As an exercise in political symbolism, President-elect Clinton's first pre-inaugural visit to Washington was a winner. Displaying the expertise in imagery that helped him capture the presidency, he paid ritual visits to the White House and Capitol Hill, stopped by a fund-raiser for wife Hillary's Children's Defense Fund, hobnobbed with elite Georgetown insiders and went for a stroll through a poor Georgia Avenue neighborhood of outsiders.
Bill Clinton may have run for office as an apostle of change, but that does not mean he will fight Washington like Jimmy Carter did or fight government in the fashion of Ronald Reagan. Rather, if we read him right, he intends to co-opt both while signaling to the rest of the country that he is a man of the people who buys de-caf at McDonald's and jogs city streets.
If Mr. Clinton had been in charge of Republican background noise, he couldn't have planned it better. During his visit, the chief news from the GOP was the assertion by Mississippi's Republican governor that this is "a Christian nation" (so much for non-Christians of assorted ilk) and the admission of the State Department that it had been "heinously" used by Bush political appointees nosing around Mr. Clinton's passport records.