“Up close, Bill Clinton looks like he’s covered in fresh fetal tissue.” So begins Gary Indiana’s report on the 1992 New Hampshire primaries. Right away an aspect of Indiana’s genius is present: the phrase, profane yet precise, that transforms an oversaturated image, the face of an all-too-familiar figure, and remains burned in your mind for good. Then the overtones: the abortion debate, the notion of an experimental Frankenstein politics mixing Right and Left, and the overgrown baby who was soon to be elevated to the White House. We know how that turned out and that there was worse to come. This is what Clinton sounded like at the time:

The platitudinous verbal droppings, more like noises one makes to stimulate horses than actual thoughts, also resemble bromides from a soothing commercial for Preparation H: the proctologist, on close examination, has ruled against radical surgery in favor of something smooth and greasy and easy to disresolve in the collective rectum.

The recourse to the scatological, to find the disgust in a political style that runs cover for corporate greed, jet-set plundering, and the heartland immiserations of globalization. It still holds in the Democratic Party today. What are the words of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Pete Buttigieg but balms against their obviously hemorrhoidal GOP opponents?