Afraid of neither exalted rhetoric ("I speak tonight for the dignity of man and the destiny of democracy") nor plain talk that conveys a hint of threat to those who would delay the inevitable ("We shall overcome"), Johnson speaks for the constitutionality and moral necessity of the law that, 35 years later, our current Supreme Court would defile.

LBJ's speech seems the only thing adequate to my feelings at the moment, my present disgust, my fear for the future, and just how much I'm going to miss President Clinton. LBJ was speaking for black Americans who wanted a voice in their own government, and it would be wholly arrogant to compare myself to them. I have never been denied the right to vote, never been intimidated or threatened at a polling place. But Clinton's 1992 election was the first time that I as a voter felt that anything resembling my concerns -- hell, that anything resembling my existence -- had been acknowledged by my government.

To understand just how sweet Clinton's victory seemed you need to remember what it felt like to be numbered among the people who, during the Reagan and Bush presidencies, simply didn't count as part of America. The alienation went beyond being middle or working class, let alone poor, during that time. Reagan and Bush did their best to define (and legislate) such a narrow idea of what constituted being American that if your politics didn't exclude you from that definition, your age or sex or race or income bracket could.

That exclusion is at the heart of Tom Perrotta's recent novel "Joe College." The working-class protagonist, the first one in his family to go to college, bears both his family's pride and his own sense of guilt at betraying his class. He understands why Reagan won over even working people, like his parents, who would suffer under his policies. "He appealed to an idea of America they cherished -- i.e., that we were innocent and fair-minded and better than any other people who had ever lived on earth."

But he also realizes what his parents don't, namely how little they count in the Reaganite scheme of things. When his rich roommate's father says without a trace of malice, "The bottom line is that Ronald Reagan's been a great president for people like us," the divide that Reagan made the basis for his presidency opens underneath the hero's feet. You don't even need to follow that thought to its logical conclusion to hear the assumption that the president was for some of the people only.

Reagan's presidency was perhaps the first time in our history in which one of the traditional promises of America, that you would do better than your parents, was tied to a betrayal of where you had come from. Doing better, under Reagan, didn't mean pulling up those you had left behind; it meant crushing them under your heel.

In that climate, how do you not feel excited about a big, good-looking guy who comes along, with a mixture of raw passion and infallible political shrewdness, and says, as Bill Clinton did again and again during the '92 campaign, "We don't have a person to waste"? Humans as waste had been the dominant reality of American political life for the previous 12 years. Maybe I would have felt elated had any Democrat beat George Bush. But the truth is Clinton made me feel as if, for the first time in my voting life, I wasn't invisible.

Whether that was a politician's shrewd skill or the expression of a genuine political vision (and let's face it, the latter never comes across without the former) doesn't much matter unless you place a premium on purity. And in politics as in art, motives matter less than results.

Salon News A Salon-eye view of the day's news, with investigative reports, analysis and interviews with newsmakers.