
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 2, 1994                   TAG: 9411030057
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A-11   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: CAL THOMAS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

`ON THE EDGE'

NEARLY TWO years after the election of Bill Clinton as president by just 43 percent of the people comes a new book that explodes the myth of ``change'' promoted by Clinton and his wife. It shows his administration to be deceitful, incompetent, naive, inexperienced and as liberal as George McGovern, Walter Mondale and Michael Dukakis.

The book is ``On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency'' by Elizabeth Drew. Drew's painstaking and detailed interviews with high-ranking administration people, some of whom spoke on the record, takes up where Bob Woodward's best-selling ``The Agenda'' left off. (On the matter of credibility, neither Woodward nor Drew is identified with Republican or conservative politics.)

From the start, says a senior White House official, ``We just weren't ready - emotionally, intellectually, organizationally or substantively.''

They still aren't. Drew writes, ``Astonishingly, there was no real plan for what the new administration would do after it got to Washington.'' Well, there was one plan - to populate the administration with as many doctrinaire liberals as possible. New York lawyer and friend-of-Hillary Susan Thomases made sure of that. She and Hillary Clinton picked most of the higher-ups at the Justice Department, according to Drew, as well as much of the senior White House staff.

Hillary Clinton is portrayed as more than an ``equal partner'' with her husband. She is, as both he and she suggested during the campaign, co-president. She makes and shapes policies far beyond her imprint on the failed health-care program. And woe to anyone who crosses her. ``She's the only person around here people are afraid of,'' said an associate who understandably didn't want to be quoted. Unlike the president, who would blow up, often curse and get over it, Hillary Clinton ``remembered,'' writes Drew.

Diversity, more than experience or competence, became the Holy Grail of the administration. ``The continuing insistence on diversity,'' writes Drew, ``led to a certain amount of tokenism, of putting people in jobs they weren't ready for. ... Around the White House, the criteria for jobs became referred to as EGG - ethnicity, gender, geography.''

With a crew litmus-tested according to political correctness, rather than experience and competence, is it any wonder so many mistakes and misjudgments have been made?

The portrait of the president that emerges in the book is of a raging co-dependent, adult child of an alcoholic who must constantly be ``bucked up'' by staff people who tell him he's doing a great job. Otherwise, writes Drew, he gets depressed and goes into a funk.

The words Drew chooses to describe the president and characterize his personality are supported by numerous sources. Here are a few that set the tone: ``Clinton looked pale and uncertain - he conveyed no sense of command''; ``capitulation''; ``he has a tendency to lay the blame on others''; he regularly risked ``the dignity and majesty of the office''; ``Clinton's self-definition as a `new kind of Democrat' was designed, among other things, to camouflage his big government tendencies''; ``feckless''; ``Clinton talks too much''; ``ineptitude''; ``ill-considered''; ``looseness with the truth''; ``haphazard.'' Drew uses scores of such words and phrases to describe a president in over his head.

Failed or unwise policies might be expected to flow from incompetence and weak character - and in this case they do.

``Clinton had a seemingly unshakable tendency to walk away from responsibility for things that had gone wrong,'' says Drew. And, revealing the president for what he is, as distinct from the crafted campaign image, she quotes a senior aide as saying about his tax-and-spend proposals, ``The problem is that with all these proposals we're making, he's in danger of being seen as another big-taxing, big-spending, big-government Democrat - which he is.''

Drew writes of ``systemic failure'' in the White House and of unprecedented power by pollster Stan Greenberg, whose data regularly shapes policy decisions, a reversal of what leadership used to mean.

Elizabeth Drew's book chronicles a feel-good presidency - therapy for a man who desperately needs another kind.

Los Angeles Times Syndicate

by CNB