Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 25, 1993 TAG: 9304250123
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A1 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
SOURCE: THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN and MAUREEN DOWD THE NEW YORK TIMES
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
"I hope that I can learn something," Clinton added. "I've just been here 90 days."
Indeed, the energetic team that so relentlessly controlled the agenda during the presidential campaign has lost focus on its central economic message. The laser is looking more like a strobe light, and youthful idealism more like inexperience.
His job approval ratings are worse than any president's in modern polling history, at this stage - just under 50 percent approval in several polls.
While the Washington chatterers are chattering about how the Clinton team has lost its focus, in a way, the president himself - with his master strokes and miscalculations, his good days and bad - actually may be coming into focus.
Unlike President George Bush, who began his presidency with the politics of minimalism and few stated goals, Clinton is trying to lasso the moon. And unlike Bush, whose personality was more straightforward and transparent, Clinton offers a complicated, contradictory portrait, vexing at times to allies and opponents.
Although the Clinton team came into office saying they intended to emulate the concentrated, hard sell that Reagan used on his economic plan, some top officials now privately admit they are falling into the Jimmy Carter syndrome of a laundry-list presidency.
"We've laid the intellectual framework for all sorts of major initiatives - national service, welfare reform, campaign finance, the budget, health care - but we don't quite have the political strategy to implement them," worried one of the President's closest friends in the government. "When you have so much out there, it makes it easy for the Republicans to define it as just more Democratic spend-spend-spend."
While Clinton intellectually understands the virtue of a clear, simple agenda, he cannot contain himself, aides say. He has an undisciplined personal style, a desire to please all sides, a mind stuffed with 30 years of policy ideas he wants to try, and a party full of clamoring interest groups who think this is their moment.
"I think there is a tension in Clinton between the student of presidential power and the student of policy," said Michael J. Sandel, a Harvard University political theorist. "As a student of the presidency, he knows he should keep it simple, but as a student of policy, he can't. The risk is that he knows too much."
The defeat of the stimulus package by rejuvenated Republicans and the disaster with the Branch Davidians - called mere "blips" and "bumps" by White House staffers - have offered a glimpse into the president's contradictory impulses and operating style.
Clinton has managed, for instance, to get his biggest domestic and foreign policy initiatives through Congress in record time: a $1.5 trillion budget outline with unprecedented deficit cuts and unprecedented new aid for Russia. At the same time, he bungled his $15 billion jobs bill and has been casting about for a single success in foreign policy.
His aides present him as a master of detail and student of history. Yet, in the Branch Davidian affair, he ignored the first lesson learned by his idol, John F. Kennedy, who felt he made a mistake in leaving the failed Bay of Pigs raid on Cuba to the experts.
Clinton has shown boldness in tackling budget deficits and health care, issues sidestepped by a succession of presidents. He has also shown flashes of his campaign problem of ducking responsibility for his words and actions.
He was silent for almost a day as Attorney General Janet Reno was left to answer to the public, uttering the phrase made famous by a Democratic president: "The buck stops here." Only after an internal debate did the president come out and take responsibility.
Such incidents have the potential to reinforce certain character doubts about the president with key constituencies.
Like Bush, Clinton came into office with question marks about his ability to be tough in a crisis. Bush dispelled such doubts by his showdown with Saddam Hussein. Clinton has yet to erase them, particularly with his own Pentagon.
In some ways Clinton is a victim of his own political skills. His ability to charm and connect with people is so potent they come away feeling he sees the world just as they do.
But, as one aide put it, "they don't always hear the fine print." Then when Clinton strikes the inevitable political bargain, people feel betrayed.
Gay and lesbian leaders who met with Clinton at the White House nine days ago emerged from the meeting glowing. Many who got only a secondhand report, however, felt Clinton was backing away from his support for the homosexual agenda, and should have at least stayed in Washington today for the gay march.
White House officials are privately fuming that the interest groups that had helped to elect Clinton will not practice more patience. Such is the fate of any politician who infuses his campaign with starry idealism.
After Kennedy's first year, New York Times columnist James Reston wrote that the magic was gone: "not that there is no momentum but that it is not fast enough to keep up with the pace of history at home and abroad."
Now the boy who once shook Kennedy's hand wrestles with the balance between pragmatism and idealism.
The conservatives already have begun their Cassandra chorus, warning that the president is just "a baby-boomer version of George Bush," as one puts it, willing to compromise on any principle and goal. But those who work with Clinton every day say he is inspiring because, while he'll cut deals where he has to, he has his eye on the prize.
"The real test is that at the core of everything he does, he is pushing a really pervasive set of changes that are embodied in the budget," said Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt. Babbitt found himself publicly undermined by a presidential deal with Western senators on grazing and mining fees to win their votes for the budget.
"After I was on the floor and took that pounding," Babbitt said, "he said: `Look, dust yourself off, get back up and keep after it. We will still get it done.' "
Memo: shorter version ran in the Metro edition.