Then he began to right himself. He sought advice from everyone he knew. The counsel ranged from style to ideology. There were Ronald Reagan video-tapes floating around the White House, he was reminded. Please study them. Watch the Gipper’s bearing, his aura of command. You’ve got to focus the message, advisers said. They made him watch another videotape. It was a ““CBS Evening News’’ broadcast, featuring no fewer than six White House stories on one night. ““You have to make just one point a day, and stick to it,’’ said media consultant Frank Greer. And, by the way, don’t discuss foreign policy in your jogging shorts.
Politically, Clinton was told, he had to quit playing legislator in chief, had to be above the fray, president of all America, not just the Democratic Party. His instincts told him to tack to the right, and to reinforce that view, he began consorting with an old friend of his and Hillary’s who would surely agree: Dick Morris, a Republican polltaker whose clients included Sens. Jesse Helms and Trent Lott.
When Clinton is crowned in Chicago this week, will we see the product of an honorable journey to maturity – or merely a methodically ““repositioned’’ candidate? The answer, at once maddening and obvious, is: both. Americans see him as a slippery character, charming and not quite trustworthy, but born to listen and effective enough to respond. He is just like us, a pleaser in a crowded nation of pleasers–a work in progress. A favorite author these days is a University of Chicago professor named Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who writes about the ““Flow–the psychology of optimal experience.’’ If presidents are the cultural emblems of their times, then perhaps Clinton is just the man for the era of self-actualization. Voters say they want a virtuous society, but in a pinch will settle for leaders who merely talk about striving for one.
Until he came to Washington, it had always been easy for Bill Clinton to be whatever his world required. He had the gift of ingratiation. He could shed the past, morph himself to meet the new season. In Hot Springs, Ark., he was the country boy who became a scholar, validating his mother’s insistent pride. At Georgetown, he was so earnestly philosophical that the Jesuits tried to recruit him, until they discovered he was a Southern Baptist. Campaigning back home in Arkansas, he began in 1974 as a Naderite reformer – and ended up a ““New Democrat’’ conservative enough on crime and economics to survive Reagan.
But two years into his presidency, Clinton still seemed lost. For a man who so craves acceptance, the lack of it was disorienting. His approval ratings were abysmal; only Nixon’s had ever been as bad. To many, he and his wife were corrupt strivers – or worse. And now Newt Gingrich had taken over Congress, marginalizing Clinton.
The fruits of Clinton’s makeover are now on display. Last week at the White House he looked right at home. In flag-draped Rose Garden ceremonies, he signed three popular measures: raising the minimum wage, ““ending welfare as we know it’’ and guaranteeing health-care coverage to workers who change jobs. His administration, meanwhile, pursued a new plan to begin regulating tobacco as a drug and to discourage sales of cigarettes to minors.
The flurry of activity slowed the Republicans’ post-San Diego momentum. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, Clinton now leads Bob Dole by 7 points (47-40), with Ross Perot garnering 7 percent. ““The Republicans have thrown everything they have at him,’’ Morris told NEWSWEEK. Yet the NEWSWEEK Poll pegs Clinton’s job-approval rating at nearly its highest ever: 54 percent.
Pictures were almost as important as the numbers. Clinton has come to look like a man in control of the office. In the White House, the president happily sorted through his birthday presents and noodled over his acceptance speech. In a gaudy 50th-birthday celebration at New York’s Radio City Music Hall, he accepted the accolades with solemn emotion. When people ask how he’s doing, he now has a stock response of humility and relief: ““Better than I deserve, thank you.''
As comfortable as he seems, he and his handlers are too shrewd to rely only on his improving image. They’ve laid out an unusual strategy for an incumbent at a time of relative prosperity and peace: it doesn’t dwell primarily on the Man in the Oval Office. The reason is clear. The special prosecutor is still at work. In the NEWSWEEK Poll, 49 percent of voters say he doesn’t have the ““honesty and integrity’’ they expect to see in their president.
So Clinton’s campaign will be blandly ““issue-based’’ – as long as his lead holds up. The pitch: whatever you may think of him, Clinton delivers. Just look at the facts. The campaign will retail an upbeat review of the economic and legislative record, plus new initiatives to help Americans thrive in the third millennium.
But this election is about personal-growth rates, not just economic ones. If Clinton has matured, it’s been by what he does best: campaigning to win. If he’s been cynical, it’s been toward the same end. His comeback is the result of happenstance, shrewd advice and coldblooded calculations of his own.
Luck played a part. He was fortunate in his enemies. Gingrich’s army overreached, and their general turned out to be more juvenile, and less popular, than the president himself. And there was a tragic political gift, the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The day before the explosion, Clinton was on the defensive in a prime-time news conference, insisting that whatever the GOP was doing on the Hill, ““the Constitution gives me relevance.''
A news cycle later, he was wired to the healing power of the presidency. He vowed to find the perpetrators of the bombing. ““Meanwhile,’’ he said with iron certitude, ““we will be about our work.’’ He went to Oklahoma in a role ideally suited to him, mourner in chief. Without realizing it at the time, the Clintonites had stumbled on an organizing theme. ““It’s the “Lean on Me’ presidency,’’ a top adviser says.
Death has sobered Clinton, once a notoriously informal man. In 1993 he went through an increasingly common rite of passage for his generation. His last living parent, his beloved mother, died. And since he’s become president he’s also seen a good friend (Vincent Foster) commit suicide, another (Ron Brown) perish in a plane crash and a third (Israel’s Yitzhak Rabin) cut down by an assassin. He has ordered 25,000 troops in the war zone in Bosnia. At times, Clinton has the distant gaze of a man who’s made the tough calls. ““I have a much better ability now to deal with the ups and downs and pressures of the presidency,’’ Clinton told NEWSWEEK in an interview (page 42).
Foreign affairs are a tonic for presidents abused at home, and that has been especially true in Clinton’s case. Unsure at first, he gained confidence when decisions didn’t lead to disaster – Haiti, Bosnia and the Middle East remain relatively calm – and when he mastered the international cast of characters. On Air Force One he loves to give scouting reports on world leaders – just as he used to tell his drivers about county officials in Arkansas. He applies the down-home treatment to foreign policy. At Hyde Park last year, Boris Yeltsin complained that his feet hurt. In a dizzy moment, the two beefy potentates tried on each other’s shoes.
Clinton used to revel in the New Age intimacy between the leaders and the led. No more. He no longer throws giddy conspiratorial winks to friends in audiences. In his first two years in office, he would prowl the hotel lobby during Renaissance Weekends, looking for one more conversation to join. No more. When he visited Austin, Texas, last October, friends expected him to kick back at a late-night dinner. ““That’s what he would have done in the old days,’’ said HUD Secretary Henry Cisneros. He didn’t.
While Clinton was becoming more presidential, he was still his own best political operative. He shook up his circle of advisers. In-house liberals George Stephanopoulos and Harold Ickes remained and made sure Clinton had no expensive, divisive primary challenge. But the president largely listened to his oldest professional ally in politics, Dick Morris. The two had worked together as long ago as 1977, when Clinton first ran for governor. They were soulmates: they would devise poll questions, pore over the numbers and scribble ad copy in minutes.
Winning this time, they decided, meant going back to what worked before. Clinton had run–and won–as a New Democrat; now he almost had to turn himself into a Republican regent. No more big-government plans like Hillary’s health-care overhaul. And the First Lady, more interested in surviving to fight another day than in ideological purity, agreed. Clinton reassures himself that the shift right was just a return to his roots. His critics call it camouflage. Overruling White House liberals–and chief of staff Leon Panetta–Clinton decided to propose a balanced budget. It was the price for regaining ““relevance.’’ Morris also sold the president on a strategy of cultural gesture: conservative-sounding ideas such as school uniforms and teen curfews. Morris lobbied the president to sign the welfare bill, and declared the election a lock when Clinton agreed to do so.
Morris wasn’t always right. He didn’t quickly pick up on the demagogic power of Medicare. He favored a budget deal above all, and urged compromise. But the president sided with the liberals and stood firm in the face of GOP threats to shut down the government. The Republicans called his bluff, and ended up looking like campus demonstrators who wanted to tear down the Administration Building. The president got to play the college dean.
Bill Clinton as the symbol of stability and order? His advisers don’t quite spell it out, but that’s their sales pitch. A generation ago, at the 1968 Democratic convention, the boomers went to war with the police on the streets of Chicago. Now, a generation later, they’re back, in charge and at the podium. The show will be splendid: Bill and Hillary and Al and Tipper in a pageant of parental maturity. Once again, Bill Clinton will have become what he thought others wanted him to be.
But Chicago isn’t necessarily the last act. The mood of the country could change yet again, and Clinton would no doubt respond. For the objective is always victory. On a recent flight to San Francisco, he settled in for a round of hearts. As Air Force One touched down, he was losing. The motorcade could wait. The players didn’t budge. The game didn’t end until Clinton was ahead.
