President Clinton's inauguration - 22 January 1993

Well, the great thumping, glittering pageant of the Clinton inauguration turned out to have cost somewhere between $33 and $38 million, 10 times the commentators kept saying, the cost of the inaugural of the last Democratic president, the frugal Jimmy Carter.

The, well let's say 33, millions were subscribed by corporations and lobbyists who since this administration promises to be as clean as a hound's tooth will expect nothing in return. The collateral for these whacking interest-free loans is the promised revenue from the sale of tickets, seats in the many stands, favoured standing positions along the route so on, also the considerable look coming from the sponsors of TV commercials played mainly before and after and then during the three-hour parade along Pennsylvania Avenue.

I haven't heard of anybody yet grumbling about this whopping bill, which at the last three inaugurals was regularly lamented and bewailed by Democrats since the last three ceremonies inaugurated Republican presidents, Reagan twice, Bush once. Why is this? Sixty years ago, Franklin Roosevelt defined and deplored the Republicans as the party of privilege, plutocrats, he called them, and economic royalists. Though the great majority of Republicans then were small farmers, but the stigma has stuck though the make-up and the ideology of the parties has changed greatly.

This time there's been, so far as I know, no lamentations in the liberal-leaning press about the $33 million splurge. Of course, Republicans would be unlikely to complain about a sin for which once every four years they are automatically blamed, but I don't think the surprisingly general acceptance of this largesse is just because it's a Democratic president. I think, I think judging from the human atmosphere of the huge onlooking crowds as also from the random television interviews with hundreds of human beings from Alaska to Florida, I judge that there's a general air of goodwill towards the new young president right across the the moral gamut from the very young to the very old.

His popularity across the country is now over 60%, though only 43% of the voters went for him. It's something to do with the upright almost innocent energy of these two young men. There has never been a younger pair of president and vice president and they presented – in their touring bus during the campaign and playing with schoolchildren in classrooms and sitting up on coffee-shop stools and munching hamburgers with every sort of ordinary citizen – they presented a new face of government, rebuking the old engraved images of self-satisfied scheming old rogues.

Now nothing could be more hackneyed in the business of political campaigning, no more tired routine than the daily doings I've just described, buddying up to the folks, especially in small towns in the schools, at petrol stations, lunch counters, everybody has done it for ever, except Franklin Roosevelt. He was a patriarch in a cloak revered by the people and he didn't need to exchange reverence for votes, he was I suppose the last in the Western world of government leaders who made a success of paternalism, nobody can do it anymore.

The point about the old buddy routine is that it's only effective when you the audience feel that that's the way the man behaves in everyday life. Governor Dukakis four years ago considered as a buddy was a disaster, he reminded me of the very sincere but the very genteel Mrs Eleanor Roosevelt visiting a coal mine. Mr Bush was really not much better on all such occasions; he left the indelible impression of a Yale man being a jolly good sport at the servant ball. But Clinton didn't have to learn to perform this role, he was born to it, he is a maniac for junk food ordered or picked up round the corner at two in the morning, he really haunts as a second home all the eating places that Mr Bush and Mr Nixon even Jimmy Carter had to strain to pretend to like – the burger chains, the super-duper Tex Mex joints, the home and hearth of the french fries with the double malted. What this does to the White House chef, I can't imagine. I can imagine that there'll be a new one.

Well, that's only one side and to every generation since the first baby boomers an engaging side to Mr Clinton who now finds himself after being 18 months ago a virtual unknown across the land now finds himself the 42nd president. Some of you asked me, which previous inaugural this one reminded me off? Well I've been watching them since the rain-flooded second inaugural of Roosevelt in 1937, which presented a display of more thousands of umbrellas than have ever been exposed together outdoors.

What I recall immediately about the first Reagan inaugural was the sight of a seemingly endless motorcade of great shining Cadillacs and gleaming people inside and the curious contradiction of celebrating a poor boy from a small town in Illinois with all the glitz and money and sleekness that Hollywood could provide. Frankly, it was a shock after the Jimmy Carter inaugural, which tried and succeeded in recalling at least the spirit Thomas Jefferson wished to show at his inaugural. You know that Jefferson, the third president took a very sniffy view of George Washington's inaugural and his demeanour in public ceremonies. Washington, by the way, had not, when he was elected the first president, not given his name to a capital city, there wasn't one yet, he took the oath on Wall Street.

Jefferson objected to the, to the folderols of Washington's inaugural. Washington arrived in full uniform and he had outriders and he made a point of not being touched, he shook no hands, he expected and got everybody to stand while he was being sworn in. It couldn't have been more than 100 people present at most and by today's lights it would be thought ludicrously unfittingly amateur and modest, but Jefferson found it offensive, a ceremony, he thought, as if looking to monarchical models.

Jefferson felt that this new Republic should be distinguished by what he called Republican simplicity for his inaugural, Washington the city had been invented by then, there was no ceremony, no parade. With two friends he rode to the capital, he delivered a little speech, it was inaudible, then untied his horse and rode back to his boarding house and sat down for dinner, a little late, below the salt. There's something perpetually attractive about that scene of that occasion and I have a suspicion that it's what most people everywhere would secretly most like America to be, but folks like me had better stop yearning for Jefferson's Republican simplicity. Ever since Eisenhower, there have been the gleaming Cadillacs, with Reagan it seemed every stretch limousine in the country had been hired and now and at all future inaugurals nobody is going to give a passing thought to the visual contradiction between a $70,000 motor car and Republican simplicity.

What was different then about last Wednesday's show? Well, the first and later overwhelming impression was of children, the kids, the young. I can't remember so many marching bands that were high school bands and the White House staff wherever they appeared once always thought off as mature, greying, reverend seniors – they're all now as young and cultish, the secret servicemen, the nervous secret servicemen roaming and coming together and wandering and watching all round the president and his wife. I'll throw in here, and forget it so as not to break the long, the mood of rejoicing. The saddest thing when you think of other inaugurals when the old president and the new waved from an open car, the saddest thing was the frosted bullet-proof glass of the limousine behind, which the pink faced of Clinton, was a hazy image.

Also, surely more massive and massed crowds than ever and practically no placards, very few protestors, but then in the main parades strutting along as confidently as the navy band or the Texas jugglers was a small group bearing a loft a banner on behalf of Aids victims and there to provoke a clap and a tear from the president and the vice president was the bus they toured the country in, a triumphant idea that never occurred to the Bush people.

What was there that was old and traditional? Three items only one of which did I hear any comment about and that was the fact that Mr Clinton took the oath with the same 39 words first used by George Washington and used forever thereafter. The second thing was that Mr Clinton, unlike James Earl Carter, did not let himself be sworn in by his nickname, he said "I, William Jefferson Clinton". The third thing was the most unexpected and delightful of all, I noticed that when Chief Justice Rehnquist stood to administer the oath, he was wearing what I took to be a yarmulke, surely he's pretending to be a rabbi was carrying Clinton's crusade for diversity too far. Well it turns out it was a black skullcap always used to be worn at outdoor ceremonies by the Chief Justice according to protocol it was always taken off during the actual speaking of the oath. Justice Rehnquist took it off. This cap had not been worn since the bearded Chief Justice Hughes administered the oath to Franklin Roosevelt, a nice touch and one that reassured old fogeys like me who even in an orgy of change and novelty like to see somebody rescue a shred or two of tradition.

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