Clintonisms.

To read Julia Gorin’s Clintonisms. The Amusing, Confusing, and Suspect Musings of Billary is to be transported back to the time of the Clinton presidency. With no time off for good behavior.

In those days, anyone still able to make bail camped out by their mailbox for the next edition of The American Spectator. Month after month, we could read there the most amazing stories of people who had by some cosmic joke come to control the civil and military power of the federal government of the United States. Though two highly intelligent people with law degrees from Yale, no less, Bill and Hillary Clinton were, it became clear, individuals suited instead to careers as Demolition Derby drivers. For eight years, we reveled in the spectacle of their going after ideological and legal enemies as they would have had they been behind the wheel, respectively, of a 1963 Studebaker Wagonaire and a 4-door 1959 DeSoto Sportsman Friday evenings in Conway, Arkansas.

Julia Gorin has made a careful compilation of the Clintons' own words with her own witty commentary and some great lines from Saturday Night Live, Dennis Miller, and Jay Leno, among others. It is a crystal clear picture of two limited people whose inner compasses were so bent they should have gotten no closer to the White House than the second window of the Hot Springs McDonalds.

Our natural temptation is to think that any resident of the White House and his wife are pretty much like the previous ones. Probably, we hope that the electoral process winnows out poseurs, flaneurs, gamblers, climbers, and others living principle-free lives. Maybe we even think that that process identifies and disqualifies people who seek the office of Commander in Chief but who have actual contempt for the nation's armed forces. Perhaps, too, we are tempted to believe that even if the scrutinizing powers of the electorate are inadequate to the task of choosing the national leaders, a glib sex addict taking a seat in the Oval Office would somehow be elevated to a higher level of conduct and consciousness by the enormity of the privilege bestowed and responsibility encountered.

Little prepared the nation for a man who viewed being president as a great way to get laid.

Gorin reminds us of the reigning spirit of the Age of Clinton — astonishment. How, we could only wonder, could two such people have risen to the top of American politics when their only motivation was to advance their private interests by any expedient means? If there had been anything noble in their thinking in Arkansas times, it must surely have been confiscated by Customs at the Tennessee border.

It is hard to describe a vacuum. How many different ways can you say "not much there"? Gorin's solution has been to present the Clintons in their own words, rather like searching for a ghost in the attic by using neon spray paint. Page after page, we are immersed in iterations of and variants on Bill's now-immortal scholastic musings upon the verb "to be," conduct that would embarrass Al Sharpton, and interspousal communication that would blister paint.

Gorin fails only in that she sheds no light at all on the 1992-2000 suspension of the laws of physics that allowed (a) law firm billing records to materialize in the Clinton bungalow, (b) Vince Foster to float from the parking lot of Ft. Marcy Park to his nearby locus terminatio, and (c) and female breasts spontaneously to spring from their place of confinement into the presidential hand. Surely experts could have been consulted.

If we overlook this omission, we can see Gorin's keen intelligence, dry wit, and comedienne's gift for language have conspired to produce a most entertaining book. Clintonisms is also an instructive read — however bereft of inspiration and uplift it might be — that is best savored four or five pages at a time or produced at dinner parties to refresh fading memories of truly bizarre times.

As Hillary's hopes revive in the wake of the r evelations about Obama's 20-year power nap in the pews of the Church of the Holy Fever, it's also something to peruse on the eve of the general election in November. It will re-alert you to (a) her modest but "burning desire to do what I can" in aid of "remaking . . . the American way of politics, government, indeed life" and (b) what a crazy mistake it would be to give her an opportunity to try.