He’d better, because the new president of the United States has been dealt a lousy hand. Ronald Reagan’s 1981 debut is often used as a modern yardstick for success in achieving a legislative agenda. But three of Reagan’s major campaign promises-cutting taxes, cutting welfare and increasing the defense budget-were all popular and easy to keep. The fourth promise-cutting the deficit-was unpopular and hard to keep. (The national debt quadrupled under Reagan and George Bush.) Unfortunately for Clinton, that’s the only card left on the table. Now he has to pick it up.
On first glance, Bill Clinton’s personality and the demands of the 1990s are a historical mismatch: the times require discipline, sacrifice and making people upset as their special favors are taken away. The new president is not particularly well disciplined, he never let the word sacrifice pass his lips during the campaign and it pains him to see people upset. A period that requires sober green-eyeshade calculations will be presided over by someone who always seems to be doing his homework the night before it’s due.
This analysis shortchanges Clinton’s political talents, which have been compared (in the realm of potential, anyway) with those of Franklin Roosevelt and Lyndon Johnson. Roosevelt, too, came to office looking a bit small for the task; the columnist Walter Lippmann dismissed him as a playboy. Like Clinton, he quickly abandoned many campaign promises. But as awful as the economy was, FDR had one big advantage over Clinton in the serendipity of the historical moment: the Depression gave him the freedom to experiment with different solutions, some of them expensive.
Clinton might have governed most comfortably during the years that shaped his life, the 1960s, when the money was there to make bighearted presidential dreams come true. At his best, he can seem like a nicer, less imposing Lyndon Johnson, without the gaping insecurities. Of course, LBJ would have slashed his wrists before slashing the budget as much as Clinton must. It’s astonishing to think that he quit in 1968 at least in part because he thought that Vietnam had destroyed his domestic plans; after all, in those days there was still plenty of money in the till compared with now. Clinton claims (to groans all around) that he doesn’t stop thinking about tomorrow, but he’s also a bit like “Miniver Cheevy” in the poem by Edwin Arlington Robinson-“born too late” for Camelot romance, when “swords were bright and steeds were prancing.” The cramped ’90s don’t suit his expansive nature. He’s a Yes president in a No era.
Clinton shows some signs of understanding this, which gives him at least a fighting chance. If his instinct is to please, his duty, he knows, is to disappoint. William McChesney Martin once said it was the job of the chairman of the Federal Reserve to take away the punch bowl. That is now the job of the president. Clinton’s challenge is to make sure that everyone goes home a little thirsty. Shared sacrifice, he now calls it (with the election safely over). Shooting the moon. Whatever the metaphor, it’s his fate.
Clinton knows that this is his destiny because he’s a student of election returns. Pat Buchanan, Jerry Brown and Ross Perot were all part of a tidal wave of resentment against business as usual that could break over the new president. The history of independent political movements in the United States argues powerfully for him to absorb the Perot agenda. If he doesn’t, the Republicans (or a third party) will-and he’ll be swamped. At the turn of the century, the radical-sounding Populist Party platform was eventually adopted almost completely by the Democrats. In the 1930s, many of the ideas of the Socialist Party were co-opted by Roosevelt. From the late 1960s through the 1980s, George Wallace’s angry, formerly Democratic constituency was folded into the GOP.
So it should be no surprise that the two major ideas driving Perot’s candidacy-political reform and debt reduction-are now two of Clinton’s priorities (the others are job creation, health care and national service). If he doesn’t take back some turf from the special interests, he’ll never be able to persuade Congress to fix health care and cut the deficit. And if he doesn’t fix health care and cut the deficit, the economy will never fully recover, which means he’ll lose his prize in 1996. It’s that simple.
Clinton understands this rationally: he says he needs political reform early in his term. But the crusading spirit that’s required for that agenda is at odds with his cautious political character and go-along-to-get-along approach to entrenched power.
Those cautious instincts are a product of his experience. His 1980 loss of the governor’s office was often attributed to his desire to do too much too soon. The same point was made to explain why Jimmy Carter’s ambitious and far-flung legislative agenda failed at the beginning of his term. Veterans of the Carter administration now serving Clinton warn repeatedly about “overloading the circuits.” But Clinton may be in danger of overlearning the lesson of overloading the circuits-in other words, doing too little, too late. Already, his chronic personal tardiness (a repeat of his Arkansas habit of occasionally leaving posts unfilled for months) has slowed his momentum and given the forces of Washington stagnation a head start in blocking his program.
In 1961 John F. Kennedy came to office facing much less of a domestic mess but a similar political bind. Having barely won the election, he moved slowly on the domestic front, worried about Wall Street and the barons of Capitol Hill. Shortly before the assassination James Reston of The New York Times wrote about how “disappointing” JFK’s presidency was turning out to be.
Lyndon Johnson did much better than Kennedy in moving legislation, in part because he knew how to wield the stick. He’d threaten to kill projects in congressional districts if members refused to do his bidding.
Bill Clinton didn’t govern that way in Arkansas; he was known as a big carrot/small stick governor. He may complain, even rage, to his staff, but he does not punish his enemies. Instead, he strokes them, often deftly. Sometimes this brings them around, but sometimes it just emboldens them to cross him again.
Another omen of trouble lies in the way Clinton tries to finesse criticism. In retreating from campaign promises last week, for instance, he did best when admitting honestly that “circumstances change” and worst when he tried to rewrite what he had earlier said. Claiming he never said this or that about the Haitians or the middle-class tax cut may have worked in Arkansas. But at the presidential level, he’ll be caught and embarrassed repeatedly, It took reporters at least three years before they began complaining about Lyndon Johnson’s “credibility gap”; this time, the press raised the issue even before the new president was sworn in.
These brushfires die quickly, but the larger lesson is that Clinton will not be able to dress up incremental change as fundamental change. To deliver he must come through with bold, sweeping reform, not just a bit of “encouraging progress” on difficult issues. This is one area where his Arkansas experience might mislead him. The legislature there was so backward that any progress in pushing it to change seemed like a big accomplishment. He often compromised too quickly, settling for a half loaf that he knew he could sell as something more substantial. At the national level, this won’t work. The press will nail him on a truth-in-advertising rap.
Will Clinton try anyway? His whole administration is structured to push his program through Congress. Several key players actually come from there, and many of the lesser appointments are being made on the recommendation of members, which is a way of gathering chits for the future. That’s why his appointments tend to be long on process and short on passion. The operating principle seems to be: Just Get It Through.
The natural extension of this approach is to just get anything through. This way lies danger. If the Clinton team is committed to “results” generally, but not to a set of bottom-line, specific results, it will end up settling for tepid, piecemeal and ultimately Pyrrhic victories. To be a great president, it’s not enough to pass a modest health bill or a modest deficit-reduction bill that allows everyone to say, “See, we broke the gridlock.” Clinton and Congress must pass a health bill and a deficit-reduction bill (and other bills) that genuinely transform the landscape. That will require Clinton to move beyond the cooperation he loves to the confrontation he loathes, to take on, directly, entrenched interests that never, ever-all of their protests to the contrary-want real change.
“The president is at liberty, both in law and conscience, to be as big a man as he can,” said Woodrow Wilson. Bill Clinton will grow in office. What’s unclear is whether he will take the risks demanded by the bad hand dealt him, or settle for the muddy margins.
