He always does. This is a man discomforted by comfort. He lives for the narrow escape. And a pattern has begun to emerge in his presidency: he tends to screw up the same way each time. He surges, becomes overconfident – and turns left. It is a strange ideological tic. The president will spend a season of moderation building popularity, then squander it by lurching onto what he seems to believe is the “high” road, but is, in truth, a fatal tendency toward anachronistic statism and interest-group indulgence. He campaigned as a “New” Democrat throughout 1992, but seemed to forget all that on election night – appointing an undistinguished affirmative-action cabinet (and staff), focusing on such pressing issues as “gays in the military” and a witless scheme to nationalize childhood vaccinations, and cavorting with fatuous Hollywood types. But he quickly righted himself after this disastrous opening and had an effective fall of 1993: a masterful, centrist campaign to pass NAFTA and the excellent Memphis speech on race. Which gave him the boost and the confidence – to pursue Hillarious Health Care. Which resulted in the electoral debacle of 1994. Which forced him to turn again to the mysterious, and apparently shameless, consultant Dick Morris. Who has helped channel Clinton’s remarkable skills and produced a political comeback that may eventually rival Harry Truman’s. Granted, some of it was the re- sult of an irresponsible left turn on Medicare, but Morris also steered the president toward offering his own balanced-budget plan, which really messed up Republican strategy.
It’s possible that Clinton has learned his lesson. He seems more disciplined, and more presidential, than in the past. But there are at least two possible left turns looming. The first has to do with Morris, who is now under assault by the same White House staff that spit out David Gergen and appears to have a Gephardtian – that is, a House Democratic – intolerance of bipartisanship. Now, Morris is no hero. Anyone who had a hand in Jesse Helms’s disgraceful, race-baiting 1990 re-election campaign probably should spend the rest of the millennium doing community service of some sort. But he has provided a necessary counterbalance to the Old Democrats who lard the White House, and he argued successfully for the very effective State of the Union Message that emphasized values over economics. Morris has done some stupid things, like leaking polling data to the enemy (and then not telling the truth about it). But deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, who is leading the lynch party, is an unreconstructed lib best known as the mastermind behind the brilliant health-care and Whitewater spin-control campaigns. His has not been a stellar career in public service.
If Morris is sent packing, it’s likely James Carville will return from the lecture circuit to run the show. Carville is smart and a hoot, and he was right in 1992: it was the economy, stupid. But he hasn’t changed his tune, and his unrelenting economic populism seems wrong politically – and intellectually simplistic – especially after three solid years of growth that any Republican president would be crowing about. (Perhaps Clinton saw the television ads in Iowa by meatpackers desperate for employees, offering wages of up to $10 per hour.) This is not to say that the president can ignore economic themes; even Bob Dole was bashing the plutocrats last week. Clinton should, and will, push a new system of job-training vouchers for laid-off workers and support the modest Kennedy-Kassebaum health-care bill now wending through Congress (it’ll mean you won’t lose your coverage if you lose your job). He should also probably revive his staff’s proposal – vetoed by Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin – that tax cuts for individuals be linked, dollar for dollar, with the closing of corporate loopholes and subsidies.
But those sorts of issues won’t win him re-election. Nor, for that matter, will the social issues he featured in the State of the Union: crime, televised violence, parental responsibility. His fate will be tied to three other factors, the least of which is probably the constant drip-drip of Whitewater-related embarrassments. Far more important will be whether he can change the current public perception of Washington as a hyperpartisan sandbox for overpaid underachievers. The best way to start would be to get a balanced-budget agreement (if he doesn’t, he’ll have failed the ultimate test of the presidency: leadership). It would also probably be good politics, if questionable statesmanship, to sign the next welfare-reform bill that crosses his desk. He has to demonstrate that he can cool off the Republican hotheads and run Washington. The other test has to do with demeanor. The president must continue to seem a grown-up. He’s appeared far less blabby and indecisive lately. The contrast with the Republicans, bumbling along the trail, has been striking. If he can do all this, he’ll be hard to beat in the fall. At which point we can start worrying about overconfidence and sharp left turns all over again.
