's time as its governor; now, after more than a year of leaked and manipulated testimony meant to drive Clinton from office through extra-legal means, Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr had lost the formal battle. Clinton had been impeached by the House; he was acquitted by the Senate. The crusade on the part of Republicans in the House of Representatives to expel Clinton from Washington had destroyed not their chosen enemy but two of their own leaders, House Speaker Newt Gingrich and almost-speaker Bob Livingston.

Not that the victory ennobled the victor, Stone said: "He reminds me so much of Nixon. The pathology. The need to lie. A President who says, I smoked but I didn't inhale. A President who refuses to be proud of, or even to acknowledge, that he didn't go to Vietnam for reasons of principle, and makes it sound like he's running away from what he did. Total pandering to the right wing. Clinton and the teenager. Like an Elvis movie. The poor man couldn't even get laid well."

A month later, in an interview with journalist Jack Newfield, New York Times columnist Frank Rich was trying to make ordinary sense of the same bizarre series of events, and found himself speaking the same language -- a language in which a metaphor that at first seems transparent is almost immediately opaque. "Do you think the far right hates Clinton more for cultural than for political reasons?" Newfield asked. "Do they just see him as the avatar of the 1960s with sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll?" "Yes," Rich said, as if nothing could be simpler. Not that he wanted anyone identifying him or his generation with Clinton anymore than Stone did, just because they were all about the same age: "In some ways it's absurd because many people who still believe in the Left of the 1960s would find Clinton a very poor example of it."

Rich recited the litany: "He wasn't really a serious Vietnam war protester; he was an opportunist even then. We know he smoked marijuana, but he's hardly an exemplar of the Ken Kesey LSD generation. Even his taste in Sixties music, I would say, is extremely suspect ... It's kind of preposterous. It's like if you hated Elvis Presley, choosing Dick Clark as the person to focus on. I'm not a Clinton fan, but he's just not worthy of the kind of hatred that everyone has for him."

Why are these two interesting people drawn so helplessly to the identification of Bill Clinton with Elvis Presley? Trying to pull a usable metaphor out of the air, why are they drawn to that identification so imaginatively? The idea of Clinton's presidency as an Elvis movie (presumably the 1967 "Double Trouble," in which nightclub singer Guy Lambert is pursued both by a smitten 17-year-old heiress and a calculating woman his own age) is almost irresistible. But the momentum in the identification of Elvis and Clinton isn't about ideas. Why are Stone, who as a Hollywood moviemaker can get more women than the president, and Rich, who during the year of impeachment came perhaps too close to crossing his newspaper's line of tolerance of Bill Clinton, drawn to this identification so personally? In the moment in the conversation when Elvis arrives -- like Superman or a bad conscience -- to dramatize or mystify what is otherwise a string of unexamined assumptions meant mostly to establish that the speaker is better than Bill Clinton, one can glimpse a piece of each speaker's life story: His attempt, in the 1950s or 1960s, to define himself by and against Elvis Presley, and how uncertain each is about how the story may have turned out. They are almost saying: What if Bill Clinton is Elvis Presley's true inheritor?

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