President Clinton’s re-election campaign began with the selection last week of a popular Washington insider, former California congressman Leon Panetta, as the newly minted White House chief of staff.
Clinton’s presidency is desperate for the sweet smell of some success. And a perceived victory this year on health-care reform, which Panetta is a good deal more likely to help broker than his predecesssor, Thomas “Mack” McLarty of Hope, Ark., is an obvious starting point.
Panetta’s other mission is to impose order on chaos, to direct the frat-party enthusiasm of White House minions, to get Clinton out of meetings and into a pattern of yes-and-no answers to questions.
Getting the Clinton staff problem under control is akin to predicting earthquakes or expecting the news media to behave itself in the O.J. Simpson case.
Getting Clinton to abandon his fondness for palavering, weighing options and engaging in wishful thinking is a problem not even Hillary Rodham Clinton has been able to mend.
So the mission is a definite longshot for Panetta, a serious man who has made a career of confronting troublesome issues in his public life.
The problem for Clinton-and Panetta-is not simply that the president dithers, or that he talks and listens too much. It is that he parcels out information to his allies and expects them to make the best of it when the entire story, or significant aspects of it, are independently revealed.
During Clinton’s long but ultimately successful presidential campaign, his advisers were driven half-mad by the candidate’s faulty memory for the details of his military draft history, his personal business dealings while in Arkansas and his relationship with Little Rock chanteuse/state employee Gennifer Flowers.
Senior staffers on the campaign trail were routinely surprised by what they saw in the morning papers about Clinton’s letters to his Arkansas draft board and his telephone calls to Flowers.
Who can forget the embarrassing “didn’t inhale” response during the 1992 campaign to a question about marijuana use? Sadly for Clinton, few have.
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Clinton could have put away the reefer-madness issue at any point in his political career by a straightforward admission of youthful indiscretion.
Everyone from Albert Gore to Clarence Thomas was admitting it in the 1980s, but Clinton relied on a legalistic argument-he says he never broke the laws of the United States and smoked in England.
This disastrous tendency to keep secrets and tell half the story continued into Clinton’s presidency. It has hurt him on dubious matters such as the Whitewater investigation and more serious matters, such as health-care reform.
During the early days of Whitewater, the absence of Democratic defenders on television was note worthy.
White House employees would do their bit on CNN and elsewhere, but members of Congress avoided the talk shows, allowing the Republicans to prattle on about this low-grade, politically driven controversy.
Why? Because Democrats in Congress couldn’t get any credible information on Whitewater, in large measure because it was in the hands of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton.
Arguing ethics with GOP Sen. Alfonse D’Amato of New York shouldn’t be a problem as long as you know the facts of the case. But neither Clinton would impart what they knew, and folks in their employ were not inclined to ask for the information.
When the Clintons took up the challenge of offering a plan to overhaul the nation’s health-care system, they fell into the same trap.
Hillary Clinton devised her proposal in secret, hiding behind task forces and her own ill-defined role as an unpaid policy wonk.
Most insiders understood that she would arrive at some form of the pre-determined “managed care” solution her husband had all but promised during the campaign.
But the secrecy alienated allies on Capitol Hill. It rendered unworkable a million-dollar plan hatched by the Democratic National Committee to sell the plan to the public beginning in 1993.
And when elements of the so-called Health Security Act began to emerge from the task force, Democrats were badly positioned to endorse and defend the plan.
They didn’t know what was in it, and they didn’t know which parts of it were negotiable, and no one-particularly the Clintons-was prepared to tell them.
If Leon Panetta is searching for a starting point in buffing up Clinton’s image, he might begin where his president gets in trouble-on the point of a half-truth.