The telephone calls were the first signs. The same reporters and pundits who only a few months ago were deep into Arkansas Chic and eager to learn the secret of the Clinton charm, the Clinton magic, the Clinton touch . . . now call and ask about the Clinton disaster.
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“What happened?” they want to know, as if they had never been warned, as if somehow I or maybe Arkansas was responsible, and owed them an explanation.
American politics knows no golden mean. Either we’re celebrating the coming of the Millennium outside the Old State House here in Little Rock, the political capital of the known universe, or all the imitation Edward R. Murrows of the televised world are putting together one of their oh-so-profound analyses of Another Failed Presidency.
Crowds that cheered on cue now boo at the mention of the suddenly former Conquering Hero. Audiences that once couldn’t get enough of America’s Hope change the channel. No wonder the Romans assigned an insignificant little figure to ride in every triumphant general’s chariot as he received the populace’s unstinting admiration, and to keep whispering in his ear: “Fame is fleeting . . . . Fame is fleeting. . . .”
Mercurial thing, public opinion in this televised, computerized, atomized mass-democracy that has all but replaced the Republic. One hesitates even to call it public opinion; it is more like mass moodiness. The gladitorial games at the Coliseum must have attracted the same kind of instant, unthinking reactions now painstakingly recorded by the Harris and Gallup polls-and revealed with a mystical solemnity formerly reserved for messages from the oracle at Delphi.
The story is told that Alexander Hamilton, on hearing the majesty and wisdom of The People invoked just once too often, turned on the invoker and sneered: “Your people, sir, are a great beast.” He had probably got too many calls from out-of-town pundits the night before.
If the people in its collective majesty and wisdom bear a certain resemblance to a great beast, surely it is to a dinosaur-a massive carnality with a pea-sized brain, a behemoth that with one flick of its great tail vaults a particular politician into not-exactly-everlasting fame, and then 15 minutes later tosses the same pol back into obscurity, or even obloquy. Invariably, said pol is left with the unshakable impression that his rise was entirely self-propelled, his decline the fault of incompetent aides who need to be replaced at once . . . .
Vanity of vanities.
Those of us who for our own perverse reasons make a business of watching ambitious politicians rise and fall have seen it before, and no doubt will see it again. It is a cycle as old as Ecclesiastes. We’re much like the field hand in the great opening paragraph of Robert Penn Warren’s masterpiece, “All the King’s Men.” Now and then we look up from our humble hoeing at the sound of another automobile in the distance going off the shimmering road, leaving behind only “the little column of black smoke standing up against the vitriolic, arsenical green of the cotton rows, and up against the violent, metallic throbbing blue of the sky.”
And all the field hand can say is, “Lawd God, hit’s anudder one done hit.” The bubble Popularity makes a treacherous and unforgiving god.
One thing for sure: Whenever a president enters that downward spiral, and begins to feel the road give way beneath him, no matter what his politics, he remains convinced that it is not he who is at fault, and that if only people better understood that, all would go well. That’s why the press secretary is often the first to go.
Quick, bring in a davidgergen to handle PR. It’s never the star attraction’s fault but his handler’s, and all the president needs is a better handler. (Remember when James Baker was going to save George Bush’s faltering presidential campaign?) Does anyone around the White House dare whisper the suspicion that the fault, Dear Brutus, lies not in our stars, or even in our press secretaries, but in ourselves?
If nothing succeeds like success, as it did last November, nothing fails like failure. Those of us who were pointing out The Candidate’s little problem with character (namely, the lack thereof) now find our doubts amplified and simplified by the great chorus called the conventional wisdom. It may be singing our song, but what we wrote in sorrow (and, all right, maybe with a little pity and contempt) now seems to come out all anger. It’s like having Rush Limbaugh agree with you.
I find myself wishing Bill Clinton would go off to the desert for 40 days and 40 nights, and substitute a diet of locusts and honey for his usual Big Macs, and find himself. Or any self. It would beat more staff changes, slick speeches and cute photo-ops. Think I’m kidding? Forty days from now, will the president be any better off for having stuck to his usual rationalization and escape clauses?
Everybody seems to be catching on at once. The effect is like the roaring of your great beast. Pat Caddell, Jimmy Carter’s old pollster, says Clinton is “the first president who has the ability to stand up and just deny he has been involved in something that he has been involved in.”
How soon they forget Richard Nixon.
Bill Clinton is scarcely the first American president who seems hollow at the core, and the Nixonian aspects of his administration grow evident with alarming speed and comprehensiveness. Says one analyst, as if it were news: “He is a pinball moving back and forth to the pressures of external events, without any internal gyroscope to guide him.” Tell me about it.
The president’s hurried response to this crisis of confidence that has been brought on by his own confidence games is to . . . rearrange his staff. He continues to switch around policies, principles and appointees, innocent of the possibility that it is not his policies, principles, or appointees that have got him in trouble. It is his inability to stick by any of them. Or by anything. Elastic Man is running out of convincing contortions.
The country senses the lack of direction, the vain attempt to substitute manipulation for leadership, the void at the center. (“It is not the compromises that he has made that trouble so much as the unavoidable suspicion that he has no great principles to compromise.” -Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, Oct. 28, 1992.) The-Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf effect already begins to set in, and the question arises whether this president would be believed even if he somehow came up with some strong beliefs.
Even at this distance, one can sense the rising panic in the White House as another administration veers off the road, fighting the steering wheel all the way, losing control, cracking up, blaming the passengers or fate or somebody, anybody else.