Clinton's Place as a Role Model: Advice from the Big Dog

* - Watch your language. Sometime around fifth grade, Mr. Clinton recalls, he tried teasing a younger boy with the old joke, "Your epidermis is showing." The young boy didn't get it. When Bill persisted, telling him that his parents' epidermises were also visible, the boy got so mad that he went home, got a knife and returned to throw it at Bill. It missed, Mr. Clinton recalls, but it taught him to be careful ever after using big words.

* - Take a look in the mirror, but not too closely. Long before Stuart Smalley, Bill Clinton's eighth-grade science teacher taught him about daily affirmations. Mr. Clinton recalls hearing the teacher, a distinctly unattractive man named Vernon Dokey, tell the class how each morning, after shaving, he would look in the mirror and say, "Vernon, you're beautiful." It was, Mr. Clinton writes, the most uplifting and unforgettable lesson from junior high.

* - Wear the right jeans (Levi's with the stitching taken off the back pockets). Mr. Clinton recalls not merely the emotional anguish of being a "fat band boy" in cheap, unfashionable jeans but also a more immediate sensation experienced in junior high. One Friday evening, at a Y.M.C.A. dance, an older boy mocked him for wearing carpenter's pants. Bill retorted, whereupon the older boy, who was 6 feet 6 inches, swung full force and punched him in the jaw.

Take a licking and keep on ticking. After the punch at the Y.M.C.A., young Bill didn't fall down or run away. He simply stood there, and the surprised older boy laughed and told him he was all right, teaching Bill a lesson about perseverance that would prove essential against a certain special prosecutor.

* - As Mr. Clinton takes center stage this week, Drew Westen has some advice for John Kerry: Don't worry about being upstaged, and don't distance yourself from Mr. Clinton, because his charisma could bring you victory.

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/06/20/politics/campaign/20points.html?pagewanted=1&ei=5062&en=151e41016b9d1d42&ex=1088308800&partner=GOOGLE