Bill Clinton was perceptive enough to master politics _ but not perceptive enough to see what politics was doing to him.
------*------
The 42nd president is an impressive thinker.
He is a talented political performer and something of a visionary.Indeed, although Bill Clinton has been largely successful in presenting himself as a moderate, he is, in a true and unpejorative sense of the word, a radical, committed to a level of change far more ambitious than that of most presidents.
Through his ability to speak with both uncommon intelligence and a common touch, he has advanced issues that had been frozen for years in a left-right stalemate, most notably health care, welfare and crime.
The expanded earned-income tax credit program he won from Congress last year was a historic measure, the government's first real attempt to guarantee that no one who works full time and has a family to support would fall below the poverty line.
People are also reading…
The health-care reform he is trying to get through Congress this year would be the most significant expansion of entitlements since the creation of Social Security.
The Clinton administration is the first to openly (if at times gingerly) embrace the idea of according protected minority status to homosexuals.
The Clinton welfare-reform bill may not entirely meet the grand campaign promise of ``ending welfare as we know it,' but it nevertheless represents a genuine attempt to impose the toughest work requirements ever attached to welfare.
Because Clinton is president, it has become harder now for criminals and lunatics to arm themselves, and easier for parents to take time off work without losing their jobs.
So why doesn't all of this seem to matter more?
Why doesn't Bill Clinton get more credit for his successes, and less vilification for his failures, which seem to loom so large?
Why does the president get so little respect?
The problem is not just criticism from the right, where many passionately loathe Clinton.
What threatens this president is a national level of mistrust that is almost visceral in its intensity.
In Washington, it is no longer surprising to hear the president spoken of with open and dismissive contempt. In mainstream journalism and even more so in popular entertainment, Clinton is routinely depicted as a liar, a fraud, a chronically indecisive man who cannot be trusted to stand for anything - or with anyone.
Much of this is unfair, some of it is irrational and some of it has more to do with the savagery of an angry and fearful time than it does with Clinton personally.
But there is a fundamental reason for Clinton's plight. Bill Clinton is the first president since Richard Nixon to be threatened with the awful intimacy of rejection not simply as a leader or as a politician but as a person.
As was also true with Nixon, this threat flows from a deep source, an abiding public doubt about the ethical content of the president's character.
According to a New York Times-CBS poll in mid-July, 53 percent of Americans view the economy as healthy, compared with only 23 percent when Clinton took office. Seventy-nine percent think universal health care is ``very important.'
Yet the public is strongly disinclined to give Clinton credit. The Times-CBS poll found that 63 percent of Americans think Clinton has made no progress in improving the economy.
Even more startling, 60 percent say Clinton has made no progress in advancing health-care insurance.
Overall, 47 percent of the public disapprove of the way Clinton is doing his job and only 42 percent approve.
Nixon's problems were rooted in the record of his life, and Clinton's are, too, in the things he has said and done to get where he is today.
The past has slugged Clinton so often, so publicly and so brutally, that its attacks have become known, in the pop-culture shorthand that signifies universal acquaintanceship, by their tabloid handles: Gennifer, the Draft, I Didn't Inhale, Whitewater, Troopergate, Hillary's Commodities, Paula Jones.
Each episode has moved the national assessment closer to the tipping point.
The president's problems did not come about because he was a cheap political hack. They came about because he was not.
For what has happened to Clinton has happened because he wanted, more than anything in life, to get to where he is today, and because he wanted this, at least in part, in order to do good - and because the great goal of doing good gave him license to indulge in the everyday acts of minor corruption and compromise and falsity that the business of politics demands.
Clinton was perceptive enough to master politics - but not perceptive enough to see what politics was doing to him.
Circumstances of both nature and nurture set Bill Clinton up for a life in politics.
Clinton grew up in the old gangster city of Hot Springs, Ark., where his mother, Virginia, had moved when he was 6.
As she describes it in her recent, posthumously published memoirs, Leading With My Heart, Hot Springs was ``a town in which the con job was considered an art form.'
Virginia's unblushing account makes it clear that her second husband, Roger Clinton, and his friends had a long history of getting away with crimes and acts of drunken violence.
The lesson here was not merely that the right people could get away with doing wrong. As she describes her philosophy, the right people - herself, her family and friends - couldn't really do wrong.
Virginia's relentless accentuation of the positive must have been a great help in dealing with years of adversity. Bill Clinton clearly owes much of his own optimism, tenacity and resilience to his mother's inspiration. Clinton also may owe to Virginia the character trait that was perhaps the essential determinant of his political success - an unusually large need for adulation.
``I think Bill and Roger and I are all alike in that way,' Virginia writes. ``When we walk into a room, we want to win that room over. Some would even say we need to win that room over, and maybe that's true ...'
This powerful need doubtless had a great deal to do with turning Clinton into the remarkable political performer he is. But this need also made him peculiarly vulnerable to the universal temptation of political life - to tell people what they want to hear.
C linton's career began while he still a student at Hot Springs High School, where he was president of his junior class, the Beta Club (for academic achievers) and the Kiwanis Key Club.
By his late teens, Clinton was already a semiprofessional politician, so greatly in demand as a civics-club speaker and leader of charitable fund drives that his high-school principal had to limit his engagements in order to protect his schooling.
It was clear early on that Clinton possessed great political gifts - intelligence, charm and drive.
After graduating high school, Clinton was accepted at Georgetown, Oxford and Yale. He was not a bomb-thrower or even a boat-rocker. He ran for his first college office, the 1964 freshman class presidency of Georgetown University, on a platform of solid, modest reform.
After his victory, he informed the college newspaper that ``the freshman year is not the time for crusading, but for building a strong unit for the future. You must know the rules before you can change them.'
But the signal event in the development of Clinton's character - the compromise from which all later compromises would flow - occurred when Clinton was 23. It was in response to the first great crisis in his life, the Vietnam War.
For Clinton, as for so many men of his generation, Vietnam would be the testing ground that would shape their characters forever.
In April 1969, Clinton was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford and received an induction notice from the Hot Springs draft board.
At his request, Clinton's induction into the Army was postponed for two months so he could finish his term.
That summer, he returned to Arkansas and won a deferment on the strength of his pledge to enroll in the Reserved Officers Training Corps program at the University of Arkansas, whose law school he said he planned to attend once he'd finished at Oxford.
The ROTC deferment could protect him for four more years, but would at the same time commit him to two undesirable courses of action: attending the University of Arkansas Law School instead of Yale and serving a lengthy stint in the Army reserves after graduation.
The ROTC deferment could protect him for four more years, but would at the same time commit him to two undesirable courses of action: attending the University of Arkansas Law School instead of Yale and serving a lengthy stint in the Army reserves after graduation.
The deferment was granted on Aug. 7, 1969. On Dec. 2, in violation of his promise to enroll in the ROTC program at the University of Arkansas, Clinton applied to Yale Law School. On Dec. 3, he sent a letter explaining his actions to Col. Eugene Holmes, the Army ROTC commander at the University of Arkansas. The now-famous Holmes letter captures the young Clinton at a crossroads.
On one hand, the writer is passionately concerned with doing, and being, good. But the letter also captures a young man learning to rationalize acts of deception and compromise as necessary in the pursuit of that good.
In his explanation, Clinton made clear that he regarded the draft as ``illegitimate,' and the Vietnam War as immoral. In the end, Clinton wrote, he decided to put the moral imperative of his political success above his principles:
``I decided to accept the draft in spite of my beliefs for one reason: to maintain my political viability within the system. For years, I have worked to prepare myself for a political life characterized by both practical political ability and concern for rapid social progress. It is a life I still feel compelled to try to lead.'
Other young men of Clinton's generation might justify their actions regarding Vietnam on the grounds of simple self-interest: They did not want to lose their lives to a stupid war. Clinton decided that his self-interest was the same as his country's. He was acting for the sake of the nation's future.
The Arkansas that Clinton came home to in the summer of 1973 after getting his law degree at Yale was in the middle of the most significant generational reform movements since the late 1940s.
Clinton plunged immediately into it, with a 1974 challenge to the popular Republican Rep. John Paul Hammerschmidt of the 3rd Congressional District, which covered most of northwestern Arkansas.
Clinton garnered strong support and was able to outspend Hammerschmidt by $20,000.
In his campaign, Clinton was much aided by his de facto campaign manager and wife-to-be, a young woman whose reformist zeal surpassed even his.
By running hard on an anti-big-business platform and by unfairly tarring Hammerschmidt with Watergate, the young candidate almost pulled off what would have been a tremendous upset, winning nearly 49 percent of the vote.
Falling back on his teaching job, Clinton immediately began planning his next race, a run for attorney general that he won as expected in 1976.
The new attorney general was a populist reformer in the classic Arkansas style: anti-utilities, anti-big-business, pro-environment, pro-working class. And it paid off.
After only one two-year term, Clinton won the governor's seat, becoming, at 32, the youngest chief executive in the nation.
Much of what the new governor did in his first term, in 1979 and 1980, was uncontroversial. But a good deal of it directly challenged the moneyed interests. Clinton took on utilities, the timber interests and the trucking companies.
The administration's most famous battles were fought against the Arkansas Power and Light Co., a perennial target of reform governors. The ``whiz kids' who ran Clinton's new Energy Department - Scott Trotter, Walter Nixon 3d, Basil Copeland and Jerry Lawson - made headlines with a suit that forced the utility to refund to its customers $8.5 million in overcharges.
As a result, in 1980, when the first-term governor ran for what was expected to be an easy re-election, much of the entire corporate establishment of Arkansas lined up behind Frank White, a Little Rock investment banker and political neophyte.
The fat cats' backing allowed White to run an aggressive campaign and he won the election.
Now the youngest ex-governor in the nation, Clinton brooded about his first real political setback, which was potentially fatal to his long-term ambitions.
The lesson was clear: To be successful, a politician had to appear hugely concerned with bettering the lives of ordinary citizens but had to be careful to avoid acting on those concerns so aggressively that they threatened the interests of the business elite.
Exiled to an office in the Little Rock law firm of Wright, Lindsey & Jennings, Clinton pondered how he could win votes as a populist reformer and still raise money as a businessman's Democrat.
Clinton had never been much good at the old style of populism, the bellowing, wisecracking, denunciatory style practiced by Arkansas candidates.
But his own natural style - his intuitive desire to please, his chameleonesque habit of becoming whoever he was with, his talent for losing himself in the moment - was ideally suited to the new style of perception-based populism, primarily defined by television.
A crafty politician could subtly manipulate the nuances of language, voice, expression and body posture so that each member of his audience saw and heard what he wanted to see and hear.
Clinton used this new political performance art in his 1982 campaign to regain the Statehouse.
Diane Blair, an Arkansas political scientist, later wrote that Clinton's ads ``portrayed White as an untrustworthy, interest-dominated plutocrat who might run with the good-old-boy hounds by day but slept with the utility foxes at night, while Clinton was just a caring and concerned, down-home Baptist family man who wanted nothing more than another chance to fight the fat cats on behalf of the little guys.'
Offstage, Clinton took pains to establish a cordial and lucrative relationship with the big-money interests against whom he was railing. Clinton regained office, and from 1983 until he resigned halfway through his fifth term to seek the presidency, Clinton achieved a number of moderate reforms, including opening up high-level government jobs to blacks and women, winning passage of the first ethics law for elected officials in Arkansas' history and increasing spending on social services.
But he would never again take on the big guns with anything like the vigor of his first term.
Clinton and his supporters have long argued that this sort of compromise was necessary in a chronically poor state like Arkansas, where the urgencies of economic growth necessitate concessions to business. The point is, to a degree, valid. But it is also true that early in his career Clinton began to garner a reputation for slipperiness and waffling in excess of even the norm of politics.
Another Clinton characteristic that attracted increasing critical attention was his readiness to do favors for current or potential financial supporters. One controversial affair centered on Dan Lasater of Little Rock.
A flashy young millionaire, Lasater, in 1980, opened a bond house that, within a year, was selling $1 billion worth of bonds a month.
Lasater quickly made himself a prominent figure in local politics and society, contributing heavily to the campaigns of Gov. Clinton and other politicians.
But the services did not stop there. Once he lent the governor's brother $8,000 to pay off Roger's debt to his cocaine wholesalers.
In 1982 Lasater and his partners asked to be included in Arkansas state bond issues. Clinton agreed.
The name of Lasater and Company first appeared as an underwriter of an Arkansas Housing Development Agency bond issue in 1983, after Clinton was sworn in for his second term. Over the next three years, until Lasater was convicted of distributing cocaine in the fall of 1986 and served six months in prison, the company won assignments to co-manage 13 bond issues from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority, handling a total of $664 million worth of bonds, and received brokerage fees of $1.6 million. What is telling about the Lasater affair is Clinton's evident willingness to risk the reputation of his state and his administration in order to benefit a powerful financial supporter.
Newsweek writer Joe Klein recently quoted the president on the subject of character: ``Character is a journey, not a destination.'
No, Klein responded, life is a journey; character is a destination reached by the actions of a life.
What you are, by the time you are the president's age, is the cumulative result of all that you have done, all the thousands of decisions that build an adult.
Clinton's problem isn't merely that his past haunts him. It is that his past has made him what he is today.
The president's essential character flaw isn't dishonesty so much as a-honesty. It isn't that Clinton means to say things that are not true or that he cannot make true, but that everything is true for him when he says it, because he says it.
Clinton means what he says when he says it, but tomorrow he will mean what he says when he says the opposite.
