Today, Bekavac is president of Scripps College in California. Clinton is president of the United States. And in 24 years he hasn’t changed his method of career advancement. Desperate last week to resurrect his failing crime bill, he invited members of the Congressional Black Caucus to the White House. Some had voted against the bill because they opposed its death-penalty provisions. But Clinton didn’t talk about the bill. “He told us it was a crisis,” said Democratic Rep. John Lewis of Atlanta. “He said, “My presidency is on the line. It’s an emergency.’ It’s always that way with him. He’s always saying, “These are the last days!’ " It seemed to work. He won three additional votes, including Lewis’s, improving the chances, rated as 50-50 last weekend, that a scaled-back bill will pass this week.
Even if Clinton gets the bill, his closest advisers – not to mention his critics – are concluding that his operating style is undermining him, imperiling health-care reform and his chances for re-election two years from now. The president’s own theory is that only the final bottom line counts: degrees received, elections won and, in his administration, new legislation on the books.
But in the White House, a president’s methods matter as much as the bills he proposes or signs. It’s a basic point that Clinton doesn’t seem to get. Elected with 43 percent of the vote, leading a divided party and a cynical citizenry, burdened by suspicions about his character, Clinton needed to learn how to coax an aura of power out of every minute in the White House. He’s done just the opposite: forever trying to do too much, lapsing into crisis mode, advertising his predicament and then depending on the last-minute kindness of strangers. Vulnerability may be very ’90s, and it certainly makes things dramatic and entertaining, but it’s a hard way to run a presidency. “As someone who cares about the authority of the presidency – whoever has the job – I can barely stand to watch him,” says Stephen Hess, a scholar at the Brookings Institution. “He seems intent on trying to undermine his own power.”
The crime bill is a case in point. With the help of bumbling and fractious Democrats, Clinton managed to turn what should have been an easy triumph – a crime bill in an election year – into a near political fiasco. He and his Democratic allies allowed the bill to balloon in size and scope. “We could have passed just the 100,000 cops in a flash,” lamented one top Democratic aide late last week. Then Clinton acted courageously by insisting on keeping a ban on assault rifles in the legislation. But after originally insisting on his big bill, he began scaling it back in search of votes from Republican suburbanites. So instead of being praised for taking on the National Rifle Association, the news was about what he was giving up. “He turned a victory into a defeat,” lamented a Democratic polltaker who was conducting focus groups last week.
A similar pattern is emerging in the health-care saga. Running out of time and popularity, Clinton is helplessly watching as congressional negotiators try to cobble together a backroom deal. Last week the so-called “main-stream group” in the Senate produced the core of a deal. If it ultimately passes the Congress, it will fundamentally reform health insurance. Yet it won’t be “universal coverage” – the one principle that Clinton has stressed above all else. And although he threatened a veto last January, some of his closest advisers now downplay the possibility. “We’ll sign whatever we get,” said one. Having asked for so much – and given away so much – the deal won’t look like victory, whatever the administra-tion claims.
Habits are hard to break. And the pattern has worked – until now. After he lost the governorship in Arkansas in 1980, Clinton confessed error and asked for forgiveness. He got it. In the frantic days before the New Hampshire primary in 1992, he begged voters to save him. They did, giving him enough votes to finish a respectable second. As Bob Woodward records in “The Agenda,” the president last year used the same ploy on Sen. Bob Kerrey, laying an apocalyptic guilt trip on a budget vote. “If you want to bring this presidency down, then go ahead!” Woodward quotes Clinton telling Kerrey. “Now maybe I ought to just pick it up and go back to Little Rock!” the president shouted. Kerrey eventually provided the crucial last vote – after making sure everyone knew how desperate Clinton had been.
The central political strategy of Clinton’s presidency boils down to this: don’t love me, love my legislation. “His model isn’t really JFK but LBJ,” says Terry Eastland, a leading author on the presidency. “There’s a big speech – and a big bill – for every problem.” Johnson could satisfy his gargantuan legislative appetites. He had huge Democratic majorities, a tradition of discipline in Congress and a country not yet so skeptical of Washington. Clinton has the Johnsonian hunger without the means to satisfy it. So he assembles vast and therefore rickety coalitions for enormous bills that can (and do) fall apart at any minute. And he piles so many items on his agenda that monitoring them is nearly impossible – making crises, and abject pleading, inevitable.
Republican Sen. Phil Gramm sees a Machiavellian plot in Clinton’s crisis mode. “They always do stuff late and come in at the last minute because they want you to miss the fine print,” he declares. But the accusation gives the White House too much credit for knowing what’s going on. In a West Wing where every senior aide gets a daily news “summary” of some 100 pages, legislative information overload makes panic unavoidable. “They’re always mistaking activity for action,” says Bill Bradley, a California Democratic consultant.
In the dealmaking days ahead, the president won’t have an abundance of friends to call on. The fate of his health-care bill now is essentially in the hands of moderate Democrats in the Senate, several of whom simply can’t stand him. And the new-wave Republicans he confronts, reared on Reagan and “Crossfire,” have a predator’s attitude toward professions of vulnerability. “I don’t think I can teach Bill Clinton to be strong,” says their dean, Sen. Bob Dole. “I just don’t want him to teach me to be weak.”
The Clinton management method produces the need for a steady stream of saviors. One of the first was Roger Altman, the Treasury aide brought over to the White House to run the budget-bill “war room” last year. Last week he quit the administration over his “incomplete” testimony to the Senate about Whitewater. Then there was David Gergen, who schmoozed up the media establishment before being shunted to the State Department.
Now it’s up to chief of staff Leon Panetta and his new Mr. Outside, investment banker (and former congressman) Tony Coelho. The two Californians’ prescription is familiar: restricted access to the Oval Office; fewer but more regular meetings; fewer but better speeches; more stroking of conservative Democrats, and more regular attempts to entrap Republicans in acts of cooperation. The new team will try to instill what consultant Bradley calls “a sense of occasion” – a Reaganesque focus and use of symbolic moments to cut through the talk-show din. All the White House needs, says Coelho, is “some old pros who know the town.” The “pros,” presumably, will advise Clinton on how to accumulate and use the ineffable stuff of power. “Their chances of succeeding are based on the assumption that he is educable,” says Hess. Clinton seems willing to learn. But the presidency, it turns out, is one course in which borrowed notes won’t help.
