ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 11, 1996 TAG: 9608130099
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LAWRENCE L. KNUTSON ASSOCIATED PRESS
THE mood at the White House on Election Night 1994 was funereal. It was clear the president had been dealt a body blow by voters who overthrew his party's majorities in the House and Senate. The elections left him reeling for months.
Two years later, in one of the most remarkable comebacks in modern political history, Bill Clinton is as close as any Democrat has been in a half century to winning a second four-year term.
Bill Clinton, who as a boy glimpsed his future when he clasped John F. Kennedy's hand on the White House lawn, has made coming back from political ruin a personal emblem.
``After 1994, when the Republicans took over Congress, he appeared to be the lamest of lame ducks,'' says Larry Sabato, a political scientist at the University of Virginia.
``But he's fashioned a resurrection out of it,'' Sabato said.
Resurrection came after a two-year display of quick-footed political mastery and through the ability to dodge the bullets of scandal and investigation.
Clinton, battling House Speaker Newt Gingrich's Republicans on the terms of a balanced budget, succeeded in tying the GOP in public opinion to deeply unpopular government shutdowns.
He used presidential vetoes to halt GOP momentum for passage of the Republican ``Contract with America.''
And unable to move his own proposals through a Congress in hostile hands, Clinton moved toward the center in a blizzard of small proposals and suggestions, each intended to be politically popular, each intended to show a presidency in motion, not a Gulliver tied down by Lilliputians.
Essentially frozen out of the House and the Senate, he turned increasingly and enthusiastically to the international arena.
Clinton oversaw the ouster of Haiti's military junta and the return of democracy, sponsored a difficult search for a political settlement in Northern Ireland, worked to advance the peace process in the Middle East and dispatched U.S. troops as part of a NATO peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.
In Clinton's first two years, his White House seemed often to be gripped by chaos and disorder. His centerpiece - sweeping health care reform - crumbled.
``He put the nation through one hell of an on-the job training period,'' says Stephen Hess, an analyst in government studies at the Brookings Institution.
Hess said Clinton brought ``chaotic habits'' to the presidency from his long service as governor of a small Southern state with no experience in the federal tier of government. Clinton learned the hard way that the United States could not be run the same way.
Clinton himself admitted that the job was harder than he had expected.
Standing at the Capitol in 1993, Clinton pledged in his inaugural address to ``force the spring,'' to chart the opening of an era of dramatic change.
Two years later, after the Republican surge, he wryly told an audience that he had discovered ``most everybody is for change in general and then against it in particular.''
Clinton's first attempt at change, equality of status for gays in the military, was immediately caught in snarling controversy and the president beat a retreat to the formula of, ``Don't ask, don't tell.''
Trouble followed trouble: Congressional investigations of the Whitewater land deal, of the firings of the professional staff of the White House travel office, of purported White House interference in the investigation of the suicide of deputy White House counsel Vincent Foster.
Through it all Clinton remained mostly upbeat. A year ago, he told members of the New Jersey Devils champion hockey team that he identified with them.
``It occurred to me that hockey is a lot like what goes on around here,'' Clinton said. ``You get behind; you get ahead; you never know you're going to win until the last minute. It's more often a contact sport than it ought to be. The difference is that here we don't have a penalty box. And sometimes the referees pile on, too.''
Harold Ickes, deputy White House chief of staff, says that over the last two years Clinton has become more organized and more disciplined.
``His speeches are considerably shorter, he talks in broader themes than he used to. In 1994, his speeches were laundry lists of accomplishments. ... I certainly see a difference in how he acts on things both large and small.''
Historian and presidential biographer Stephen Ambrose, no Clinton fan, sees Clinton as a mediocre president at best.
``He's certainly not a great president,'' he said, defining greatness as making a permanent contribution to American life so indelible that it affects everyone from that time forward.
``They've worked out most of the kinks,'' Sabato said, pointing to the work of former California congressman Leon Panetta as Clinton's chief of staff. ``This is finally a White House that works; they lost two years, but they finally got it right,'' he said.
In the spring of 1995, in the midst of the Republican drive on Capitol Hill, Clinton was asked if he was even relevant to the process.
``The Constitution gives me relevance, the record we have built up over the past two years gives me relevance and the things we're trying to do gives me relevance,'' the president insisted.
Then a powerful bomb tore the face off a federal building in Oklahoma City and the issue of Clinton's relevance faded. Clinton became the nation's chief mourner, borne up by a tide of grief and rage.
After Oklahoma City, the president's approval rate jumped from 46 percent to 56 percent. The poll numbers have stayed high ever since.
For Clinton, the presidency has had more peaks and valleys than the Grand Tetons, the mountain range at Jackson Hole, Wyo., where he enjoyed his vacation so much last year that he plans to return this month.
Clinton works long days and hours, and plays just as hard.
He has become more linked in the popular eye to golf than any president since Dwight D. Eisenhower. During last summer's vacation he played more than 200 holes in Wyoming. He has completed a few rounds so late at night that the final swings came with the help of the strobe lights of a White House camera crew. This summer he realized a long-held ambition to break 80 before his 50th birthday on Aug. 19.
Clinton clearly enjoys the presidency. Unlike Harry Truman, he has never been heard to call the White House a big white jail.
In April, with the flags flapping in the breeze at Baltimore's Camden Yards baseball stadium, he had this to say about his job.
``I enjoy it very much,'' he told an interviewer. ``I'm honored every day when I go to work. There are some parts of it that are a little rougher than I thought it would be. But I have no complaints.
``Even the bad days are good.''
NAME:
WILLIAM JEFFERSON CLINTON
AGE: 49. Born Aug. 19, 1946.
EDUCATION: Bachelor's degree from the Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. Studied as a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University 1968-70. Obtained law degree from Yale Law School in 1973.
EXPERIENCE: Worked as Texas director for George McGovern's presidential campaign, 1972. Elected Arkansas attorney general in 1976. Elected governor in 1978, 1982-1992. President of the United States, 1993-present.
FAMILY: Married to Hillary Rodham Clinton. One daughter, Chelsea.
RELIGION: Southern Baptist.
QUOTE: ``This is really an age of remarkable possibility for our nation. More of our people will have the chance to live out their dreams than ever before. ... If we don't want to grow apart as a people, we have to do the things that will enable us to grow together.''
LENGTH: Long : 135 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: color. KEYWORDS: POLITICS PRESIDENTby CNB