Any evaluation of the first year of the Clinton presidency must begin with an appreciation of how Mr. Clinton came to be elected in the first place.
Some presidents—Ronald Reagan comes to mind—are swept into office on the crest of some new powerful impulse in the body politic. Others (George Bush, for example) are elected precisely because the voters are satisfied with the status quo and want as little change as possible. Finally there are those, such as Jimmy Carter, who are chosen, not because they stand for anything the voters especially want, but simply because their opponents are marginally less appealing. Bill Clinton's victory, with just 43 percent of the popular vote, clearly falls into the latter category.
President Bush's high approval ratings after the Gulf War had the effect of persuading all of the best-known and most formidable Democratic possibilities—Bradley, Cuomo, Gephart, and Rockefeller—to sit out 1992 and wait for 1996. That left the race for the 1992 Democratic nomination to the "B team": Brown, Clinton, Harkin, Kerrey, and Tsongas. This was the uninspiring litter of which Mr. Clinton turned out to be the pick.
But no sooner had Clinton nailed down the nomination than Bush began to slide in the polls which continued right through election day. The reason is no mystery: He fatally disregarded the growing public perception that the country was in a depression. Subsequent analyses suggest that the perception was false, but it was certainly real. The "chattering classes," in particular, were suffering economically, and made sure that everyone new it. Yet Mr. Bush repeatedly allowed himself to be photographed in his golf cart and on his speedboat, gamely insisting that there was no recession and urging everyone to wait for his (thoroughly forgettable) acceptance speech at the Republican convention.
The situation was rendered vastly more complicated by the entry, withdrawal, and reentry of Ross Perot into the race as an independent candidate. Tapping into widespread public concern over the annual federal deficits, and even more general public disgust with the professional politicians of both parties, Perot managed to win 19 percent of the voters on election day. A large majority of these had voted twice for Reagan and then for Bush. Clinton's 43 percent was almost identical to the vote rolled up by Dukakis in 1988.
But not even that 43 percent represented a bloc of voters determinedly loyal to Clinton. Among them, it seems clear, were millions who doubted his truthfulness, and more generally his character, but who simply could not bring themselves to vote for four more years of George Bush or run the unknowable risk of a Perot presidency.
To be sure, the fact that both houses of Congress are controlled by his party represents a plus that no Republican in the White House has enjoyed since the first term of Dwight Eisenhower. But the longstanding division of power between Democratic Congresses and Republican presidents has led the Democrats to create almost a "shadow government" at the eastern end of Pennsylvania Avenue: the staffs of Congressional committees and other organizations (such as the Congressional Budget Office) that closely monitor every act of the executive departments and agencies. It became clear that these were not going to fold up merely because a Democrat had been elected president.
President Clinton's Cabinet appointments reflected his declared wish for a cabinet that would "look more like America." It certainly contains a little bit of everything—a black, a Hispanic, several women, etc.—but it is apparent catholicity was diminished considerably when somebody pointed out that it contains more millionaires than Mr. Bush's.
Unfortunately one of its weakest members appears right at the top of the list: Warren Christopher, a California attorney whose work as chair of the committee to review vice presidential possibilities so impressed Mr. Clinton that he made him his Secretary of State. In view of Clinton's own unfamiliarity with foreign affairs, and his famous lack of interest in this subject, it was crucial that he had a strong Secretary of State.
Instead, Christopher has already acquired such a reputation for inadequacy that public calls for his resignation have come from a prominent Democratic Congressman and London's respected weekly, The Economist, among others.
The new president's early months in the White House revealed, moreover, a dismaying clumsiness. Mostly because he held the press at arm's length before his inauguration, he never had to explain how Johnetta Cole, a radical friend of Ms. Rodham Clinton's with ties to the notorious pro-Castro Venceremos Brigade and other Communist-affiliated organizations, happened to be appointed to a high post in his transition team. But the Clinton's close personal friends Harry Thomason and his wife Linda Bloodsworth-Thomason were rashly given the run of the White House, and were soon caught trying to toss the lucrative business of its travel office to friends.
Clinton's first nominee for the post of Attorney General, Zoe Baird, was compelled to step down when it was discovered, belatedly, that she had violated the Tax and Immigration laws. A similar fate overtook the next choice for that post, Judge Kimba, even though she was apparently not guilty of the particular offence that felled Ms. Baird. Lani Guinier, whose father was secretary-treasurer of a union expelled from the CIO because it was Communist-controlled, had to withdraw as Mr. Clinton's nominee for the post of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights when the president finally got around to reading what she had written.
As for serious matters of policy, Mr. Clinton abandoned, even before he was inaugurated, his pledge not to raise taxes on the middle class, offering the traditional excuse that he hadn't discovered until after the election how big the deficit was. Unfortunately for this explanation, Mr. Clinton had repeatedly insisted, during the campaign, that the actual deficit was just as big as he ultimately "discovered" it to be. At the same time, and most foolishly, he insisted on pushing ahead with his plan to order the admission of avowed homosexuals to the armed forces— a step which he had declared, during the campaign, could be accomplished "with a stroke of a pen." Instead he wound up being forced by Senator Nunn and an uncooperative Congress into a humiliating backdown in which the regulations against open homosexuality in the military were not only reaffirmed but, for the first time, written into statute law.
Many of these blunders could have been avoided if the Clinton team had simply been more experienced in the ways of the White House. No doubt the appointment of David Gergen, the former Nixon and Reagan advisor, to a high post in charge of making the president look better will have a beneficial effect. Indeed, it is already doing so: There have been no more traffic-stopping $200 haircuts on the runway at Los Angeles International Airport, nor are there likely to be.
But in the nature of things not even Gergen can shield Mr. Clinton from the effects of his often bruising encounters with Congress, let alone from the visibly disastrous consequences of his foreign policies.
Clinton's first major clash with Congress was painful but at least educational. Putting his "stimulus package" before the lawmakers, he calculated that the Democratic majorities would stand by him, and decided to simply shove the package down the Republicans' throats. That gave Republicans a superb opportunity to depict themselves as the foes of higher taxes: Every single Republican in the House of Representatives voted against the bill. Mr. Clinton duly mowed them down, but then discovered to his horror that 40 senators can filibuster a bill to death—and there were 43 Republicans in the Senate! Under the brilliant leadership of minority leader Bob Dole, they opposed the stimulus package unanimously and launched a filibuster. End of package.
Mr. Clinton apparently learned from that experience, because he fought hard, and in the end more successfully, for his budget bill. But so many Democrats defected in the senate that Vice President Gore had to break a tie, and the measure passed by a single vote in the House, after wavering Democrats had been promised everything but the Capital dome.
Congressional ratification of NAFTA was universally hailed as a victory for Mr. Clinton, and indeed it was, if one recalls how hard he worked (and how liberally he deployed the powers of the president) to secure its passage. But the agreement's comfortable margin in the House (234 to 200) looks distinctly less comfortable when one remembers that 132 of those 234 votes were cast by Republicans. The Congressmen of Mr. Clinton's own party voted heavily against him—156 to 102—on this major bill, on which he had gambled everything he had.
These are not the results that a new president in his first year can point to with much pride. The Congressional Democrats have clearly taken Mr. Clinton's measure, and are not in the least afraid of him.
In the extremely important matter of Supreme Court appointments, on the other hand, Mr. Clinton has had just one opportunity to name a justice, and he handled it rather adroitly. In nominating Ruth Bader Ginsburg he chose a firm liberal whose judicial skills, as already displayed on the District of Columbia Circuit, are known to have impressed both Justice Antonin Scalia, the Supreme Court's leading conservative, and Senator Orrin Hatch, the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee. Add to this the fact that she is a woman and the first Jew to sit on the Court since Abe Fortas, Mr. Clinton can be congratulated on an appointment that was judicially defensible and politically shrewd.
There is one other area in which the Clinton administration has similarly exceeded expectations, at least thus far. The president's wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, is obviously a highly intelligent woman with many ideas in what government needs to accomplish and a firm determination to help the process. She has, moreover, her husband's enthusiastic consent to her participation in the active work of his administration. When she accepted the assignment of drafting the president's health care proposal, it was widely expected that she had bitten off more than she could chew, and that her aggressive style would alienate voters.
Thus far, however, it hasn't turned out that way. Ms. Rodham Clinton's approval rating in national polls is well ahead of her husband's. She managed to bring the health plan through its lengthy birth agonies, while still striking most people as bright, good-natured, and resourceful. Just recently, as critics of her plan started weighing in with their objections, she has begun to show an edge of exasperation that does not become her and which, if continued, may start offending people (calling some of the criticisms "lies," for example). But up to now, it is fair to say, she has proved a bigger asset to her husband than many of their opponents had anticipated.
In the field of defense, Mr. Clinton's own notoriously anti-military inclinations have been modified, not only by the exigencies of his new responsibilities as commander in chief, but by the counsel of his relatively moderate Secretary of Defense, former congressman Les Aspin. The Clinton reductions in the military budget are in many cases not all that much greater than those proposed by President Bush. Recently Aspin has come under criticism for various derelictions, from refusing to send tanks to Somalia to lacking any clear concept of a military policy for Haiti. But in an administration bulging with leftists he remains, at least relatively, an influence for common sense.
It is foreign affairs that Mr. Clinton's performance thus far has proved most ominous. His defenders argue, with justice, that he deserves credit for having stuck by Boris Yeltsin at various points when the Russian leader, and with him the hope of a democratic and market-oriented Russia, were in great peril. He also managed to avoid doing anything visibly wrong at the G-7 summit in Tokyo. But, with those exceptions, his record in the foreign arena has been one long succession of missteps and failures, several of them serious enough to be called disasters.
Having criticized President Bush during the campaign for not doing enough to block Serbian aggression in Bosnia, Clinton sent Secretary of State Christopher to Europe to round up support for the lifting of sanctions and the launching of air strikes. But the Europeans, like the Congressional Democrats, have sized Mr. Clinton up as a paper tiger, and Secretary Christopher similarly failed to impress them. He came home empty-handed, and Mr. Clinton settled for blaming our European allies for making it impossible for him to do anything.
On the subject of Haiti, too, Clinton had been a sharp critic of the Bush policy, and had vowed to stop turning back refugees from that tormented island. But once in office he quickly— and, let it be said, wisely—reversed himself. He also, much less wisely, sought to impose the elected president, an unstable and pro-Communist ex-priest, Jean Bertrand Aristede, on a reluctant military, and wound up making the United States look ridiculous when it's soldiers, sent to Port-au-Prince with inadequate arms, had to sail away without landing when threatened by rioters onshore.
Even in Somalia, where the Bush administration had committed American forces to insure the delivery of food and humanitarian supplies, Mr. Clinton allowed himself to be talked by UN Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali into turning the operation into an ambitious "peace-making" expedition to build a new government, and thence into a preposterous search-and-destroy mission with a cash reward for the capture (never achieved) of an uncooperative local warlord.
Only in the Middle East has the situation improved during Mr. Clinton's first year in office, and there, significantly, progress was made the administration had least to do with it and knew least about it. The Israelis and the PLO reached agreement in secret talks in Oslo, under the sponsorship of the Norwegian foreign minister. Subsequently Israeli foreign minister Peres traveled all the way to Santa Barbara to notify Secretary Christopher who was vacationing there.
Approaching the end of his first year as president, therefore, Mr. Clinton has, as Winston Churchill once acidly remarked of Clement Atlee, a great deal to be modest about. But he clearly believes that his health care proposal, now beginning its long journey through the legislative process, may yet earn him a place among the presidents memorable for their great achievements. The readiness to compromise on health care has already been displayed—almost everything, it seems, is negotiable except that it must be universal—suggests that his ultimate goal is political: Whatever Congress passes next year, he evidently reasons, he can claim paternity and be hailed forever afterward as "the president who brought universal health care to America."
But it is, of course, precisely this accolade that his opponents will seek to deny him. The bill as ultimately passed will not only bear little resemblance to the one submitted by him and his energetic wife; it may well be named (quite accurately) "the Jones-Brown Act" or whatever, in honor of its Congressional authors. Getting the credit for it may not prove as easy as Mr. Clinton expects.
On the evidence of his first year, in any case, it is not only Rush Limbaugh who finds Mr. Clinton seriously lacking. During 1992 it seemed possible that he might indeed prove to be the kind of "new Democrat" he professed to be: ready to acknowledge that the old liberal nostrums had failed, and to work with such creative forces in his own party as the Democratic Leadership Council (which he once chaired) to find new solutions for the nations problems. But once in the Oval Office he quickly sidelined relatively moderate Democrats, repudiated his own pledge not to raise taxes, cynically scuttled the Hatch Act (which had kept federal employees out of political campaigns), signed a bill enabling welfare recipients to register to vote while picking up their checks, and revives the old politics of envy with the clearest appeal to class warfare since the early days of the New Deal.
The public has responded by giving his performance the poorest rating, at this point in his term, of any president since the polls began.
And yet it is much too early to dismiss Bill Clinton as doomed to be a one-term president. If the economy manages to emerge from its long doldrums, despite the burdensome new taxes and other obligations that Mr. Clinton seems bent imposing on its job-producing sectors, he will be given credit for the fact that people are "better off now than they were four years ago." And if Ross Perot decides to enter the presidential race again, he may, even though no longer able to command 19 percent of the votes, deprive the Republican candidate of just enough of them to reelect Mr. Clinton.
For after all, as Richard Nixon demonstrated long ago, a candidate does not have to persuade the voters to love him, but only to find him marginally more acceptable (or less offensive) than his rivals. Mr. Clinton succeeded in doing just that in 1992, and it would be rash indeed to conclude, just yet, that he won't be able to do it again in 1996.
