It was a good year for Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, and a better year for radio gadfly Rush Limbaugh.
At President Clinton’s expense, Republicans collected a handful of new governors and senators. Somalia blew up in the State Department’s face, the administration went to the brink with Congress on a number of issues, and Little Rock attorney Cliff Jackson, a lifelong Clinton loather, got the allegedly mainstream press to chase a dusty sex-and-state-trooper scandal into the Christmas headlines.
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But a year after Bill Clinton left Arkansas for the White House, it turns out that in large measure the voters who elected him don’t want their money or their franchise back.
A Wall Street Journal/NBC News survey last week gave Clinton a job approval rating of 60 percent, while similar polls by the New York Times/CBS News and USA Today/CNN found that 54 percent of those asked approved of the president’s performance.
That’s a slightly higher grade than Ronald Reagan earned at the end of his first year, and a little better than the public assessment of Jimmy Carter’s first 12 months.
Reagan, of course, went on to become the most popular president since the invention of the Teleprompter, and Carter went on to provide bad example to the men who succeeded him.
All of which demonstrates that snapshot surveys at any point in a president’s tenure provide dicey and uncertain analysis.
A New York Times/CBS poll at the end of George Bush’s first year, for example, gave him a job approval rating of 76 percent. Bush is now helping his sons, Jeb and Junior, get started on their electoral careers.
But the message of Clinton’s upbeat year-end surveys might be that the public is simply not as fascinated with the controversies that so engage the news media and the president’s political opposition. From the Zoe Baird fiasco to the suicide of White House deputy counsel Vincent Foster, from the defeat of Clinton’s economic stimulus plan to the botching of the gays-in-the-military debate to the $200 airport coif by a stylist with one name, Clinton found himself in holes and, too often, kept digging.
Clearly, however, the public does not view Clinton as “the incredible shrinking president,” which is the tag Time magazine hung on him last summer.
Once again, political pundits are re-learning the idea that an expansion of consumer confidence and a sense among a sufficient number of Americans that the country is moving in the right direction will boost the presidential image.
It’s likely that a 60 percent approval rating is as good as it’s going to get for a president who was elected with a 43 percent plurality.
The evidence suggests that perhaps a third of the voters will never find a Clinton initiative to their liking, unless he opts to return early to Arkansas.
Beyond the poll numbers, it’s all but certain that Clinton’s bad habits-his penchant for overreaching on policy, his sometimes ambiguous relationship with the whole truth and his now-storied inability to organize his administration-will get him in serious trouble again.
Indeed, watching your attorney general name a special prosecutor to investigate a land deal in which you were entangled as governor of Arkansas provides a dubious kickoff for Year Two.
Republicans hope for the worst. At a meeting of the Republican National Committee last week, party Chairman Haley Barbour unveiled a six-minute video aimed at reminding voters of what he characterized as Clinton’s “unprecedented string of broken promises.”
The video chides Clinton for failing to deliver on his proposed middle-class tax cut, for not introducing a welfare reform bill, and for offering a health-care reform plan Republicans insist will limit patient options and smother small businesses, which will be required to pay for some employee coverage.
It’s a message Barbour and company believe will serve the GOP well in the midterm elections, and there’s little to suggest that Clinton will have coattails of any length when November rolls around.
Still, in the Ozark patois he sometimes affects, Clinton has made good on an oft-stated campaign promise that he would stay on the case “until the last dog dies.”
He’s proven himself to be resilient, at least in the face of a pundit class that rates his presidency on a weekly basis.
Clinton may understand, in ways his critics do not, that the umpteenth Friday night report card from “The McLaughlin Group,” or the latest almost-certain-to-be-fatal scandal inside the administration is devalued by an increasingly jaded public.