by Jon Meacham

About the author: Jon Meacham is an editor for Washington Monthly magazine.

Increasingly, there is a sense in Washington that the Arkansas political culture does not work in the White House.... Little Rock culture was rooted in an informal way of doing business, in which behind-the-scenes relationships played at least as large a role as the evident formal structure of power. —Maureen Dowd, in the New York Times, on the day [associate U.S. attorney general] Webster Hubbell resigned

Washington is simply shocked—shocked—at the loose morals the upstart crowd from the South has brought to the capital. On “Inside Washington,” National Public Radio’s Nina Totenberg sighed in 1994, “Everybody scratches everybody’s back in Little Rock. It’s a tiny little...