When a ‘Huggy’ Guy Is at the Helm : Personal style: The President’s affectionate manner has charmed the nation, but will it eventually rub others the wrong way?

It was the hug seen round the world.

There, on the big platform at the Capitol, were the new President and vice president of the United States, celebrating their inauguration with an embrace that seemed to last forever.

Nearby, former President George Bush and former Vice President Dan Quayle marked their departure from office with a crisp handshake.

The contrast, cultural analysts maintain, represented more than the passing of power from one political party to another, more than the shift to a new generation in the White House. Bill Clinton was introducing a new level of intimacy to what has traditionally been a remote level of leadership.

He was, in short, inviting America to be part of the Hug Administration.

“I think politicians are people who need to establish intimacy quickly,” said John Kasson, a historian at the University of North Carolina and author of “Rudeness and Civility.”

“And whatever else you may say about Bill Clinton, he’s a master at doing just that.”

On a campaign stop in New Hampshire, just days before the election, Clinton was confronted by a woman whose frustration over “having to choose between health care and food” reduced her to tears, Clinton’s friend David Mathews recalled.

“Instinctively, Bill Clinton just went to her and held her,” Mathews said.

Claiming victory late at night on Nov. 3, Clinton wrapped Gore in what could only be called a bearhug. Two days later, on an Arkansas golf course, he all but enveloped his old friend Paul Berry. He embraced entertainers at his inaugural gala. A private White House reception for residents of his home state the day after the inauguration turned into a veritable hug-in.

“He’s a huggy kind of guy,” said Sheila Rothman of Westport, Conn., who worked with Clinton in Democratic politics more than 20 years ago.

“Always has been,” concurred Little Rock, Ark., salesman David Leopoulos, a Clinton crony since childhood. “Then again, our whole crowd is sort of huggy.”

“Bill is somewhat unabashed,” said Mathews, an attorney in Rogers, Ark., and a former member of the Arkansas Legislature.

“If he is affectionate toward someone, he has no hesitancy about showing it.”

But political researcher Kevin Phillips warned that Clinton’s exuberance could mutate into a detraction. If nine to 12 months pass with no economic upswing, “and this guy is running around hugging everyone, it isn’t going to work.” Phillips said.

If America begins to sour on Clinton, Phillips went on, “he’d better get a demeanor that is more compatible with rolling up his sleeves and spending a lot of time working and not looking like a happy yuppie.”

In part, Clinton’s propensity for physical closeness can be ascribed to a generation of men raised after World War II, when stereotypes were toppling and cultural barriers were crumbling. In the 1960s in particular--just when Bill Clinton and Al Gore were coming of age--gender roles came under scrutiny, and many men began to examine their relationships with one another.

“The sexual revolution wasn’t just about intercourse,” said Todd Gitlin, a sociologist at UC Berkeley and author of “The Sixties.”

On the contrary, said Gitlin, “one of the interesting things that happened in the ‘60s was that men didn’t feel they had to keep a distance from each other in order to be men. They went out and started expressing affection.”

As a man who is “very comfortable with himself, and whose masculinity is not threatened by showing affection,” the 42nd President of the United States embodies this kind of physical self-confidence, Mathews said.

But Beverly Hills psychologist Melvyn Kinder said it is simplistic to dismiss Clinton’s physical expressiveness as simply a product of his generation.

“I think the most interesting part of Clinton’s embrace is that his style is very Southern,” Kinder said.

Southern men are “more emotional. They are friendlier. They are warmer. They wave to each other. They hug,” said Kinder, who has led seminars at UCLA and elsewhere on “the new American male.”

Leopoulos, a friend of Clinton since the two were 8 and neighbors in Hot Springs, said he had spent some time reflecting on the hug question during the last year of campaigning.

Occasionally slipping and referring to “Bill--excuse me, I mean, the President,” Leopoulos said: “We were raised with this kind of Southern caring for your neighbor.” He said there was always a great deal of chumminess in that kind of environment, and he chafed at the possibility that hugginess might be a light bulb kind of quality that could be turned on and off.

Clinton, Leopoulos said, doesn’t just hug everybody he sees. “I mean, heads of state” might not get a bone-crunching squeeze, unless, of course, they happened to come from a region of the world where hugging is culturally acceptable.

“He knows protocol,” Leopoulos said.

And he also knows about the nuances of nonverbal communication. Dr. T. Berry Brazelton, a pediatrician and author whose most recent book is called “Touchpoints,” described the way the new President uses physical contact as “a way of letting people know that you care.”

Clinton’s comfort with touch “shows a sense of ego and security that leads us all to try and let down our own inhibitions,” Brazelton said.

But while praising the “warm and engaging” aspects of Clinton’s personal style, Kinder said this tendency also reflects “an enormous need” for connection and admiration.

Someone who needs to reach out and touch is also often “somebody who needs reassurance back and needs to be told how great he is,” Brazelton said.

At the American Enterprise Institute here, political analyst William Schneider said that need for reassurance was a troubling aspect of Clinton’s hugginess.

“If he has one potential liability, it’s that he wants everyone to like him,” Schneider said.

He noted, too, that what’s charming today in a President can become cloying tomorrow. Hugging, said Schneider, “is one of those things like Jimmy Carter wearing sweaters. It’s endearing at first, but it came become irritating.”

And Evan Imber-Black, a New York family therapist who studies the role of ritual in daily life, cautioned that excessive presidential hugging could wring the significance out of an otherwise friendly gesture.

“Anything that becomes just automatic pilot will lose its essential meaning,” she said. “If we now start seeing Bill Clinton hugging every man he meets, I guess I’ll start to wonder.”

But Imber-Black said the current extent of Clinton’s habit of hugging actually offers the happy possibility that “some of our rituals, such as how people greet one another, are changing.”

In establishing a tone for this presidency, Kasson contrasted the way Clinton hugs people with the paternal qualities of, for example, President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

“Clinton is not trying for that kind of a fatherly role,” Kasson said. Instead, “I think of him as a smart contemporary.”

Back in Arkansas, meanwhile, Bill Clinton’s buddies said they were bored with attempts to read lofty interpretations into the new chief executive’s every hug and handshake.

“Listen, it’s just totally spontaneous,” Leopoulos said.

“What you see is what you get,” echoed Mathews.