Bill Clinton at the Church of Baseball

Bill Clinton at the Church of Baseball reveals how the President of the United States deployed the mythology of America's national pastime in the exercise of political power. It demonstrates how he exploited the intimate relationship between two sacred, but fallible American institutions, the presidency and Major League Baseball, to shape some of the most fiercely contested debates of the 1990s. This is a story of the game's connections with national identity, heroism, race, and traditional American values, and how they were used by Clinton in his battles over affirmative action, welfare reform, and ethics in public life. It climaxes in the summer of 1998, when an epic home run chase between two baseball "gods," Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, acted as the cultural counterpoint to a more toxic drama simultaneously playing out in the public arena--the constitutional crisis and national moral spasm induced by a sex scandal involving the President and a White House intern. As the reality of impeachment closed in, Clinton sought to divert attention from his own moral failings by invoking an idealistic vision of a game, which itself was being corrupted by the use of performance enhancing drugs. Drawing on newly released documents from the Clinton archive, and original interviews with former White House staffers, this study reveals that by embracing the quasi-religious ideals of the national pastime, Clinton sought to address the anxieties of those who yearned for normality in an unsettled world, and to validate his troubled leadership at times of personal crisis and political peril.