![]() At the Democratic convention in New York, he closed his acceptance speech with the words "I still believe in a place called Hope." Hot Springs went unmentioned. Listening to Clinton on the trail this year, one might never know that Hot Springs was his boyhood home. He left at age 17 in the fall of 1964 to study at Georgetown University - a bright and worldly young man on his way to a career that three decades later would prompt his proud home town to hang "Boyhood Home of Bill Clinton" banners across Central Avenue. He arrived in town at age 5 in 1952 with his mother, Virginia, and her new husband, Roger Clinton - a little family with secrets of its own. The governor of Arkansas and Democratic nominee for president had his upbringing here. After an upbringing here, New York City politics, or Watergate, or even the savings and loan scandal, could hardly come as a surprise." Hot Springs is a place, Abbott writes, that "deconstructs and demolishes the American dream of virtue and hard work crowned by success, as well as all platitudes and cant about the democratic process and small-town American life. Hot Springs is a place that inspired a poetic memoir titled "The Bookmaker's Daughter" by Shirley Abbott, who was exactly that - the daughter of a bookie who would leave for the office every morning saying with only the slightest hint of irony that he was off to make an honest buck. Hot Springs is a place where Mayor Melinda Baran, a contemporary of Clinton, says that "every family in town has a skeleton rattling around in the closet," and then goes on to describe how her grandfather was a member of the political machine that made the city safe for gamblers and mobsters in the 1930s and how he accumulated a wide swath of valuable hillside property despite his modest clerk's salary. "Yeah," he says, "I think I'll make a play on Billy this year." ![]() Hot Springs is a place where Dick Hildreth, the leather-faced masseur at the Arlington Hotel bathhouse, describes his intention to vote for Clinton in the idiom of an old gambler who once gave rubdowns to Lucky Luciano, Meyer Lansky and the Capone boys from Chicago. Hot Springs is a place where when you ask county historian Inez Cline if she has any information on someone, the spunky grandmother heads to her file cabinet and says, "Let's see, why don't we look under 'Gangsters'?" He became Bill Clinton years later in Hot Springs, only an hour up the road but an altogether different place, a city of secrets and vapors and ancient corruption and yet somehow purely American idealism. The boy brought into the world there on Aug. No one named Bill Clinton was born in Hope. As a small town in Arkansas and the birthplace of a potential president, the name carries with it an unavoidable poetry, but its importance beyond that falls into the realm of myth. Hope gets you nowhere in the Bill Clinton story.
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