ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, July 2, 1996 TAG: 9607020030
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: NEIL JUMONVILLE
AS A PRESIDENT, Bill Clinton is already more like Franklin Roosevelt than many of us realize. Both have been accused of being wafflers - and waffling might be the key to their success.
Success? If Clinton is re-elected in November, he will be the first Democrat elected to serve twice since Franklin Roosevelt was voted into his fourth term 52 years ago.
Clinton has enough problems at the moment, of course, to cast doubt on whether he will be living on Pennsylvania Avenue next year. Yet the economy is healthy, which is centrally important in re-election campaigns. Further, Bob Dole has problems of his own. The abortion feud among the Republicans is worse news for him than a package from Ted Kaczynski. And Dole, with all of the cuddliness of Richard Nixon, is not exactly lighting the campaign trail on fire.
So it is a possibility that Clinton will become, after Woodrow Wilson and Roosevelt, only the third two-term Democratic president in this century.
Although many appear frightened at the prospect of re-electing a person with a reputation for indecision and with a storied lack of commitment to principle, it is precisely this character trait that serves Clinton so well. In fact, it is that approach to the presidency that puts Clinton in the same category with Roosevelt.
If Clinton tastes some of the same re-election success as FDR, it will be no accident. It will be partly the result of the ``waffling'' he shares with the New Deal president, a trait that in retrospect we praise about FDR but in the present condemn about Clinton.
Clinton, it has been charged by opponents and friends alike, waffled about such matters as gays in the military, budget and deficit reduction, and welfare. Instead of standing firm on principle, it is said, he repeatedly held a finger to the wind and went where the shifting winds of public opinion blew him. He sought what would work rather than what was right.
White House press spokesperson Mike McCurry, for example, last year in a press briefing had to answer Republican charges that appointing a commission to address issues of affirmative action was ``another Clinton waffle.''
Similarly, Republican Congressman Lamar Smith of Texas complained of Clinton waffling on the issue of immigration. Newt Gingrich defines the president's immigration waffle as ``talk tough, act weak, and be confused.''
Another description of the waffle emerged from the 1994 Oregon governor's race between Republican Denny Smith and the eventual winner, Democrat John Kitzhaber. Frustrated that Kitzhaber danced the Clinton waffle, Smith borrowed a line from Forrest Gump and remarked that Kitzhaber was like a box of chocolates: ``You never know what you're going to get.''
Yet the same trait of indecision that we disparage as waffling in Clinton we praise as pragmatic flexibility and compromise in Franklin Roosevelt. What worried FDR's contemporaries is now interpreted by historians as the mark of a great president.
Beginning with his initial campaign for the presidency against Herbert Hoover in 1932, Roosevelt was said to be ``a vacillating politician.'' His farm speeches left listeners wondering what he intended. Yet, according to the historian William Leuchtenburg, ``this was as nothing compared to his oscillations on fiscal policy.''
Roosevelt's undersecretary of state, William Phillips, found the president inscrutable. ``To describe Roosevelt you would have to describe three or four men, for he had at least three or four different personalities,'' Phillips confided. ``He could turn from one personality to another with such speed that you often never knew where you were or to which personality you were talking.''
Similarly, cartoonists frequently portrayed FDR in multiple images, as in a multipane mirror with several likenesses peering back.
Historians, however, have treated Roosevelt's waffling as a mark of strategic compromise, a nonideological preference for results, a desire to combine the best features of sharply conflicting ideas, a flexibility instead of a weakness.
Richard Hofstadter, one of the most noted American historians of this century, praised Roosevelt as ``opportunistic and flexible'' enough to handle problems because he ``had learned his trade straddling the terrible antagonisms of the 1920s.''
So FDR's straddling contradictions and compromises we now see as assets. The ``Second New Deal'' of 1935 was radical enough to contradict the conservative ``First New Deal'' of 1933, yet in retrospect historians describe FDR's policy reversal as a practical spirit of innovation, an honorable sense of experimentation, a willingness to try what works instead of blindly pursuing principle.
Perhaps because of the soft filter of history, the public today finds Roosevelt's waffles much more palatable than Clinton's. But if Clinton wins a second term this fall and joins the elite ranks of Wilson and FDR as second term Democrats, it will be partly because - like Roosevelt - Clinton is flexible and opportunistic enough to pursue what works.
Neil Jumonville, an associate professor of American history at Florida State University, wrote this article for the Tallahassee (Fla.) Democrat.
- Knight-Ridder/Tribune
LENGTH: Medium: 95 linesby CNB