Bill Clinton has let it be known that he admires Teddy Roosevelt -- a claim that can only cause alarm among those familiar with U.S. history. But the wording of his second inaugural address suggests to PNS commentator Chris Lehmann that Clinton may be more at home in a zeppelin than atop a bully pulpit. Lehmann is editor of Newsday's Sunday Currents Section.

The second installment of the Clinton Age is upon us, and already our shape-shifting chief executive has seized upon on an unlikely new role model -- Teddy Roosevelt and his "bully pulpit."

During his re-election campaign, Clinton announced that Roosevelt was "one of my favorite presidents ever." White House Press Secretary Michael McCurry observed reassuringly that the bully pulpit "defines the modern presidency."

This should have set off red flags somewhere. Teddy Roosevelt, that singularly bellicose, insecure, patrician president, "never suffered from an over-developed sense of responsibility" as historian Richard Hofstadter has delicately put it.

But never mind. The media rushed in -- not unlike TR himself -- earnestly questioning whether Clinton's gnat-straining second-term agenda (school-uniforms, curfews, the V-chip, etc.) was really Teddy-ish or bully-ish.

The answer was not long in coming. In his second inaugural address, Clinton raised high the timorous theme of bipartisanship -- a retreat from dread extremism -- as the weather-balloon that will help us ford that bridge to . . . you know where.

Yet TR was passionately partisan, goading his party into repudiating its prostration before the "malefactors of great wealth." When William Howard Taft, his hand-picked successor, disappointed him, Roosevelt launched his own Bull Moose party, splitting the Republican vote nearly down the middle in the election of 1912. You can't get much more partisan than that.

But the real test of the bully pulpit was the inaugural speech itself -- a parade of inanities that suggests Bill Clinton is the most idea-free chief executive since Calvin Coolidge. The shade of Teddy Roosevelt can only be snarling at this insult to his intelligence.

Do I exaggerate? Consider the text. Clinton, talking as enlightened pedagogue, burbles at the outset that "it is our great good fortune that time and chance have put us not only at the edge of a new century in a new millennium, but on the edge of a bright new prospect in human affairs."

For starters, ask yourselves what role "chance" really has in the division of historical time into centuries and millennia, and note that the dawn of the last century brought with it unprecedented European decadence and American labor and agrarian unrest. Meanwhile, the last millennium ushered in the lingering twilight of the Dark Ages.

Emboldened, Clinton piles on the logic- and history-chopping flourishes.

"Guided by the ancient vision of the promised land, let us set our sights upon a land of new promise," meaning, I suppose, that the children of Abraham were promised entry into the Information Age.

"We began the 19th century with a choice to spread our nation from coast to coast." (But through at least 1819, our Western boundary was the Rio Grande -- more a riverbank than a coast. The doctrine of Manifest Destiny didn't appear until the 1840s, and then to justify the annexation of territory sure to expand the reach of slavery.)

"We began the 20th century with a choice to harness the industrial revolution to our values of free enterprise, conservation and human decency." (News, certainly, to the voters who saw Populist crusader William Jennings Bryan defeated by William McKinley, lapdog of tycoon union-buster Mark Hanna, and our president in 1900. News as well to the hundreds of American workers killed in labor struggles running right up to World War II.)

Alright, so maybe the White House's speech writers couldn't find a decent history textbook. Travel with us, then, to the land of Clintonian language.

"In the end all the world's wealth and a thousand armies are no match for the human spirit." "Nothing big ever came from being small." (So much, I guess, for those school uniforms.) "Each and every one of us in our own way must assume personal responsibility not only for ourselves and our families, but for our neighbors and our nation." Okay, Bill! When do we start?

Recent presidents haven't exactly set forbidding standards of inaugural eloquence. But they have at least laid out vaguely coherent programs. One scours the text of Clinton's second in vain for some clue of an agenda, for bringing the president's shimmering visions into reality. Teddy Roosevelt, for all his imperialist and racist excesses, kept his inaugural speech brief, and acknowledged that problems attendant upon the nation's "growth in wealth" required that we move "with the unbending, unflinching purpose to solve them aright."

Still, Teddy R., like his admirer, was a skilled political operator, who landed in the presidency just six years after serving as police commissioner of New York City. If members of our history-challenged media had dug a bit they might have found some instructive affinities. Consider the testimony of Robert LaFollete, the great Progressive governor, senator and presidential also-ran, thrown over by Roosevelt when he tired of his career as a radical reformer. LaFollette wrote, "Theodore Roosevelt is the ablest living interpreter of what I would call the superficial public sentiment of a given time, and he is spontaneous in his reactions to it." Hofstadter concurs: In a nervous time, Roosevelt "was the master therapist of the middle class."

Now THERE'S an analogy.