So why is the most intensely political president in memory sometimes so surpassingly inept politically? Last week, when he called conservative Democrat Ben Wattenberg to confess that in his first two years he behaved “like a prime minister, not a president” and was too interested in the “legislative scorecard rather than in the [new Democrat] philosophy” of his ‘92 campaign, few cared that he happened to be correct in his analysis. The instant reaction was that Clinton, just a week after shirking his ‘95 tax hike before Houston high rollers, was yet again trying to have it everywhichway. It was unfathomable to his staff and to the political world that he didn’t talk to Wattenberg, an author and syndicated columnist, off the record. Even reporters who define journalistic success as getting a politician to admit an inconsistency were struck: why the hell is he telling us this?
Maybe it’s just Clinton’s prolix problem. Even in school, the teachers thought he yakked too much. Fellow adult children of alcoholics see a classic pattern: telling people what they want to hear. Clinton himself sees it, and has admitted to as much about his own dysfunctional family. And, of course, his trouble in projecting authority is rooted partly in the anti-authoritarian ’60s that shaped him.
But the president had to know that Wattenberg would print his latest confession. So what was he trying to convey? There have to be less painful ways of getting across that he’s not some paleo-liberal, and it’s hardly a new message. Clinton’s tack to the center began not after the 1994 elections and not with the hiring of Dick Morris as his consultant, but as long ago as May of 1993, four months into his term, when he hired David Gergen.
Maybe the real point was to get credit for admitting error. This can look attractive in a politician, though there’s a difference between self-deprecating wit (not Clinton’s strong suit) and repudiating nearly everything about your record. Clinton resurrected his career once before with an apology. In 1981, at Morris’s urging, the 34-year-old ex-governor made a TV spot in which he told the voters of Arkansas that when he was growing up, his daddy never had to whip him twice for the same thing. (The public didn’t know then that Stepdaddy was a drunk.) “By admitting his mistakes and seeking absolution before the first tough question of the race could be asked,” writes David Maraniss in his Clinton biography, “he was able to say that criticisms of his previous actions were irrelevant.” Within a year, Clinton was back in office.
Let’s assume Clinton and Morris were cooking up some kind of similar gambit this time; after all, politicians and consultants are inclined to stick with what works for them. A contrite TV appearance is out. Too unpresidential. But would their vehicle really have been Ben Wattenberg, who called the administration’s first two years a “betrayal” of the moderate New Democrat ideas on which Clinton ran in 1992? Actually, he fits the precedent. In 1981 Clinton (and Hillary) ardently courted a crotchety Arkansas Democrat columnist named John Robert Starr. Before long, Starr went from trashing to boosting Clinton. Now he’s back to attacking him, but the flattery worked wonders at the time.
Wattenberg is not as powerful nationally as Starr was locally, but he’s conservative enough to be a plausible source of political absolution. So why didn’t Wattenberg’s largely favorable column further Clinton’s next rehabilitation? Why wasn’t the past cleanly jettisoned this time? The answer may lie in this part of Wattenberg’s piece: “Clinton told me he had recently been thinking through the current political situation and had come up with a phrase to describe it: ‘Values matter most.’ Accordingly, he had been somewhat astonished when he received a set of page proofs of a book [by Wattenberg] with that very title.” On one level, this is nothing more than routine, transparent John Robert Starr-style flattery of a journalist. What was so revealing–and annoying–was the suspicion, no, the certainty, that days, maybe hours, before or after speaking with Wattenberg, the president had told someone else that “declining wages matter most” or that “protecting the safety net from Republicans matters most” or that any of a dozen other ideas “matter most.”
In 1981, Clinton was running away from his image as arrogant and immature. Easy enough to solve. In 1995 he’s running away from his image of . . . running away from his image. Every time he tries to make a midcourse correction, he confirms the reason the midcourse correction was necessary in the first place. Morris’s now legendary idea of “triangulating” between both the GOP and the Democrats in Congress makes sense tactically, but it’s at odds with the larger strategic requirement of any Clinton campaign: the firmly planted flag, the certain trumpet, the sense that he knows what he believes.
This president accurately reflects the confused state of his country at century’s end. Like Clinton, the voters themselves want a balanced budget on Monday, Medicare protected on Tuesday and a mushy compromise on Wednesday. If Americans want an expression of who they are, Clinton’s in decent shape. If Colin Powell or someone else convinces them to vote for who they aspire to be, or think they once were, then all of Clinton’s political box scores will add up to nothing.
