New Delhi, May 13 -- Bill Clinton delivered this line at his first presidential inauguration on 20 January 1993. He was 46 years old. He had just become the 42nd President of the United States. The country he inherited was uncertain about its direction.

The Cold War had ended two years earlier. The economy was sluggish. Public trust in government was eroding. Americans were asking what their country stood for now that the defining conflict of the century was over.

Clinton's answer was not a policy proposal. It was a frame. It told Americans to stop measuring their problems against their failures and start measuring them against their strengths. That is the entire weight of this sentence.

The sentence is constructed as a logical proof. ...