WHO’S COOLER THAN EVEN HOOTIE AND THE BLOWFISH? WHY, THE FIRST BOOMER AND BOOMERETTE, OF COURSE. THEIR VISIT ROLLED OUT THE TUMBRILS FOR THE HAMPTONS’ ANCIEN REPUBLICAN REGIME — BILL AND HILL TOP TREND PARADE WHERE STARS BUILD CASTLES ON SAND

The summer havens of the Northeast are emptying this week. From coastal Maine to the Jersey Shore, the beachside bungalows and oceanfront mansions are being battened down for the coming storm season. In no place is the transformation more welcome to the locals than in the Hamptons, the sliver of land on Long Island’s Southern Fork that sticks out into the Atlantic like a crab’s claw.

The media light blasts brightly there each summer, bathing the Wall Street, Hollywood and Euro heavyweights who stroll its sandy beaches. Breathless stories are beamed so deep into the hinterlands that even the most prosaic Hamptons happening assumes mythic proportions, precisely because of the concentration of trendsetters: cellular phones — they’re everywhere! (tiny Nokias ringing up and down the beach); traffic jams — everywhere! (bumper-to-bumper Mercedes station wagons on the Montauk Highway) bad contemporary architecture — everywhere! (industrialist Ira Rennert’s massive Fair Field castle). Clothes, cuisine, politics — it’s all part of the Hamptons shine. And the glare of publicity reached white-hot levels at the beginning of August, when none other than Bill Clinton rolled into town for a weekend of schmoozing, fund raising and golf.

Aside from raising oodles of cash for various Democratic Party entities, the president nailed home a larger point about money and politics in the 1990s. For the weekend served as a sort of presidential coronation of a new class of Wall Street movers and shakers — call them the New Moneycrats — who wield substantial influence. Indeed, Mr. Clinton’s fun-filled weekend — the relaxation at Steven Spielberg’s compound, an intime dinner party for 60 at investment banker Bruce Wasserstein’s manse, a round at the Atlantic Golf Club, a blowout bash chez Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger — will likely go down as the apogee of 1990s Hamptons good life.

Fleeing the poisonous miasma of L’affaire Lewinsky, the First Couple received a warm reception from the equally satisfied and accomplished baby boomers who populate the region. The moneyed and landed local gentry — a startling number of whom are Democrats — stood with open arms to shelter the president and the First Lady from the vulgar barrage of attacks. (Venture capitalist and Hamptons homeowner Alan Patricof, who held a $30,000-a-head dinner for Mr. Clinton in Manhattan last January, is credited with masterminding the visit.) “The people of the Hamptons want desperately for Clinton to be safe,” Steven Gaines, author of the Hamptons Baedeker, “Philistines at the Hedgerows,” told the New York Observer. “He is the spirit of the bull market.”

That’s a strange way to describe the denizens of a region that has traditionally been viewed as preternaturally blue-blood and white-bread (read: Republican). Throughout its 360-year history, the Hamptons has never been very democratic, in a social sense, nor particularly Democratic, in a political sense. By all accounts, the first president to summer there was John Tyler, a Whig (one of the antecedents of the Republican party) who built a house in East Hampton. More recently, in the 1980s, that most Republican of decades, GOPers were the most prominent stars in the Hamptons firmament. Billionaire Ron Perelman, a perpetual giver to Republican causes, bought the Creeks, a massive estate in East Hampton. The party of the decade, thrown by Republican insurance tycoon Saul Steinberg and his wife, Gayfryd, was an over-the-top spectacle that featured naked actors in tableaux vivants.

These days, many of the most imposing cottages belong not to Republican industrialists but to Democratically inclined Hollywood executives, media all-stars and Wall Streeters. A glance at the guest list for Bruce Wasserstein’s party illustrates the point: Jon Corzine, head of Goldman Sachs, Roy Furman of Furman Selz, Byron Wien of Morgan Stanley, Paul Fribourg of Continental Grain. Such was the density of Democrats at hot boîtes like Nick ‘n’ Toni’s during the Clinton visit that Mr. Perelman high-tailed it to the Spanish resort of Ibiza.

Of course, the most exclusive Hamptons institutions remain hostile to Democrats. The best local golf course, the ultra-WASPy Maidstone Club, wouldn’t invite the First Golfer to play there. Instead, he found a foursome at Atlantic — formed in 1992 by comparatively nouveaux riches magnates who had been excluded from old-line redoubts like Maidstone. Atlantic’s members include big-money Democrats like Edgar Bronfman Jr. of Seagram, Steven Roth of Vornado and George Soros of, well, George Soros.

By hanging out with the Spielbergs, snarfing barbecue at a local joint and attending a cocktail party at the home of composer Jonathan Scheffer, Mr. Clinton indirectly overturned the Hamptons’ historic social structure. It’s not so much that the stodgy and exclusive old money club is irrelevant. Rather, the First Family found the newer, Democratic money more welcoming, more fun, more, um, sexy. (At one point, the presidential limo pulled over to the side of the road for a planned “impromptu” meeting with the former model Christie Brinkley.)

Lots of the participants in ClintonFest ’98 were dyed-in-the-wool Democrats who have long put their money where their partisan mouths are. But many others were simply along for the ride. (Hootie and the Blowfish headlined at the Baldwin-Basinger fete, after all.) The succession of parties constituted the social event of the season, and not to be included was simply intolerable for some. Henry Kravis, a Republican’s Republican, ponied up $25,000 for the Wasserstein gathering, but reportedly canceled in a fit of pique after being scratched from the First Duffer’s foursome at the Atlantic.

Moreover, there’s a certain shallowness to the politics of the Manhattan-based Democrats who migrate to the Hamptons each summer. They will gladly write checks for the campaigns of Mr. Clinton and Wall Street-friendly candidates like Rep. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., who hopes to replace Al D’Amato in the Senate. But if you stroll along Main Street in Southampton, you won’t find a whole lot of sympathy for, say, the cause of labor unionism. And precious few of the summer migrants are willing to strengthen the fabric of the city they live in by sending their own children to New York City public schools.

It’s hard not to conclude that the friendly frenzy engulfing the First Family stemmed from the fact that Hamptonites regard Bill Clinton and his clique as being cooler than Newt Gingrich and his distinctly un-urbane crowd. Just as the taste in cars has shifted from BMWs to Range Rovers in the 1990s, the fashion in politics seems to have turned from Republicans to Democrats. And keeping current with the latest fashions is one thing the Hamptons’ part-time residents do better than practically everyone else.