The image of President Clinton as the bungee-jumping chief executive, the cheeky undergrad who snoozes through the semester and pulls an all-nighter to wrap up the term paper was enhanced by last week’s victory on the North American Free Trade Agreement.
There’s no question that Clinton has been sleeping on the yellow line for months.
As his job-approval rating lingers in the mid-40-percent range, the president has been racing from big speech (health care to Congress, NAFTA at the White House, crime in Memphis, trade at Georgetown University) to big congressional vote.
Mostly, he’s won, cobbling together coalitions and, in the case of the trade agreement, purchasing support from recalcitrant members with protectionist deals for wheat, tomatoes and orange juice.
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If the NAFTA vote proved one thing, it demonstrated that nothing helps free trade like a liberal application of protectionist tariffs.
But the orgy of Capitol Hill dealmaking aside, give the man his due. A president who was being compared to Jimmy Carter last month is now being likened to Lyndon Johnson, although it’s difficult to unearth the instance in which LBJ ever worked the phones to help pass a deal negotiated by two Republican presidents.
Still, Clinton has his reasons. And the longer he’s in the White House, the more fascinating that reasoning process is to observe.
He seems to revel in the confusion of friends and foes as he presents a different facet of Bill Clinton from issue to issue.
Some call it waffling, but it’s apparent Clinton has decided that a man elected president with just 43 percent of the vote in a country where party identification and loyalty are on the wane must present a moving target.
Over 10 months, Clinton has delighted and confounded a host of groups, some long allied with the Democratic Party, others who have long served as targets for Democratic presidents.
His election was hailed by Big Labor as blessed relief from 12 years of being in the political wilderness, but his NAFTA win generated a front-page story in Friday’s Wall Street Journal that contended Clinton was “wooing, and mostly pleasing, big-business leaders.”
The Congressional Black Caucus, which anchored Clinton’s support in the House in fights over the budget and the administration’s failed economic stimulus plan, has felt whipsawed by the president, finally breaking with him (though not unanimously) over NAFTA.
After last week, Jesse Jackson, who may never forgive Clinton for his Sister Souljah ambush during the presidential campaign, accused the president of leading “the Reagan-Bush-Limbaugh-Iacocca-Kissinger-Rostenkowski-major publishers-Wall Street-Republican victory team.”
If Clinton can’t find a way to surprise his alleged allies, he’s liable to pick a fight.
Remember the elite liberal press corps that aided Clinton and bashed President George Bush?
Well, in an interview with Rolling Stone magazine this month, Clinton complains that his accomplishments have been ignored by the media, that he has “not gotten not one damn bit of credit from the knee-jerk liberal press, and I am sick and tired of it.”
“In the campaign,” Democratic pollster Stanley Greenberg said, “Clinton was always pleasing and displeasing people who thought they owned him.”
Greenberg, who worked with Clinton during his long and eventful campaign, cites the party moderates in the Democratic Leadership Conference, which the former Arkansas governor once headed up, as “a particularly good example of that.”
Along with the liberals, the business-friendly Dems at the DLC are having problems with key elements of Hillary Rodham Clinton’s health-care plan, and with what they view as the president’s tendency to keep moving away from the political center.
According to pollster Greenberg, Clinton believes that his presidency will rise or fall on the state of the economy, which is no surprise, and on his ability to to deliver on his promise to boost the middle class and improve the lives of working families.
This administration is counting on short political memories and long-term economic growth.
And Bill Clinton thinks he will earn a second term despite the ideological wrangles if he succeeds in delivering meaningful health-care reform, as well as developing effective strategies for job retraining, national service, street crime and welfare reform.
“One has to take seriously the alienated segments of the American polity,” Greenberg said. “(If not) … it will find other outlets.”