OUR CLEVELAND:

Up close and presidential: a review of The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House by John F. Harris (Ronald Brownstein, LA Times)

Harris' freshest insight challenges a cornerstone of accepted wisdom among both Clinton supporters and critics. Almost all portraits of Clinton focus on his hunger for ideas, information, people and sensation, and his desire to squeeze every opportunity and experience from each day. His admirers believe that this restless insatiability sparked his political and policy innovations, even if it fed the personal recklessness exemplified by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Many of his critics, conversely, believe he dissipated his presidency by failing to focus it; even some sympathetic analysts, like journalist Joe Klein, have argued that Clinton's personal failings and political setbacks were both marked by an inability to set limits or establish priorities.

A common theme for supporters and critics alike is that the essence of Clinton is his boundless energy — his curiosity, ambition and voracious appetites. Harris acknowledges all of that. (How could he not?) But mostly he turns the judgment on its head. Clinton's problem, he argues provocatively, wasn't too much activism but, on many occasions, too little.

"Beneath Clinton's constant whir of activity," he writes, "lay a passive streak." While Clinton was intellectually drawn to the toughest problems, Harris argues, he too often let decisions drift, unable or unwilling to settle disputes among his advisors or with Congress or other nations. Clinton's desire to synthesize alternatives and preserve his options sometimes produced brilliant improvisation — as when he outmaneuvered congressional Republicans, and revived his presidency, during the 1995 showdown over the federal budget. But especially in his first term, his failure to impose his will — or sometimes even to discern it — left him paralyzed on issues from campaign finance reform to turmoil in Haiti and atrocities in Bosnia. Later, Clinton's reluctance to confront resistance within the government's national security bureaucracy prevented him from producing a response to terrorism commensurate with his understanding of the problem.

The result, Harris astutely concludes, was a presidency that was most effective when Clinton's advisors offered him a clear direction. "He needed people of emphatic certitudes to help sharpen his own goals, and to give him the self-confidence to pursue them," Harris writes. Even during the most chaotic moments of the administration's first years, he notes, Clinton established a decisive course on economic policy that emphasized deficit reduction and free trade largely because confident advisors the president respected, like Lloyd Bentsen and Robert Rubin, unwaveringly urged him in that direction. By contrast, Harris believes, Clinton's foreign policy drifted badly in his initial years partly because Warren Christopher, his first secretary of State, tried to "respond to his boss's wishes" rather than shape them. Christopher failed to recognize that what Clinton needed in a secretary of State "was someone who with his own certitude quieted Clinton's doubts."

The tragedy of Bill Clinton is that he could have been a great president, though not much of a man, had he simply governed as he ran. Had he, for instance, pursued a Third Way health care program with HSAs and the like, instead of an even more bureaucratized government plan. He also could have enacted sweeping SS reform, especially after 1994, far more easily than a Republican president can, because there wouldn't have been enough Democrats willing to filibuster their own president. His two great achievements, free trade and Welfare reform, came when he depended on Republican votes in Congress. Using that model he could have tackled a whole swathe of big issues and built a significant legacy.

Posted by Orrin Judd at May 25, 2005 10:05 AM