Drawing on newly released documents from the Clinton archive and original interviews with former White House staffers, author Chris Birkett reveals how the President of the United States deployed the mythology of America's national pastime to shape some of the most fiercely contested debates of the 1990s. This is a story of the game's connections with national identity, heroism, race, and traditional American values, and how they were used by Clinton in his battles over affirmative action, welfare reform, and ethics in public life. It climaxes in the summer of 1998, when an epic home run chase between two baseball "gods," Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, acted as the cultural counterpoint to the constitutional crisis and national moral spasm induced by a sex scandal involving the President and a White House intern. Clinton diverted attention from his own moral failings by invoking an idealistic vision of a game, which itself was being corrupted by the use of performance enhancing drugs.