Hillary Clinton announced her candidacy for the Senate at a teachers' meeting in response to a seemingly impromptu question. But reporters noticed that both the question and the answer were obviously scripted: in attempting to achieve the appearance of spontaneity, Hillary had achieved merely the appearance of attempting to achieve the appearance of spontaneity.

Between the out-and-out lying by public officials, the gutless avoidance of controversy that is standard operating procedure for candidates, and the media machine that churns everything into image and sound bite, American politics has become a Macy's parade of inflated mumbo-jumbo, an ecstasy of jive. As many observers have noted, there is a reaction in progress against that, and voters seem to be yearning toward reality. But the idea of authenticity is unexpectedly complicated and so are the reasons for which we want it.

If Hillary were John McCain, she would have answered the question something like this: "Dammit, I am so sick of playing this game. I've been running for a year. I'm running, OK? I'm running." That sounds real, even spontaneous, just because it's perfectly direct, in vernacular English. And it would have helped the First Lady's candidacy, because it would have satisfied our sudden and perhaps quixotic yearning toward authenticity.

Instead, what Hillary said was: "You know, Randi, in the past months I have been-at last count-in at least 35 counties all over this state, and everywhere I've gone people talk to me about issues like what we've discussed today. And that's very exciting to me because I believe if we work together we can really make a difference for the children and families of New York So the answer is: Yes, I intend to run." She put her brain on autopilot and mumbled boilerplate.(Or maybe, horrifyingly, this is the way the Clintons really talk.)

Some might claim that the regular-guy directness which has gained Bill Bradley and McCain so much attention is just as much a simulation, a rhetorical strategy, as the smoothness and professionalism of their rivals. As McCain travels about New Hampshire in his bus the "Straight Talk Express" it becomes evident that authenticity is itself an image to be cultivated: a rhetorical and electoral strategy. As the vacuum door of the Express whooshes open and McCain comes down the stairs, you can picture him thinking: this authenticity thing is really working. You can picture him on the stump, trying to maintain his core of genuineness, but not actually being able to be sure whether he's being true to himself or manufacturing the appearance of being true to himself.

But whether it's a rhetorical strategy or not, folks respond to it. And perhaps finally, in our media-soaked postmodern age, we can't do without it. Precisely as the idea of authenticity has been complicated and compromised, we yearn toward it more and more deeply.

There is no doubt that American political rhetoric needed to take some turn or other. Albert Gore, for example, tends to lapse into a series of utterly empty cliches and catch-phrases: "We are here at this gathering, the very first of its kind, to talk about a subject that lies at the very heart of economic growth and productivity-and even basic political legitimacy-for the 21^st century: reforming and reinventing government so that it is smaller, smarter, and more responsive to change in this fast-changing information age." What, as the kids say, ever.