The president’s difficulty comes in explaining himself-in selling his plan-to the Congress and the country. He turns to his four outside political consultants-James Carville and Paul Begala, Mandy Grunwald, Stan Greenberg-for a strategy. They are, arguably, the best in their business. They are true believers, not mercenaries (they say they don’t cash in on corporate clients). They consider themselves outlaws-populist, irreverent, defiantly informal. And, on the evidence of Woodward’s “The Agenda,” they are almost entirely useless when it comes to creating a strategy for governance. They bring a heavy-metal, outdoor-stadium style to a chamber-music concert: the broad, fiercely partisan slogans that work in a campaign seem inappropriate and undignified in a presidency. They are relentlessly intemperate, railing against “The Rich.” They are so busy being angry that they neglect the business at hand: figuring out a way to sell the plan. “You gave me a week’s worth of strategy and I needed three months,” Clinton tells Begala.
“You walked away from emphasizing the tax on the rich,” Begala sulks (a less angry strategist might have “emphasized” that under the Clinton plan, 10 times as many people had their income taxes reduced as had them raised).
The consultants’ cryptopopulism isn’t always so myopic. Woodward sticks with the budget story and doesn’t mention that during this same period Begala and friends were trying to woo Clinton away from expensive haircuts and frolics with the Hollywood elite-and back to the issues like crime and values like “individual responsibility.” But they never quite see that by going after the deficit, Clinton is-symbolically-attacking the real source of populist outrage in the country: the sense that Washington is out of control, a hog-wallow of bureaucrats and special interests wasting money by the billions. This, even though Greenberg spent the spring of 1993 studying the crucial Perot constituency and finding that “a reinventing government agenda is virtually a prerequisite for … reaching the[m]. The[y] want … their leaders [to] cut waste and bureaucracy, search for efficiencies, limit special-interest influence and reform welfare.”
A year later, not much has changed. A Gallup-CNN poll last week found the electorate pretty much where it was on Nov. 3, 1992: 42 percent supporting Clinton, 40 percent opposing him, 18 percent unsure. The game -the presidency depends on finding a strategy to win over that 18 percent, the radical middle. The consultants-fervent Hillarophiles all-seem to think health-care reform is the way to do it. Wrong again. As Greenberg pointed out a year ago, the Perot path-“cleaning out the barn” is the best way to build the credibility needed to govern successfully. Clinton did devote a week to “reinventing government” last September, saw his ratings soar, then lost himself in Health Alliances and Employer Mandates. The vice president has continued the work, quietly. Progress has been made. There may be 250,000 fewer federal bureaucrats come 1996. The Senate has passed a bill allowing the Pentagon to buy toilet seats-and other items-like normal people do rather than having to design its own at $600 a pop. There are other horror (and success) stories to be highlighted throughout the government. If Clinton were to make good management the centerpiece of his presidency, he’d have an easier time selling the rest of his agenda.
The other half of a winning strategy is bipartisansic ship. The radical middle transcends the existing parties, and so should Clinton’s governing coalition. But the consultants see Republicans only as the enemy; they’ve spent their lives running campaigns against them. The Democrats’ listless congressional leaders, and their promoters within the White House, are similarly reflexive. in Woodward’s book the Clinton aides who counsel bipartisanship are the weakest: Mack McLarty, the chief of staff, is too courtly to be taken seriously-and David Gergen is quickly marginalized as a Republican interloper. But McLarty and Gergen are right, especially now: health-care-and welfare-reform won’t happen without bipartisan support.
Early on, Al Gore tells the president: “We have a chance to create a new reality.” Actually, the public signaled that in 1992. It seemed hungry for a post-partisan realignment, an end to political posturing, an end to witless spin -a desire for a real government of national reconciliation. To respond, Clinton would have had to shed the anachronistic elements of Ms own party and build a new coalition-but he flinched, and his presidency languishes. In the end, gridlock isn’t broken; it has to be transcended. And Clinton-who may know that-is too tortured to soar.
