Why is that? Bill Clinton has a distinctive voice, look, posture, gestures–but no one has been able to impersonate him passably. much less achieve the devastating precision of Dana Carvey’s George Bush or Rich Little’s Nixon. It is not for lack of trying. Amateurs like Begala–who did a great Tsongas and Perot (and a wonderful Sen. Phil Gramm)–and ABC News producer Mark Halperin (an inspired Gore) have been on the case for years with little luck. “Saturday Night Live’s” Phil Hartman can look a lot like Clinton, but he doesn’t do the voice very well (and mostly portrays him as passive, Hillary-pecked). Jim Morris who does dozens of politicians brilliantly, doesn’t come close on Clinton. “I don’t know,” says a comedy writer for one of the latenight talk shows. “Maybe it’s that he’s so familiar. He’s everyman. He’s the smartest kid in the dorm. He’s not larger than life. You couldn’t see him up on Mount Rushmore–like Reagan, whatever you thought of Reagan.”
But that’s not quite right, either. George Bush wasn’t exactly Mount Rushmore material, and Carvey nailed him. And Clinton is anything but everyman–he is an encyclopedic feast of quirks and appetites, all easily caricatured. Indeed, there may be too many quirks to capture. He can be a laid-back, slightly goofy, good old boy (he’s got that open-mouthed look of wonderment) and the world’s quickest study (could anyone begin to impersonate him explaining health care?) and a fast-talking traveling salesman. He is a televangelic Elvis, a weeping Lothario, a hugging Bubba. “To do a good impersonation, you take one characteristic and blow it out of proportion,” says a Clinton aide. “You try that with the president and there are all these other, contradictory aspects of his personality you’re leaving out. That’s why he’s so hard to imitate.”
And also, to evaluate. In the past year, Bill Clinton has overwhelmed our public life but has not quite won us over. His intelligence and energy are manifest. After a fallow time, when politicians of both parties manipulated or avoided some of the most difficult questions facing the nation–from race relations to the deficit to the economic insecurity of the middle class–Clinton has not only confronted these issues, but he’s plunged avidly into areas most politicians assume suicidal (raising taxes, cutting programs and benefits, challenging some of the most important constituencies in his party). He has been willing to use his political capital in the service of abstractions–to reduce the deficit, to pass a freetrade agreement with Mexico–that are likely to produce more pain than progress between now and 1996. This is a serious, highminded administration–and yet, it remains difficult to know what to make of Bill Clinton, difficult to accept him completely as president.
There is an oddly compelling fascination with this president (and, of course, his wife). The White House has been inundated by mail and phone calls, more than twice the mail George Bush would receive during the course of a year. People seem to assume an intimate relationship with the Clintons, a right to demand their attention. There is an emotional intensity to this reminiscent of the feelings–attraction and revulsion–inspired by the president’s hero, John F. Kennedy, 30 years ago, the last time there was a change of generations in the White House. But Kennedy quickly achieved a level of public acceptance that Clinton couldn’t begin to imagine, even though JFK’s first year was marked by spectacular and dangerous failures.
BY CONTRAST, AND BY most rational standards, this president has had a pretty good first year. He’s had legislative triumphs, both liberal–family leave, Brady bill–and conservative (NAFTA). His central gamble, pushing a budget that emphasized deficit reduction over new spending paid off. the bond market was placated, interest rates remained low and the economy’s natural, cyclical rising tide wasn’t impeded. His foreign policy has been a mess, but be hasn’t launched the country into any inextricable disasters–and foreign matters just don’t seem to register these days on the nation’s radarscope. Most important. he has devoted himself to issues people really care about crime, health care, economic security. a rare honesty, about race and poverty. “They think he’s raising the right issues,” says Stan Greenberg, the president’s pollster. ‘And they also think he’s got the right answers. But they see him up against an array of powerful forces in Washington, and they are convinced the forces of evil are going to win."
There is a surging, populist–at times overwrought, but ultimately justifiable–sense that the Washington establishment is invincible. But more to the point: there is a persistent queasiness about Bill Clinton himself People aren’t sure if he really believes the things he says, or if he’s just trying to seduce them. The constant mist of scandals drizzling on his parade doesn’t help. He seems ever in the act of talking his way out of something. Even when the scandals recede, the doubts linger. He can seem precocious rather than wise. He tends to mistake achievement for leadership. He can be persistent–sticking to the business at hand during the presidential campaign even when all seemed lost, and, more recently, during NAFTA–but he never quite seems…strong. One cannot imagine a real, honest-to-goodness grown-up president allowing his designated secretary of defense to condescend, as Bobby Ray Inman did, by admitting that, after some consideration, he had achieved a sufficient “level of comfort” with Bill Clinton as commander in chief and was ready to join the administration.
In a way, Bobby Inman’s reluctance is America’s. The president’s willingness to tolerate such disrespect indicates that he agrees there is another hurdle to overcome. He has yet to convince the country that he is “appropriate” for the office, that he is dependable. that he can lead, that he is worth following. Part of this is personal, of course: there are those who look at the scandals and evasions of the past two years–the bimbo eruptions, the draft, the current Whitewater two-step–and conclude that Bill Clinton lacks the character for the office, and will never have it. They may, in time. be proved right, though it’s more likely that the scandals will remain a constant, nagging–and inconclusive–undercurrent. Another part of the great national reluctance is generational: Bill Clinton wouldn’t have some of the “character” problems he has if he weren’t a member of the most coddled, self-righteous, self-indulgent and persistently immature generation in history a generation that still thinks of itself as, well, evolving, rather than adult. “Baby boomers are more skeptical about the president’s youth and inexperience than older voters,” Stan Greenberg says. “They can’t imagine anyone their age having the maturity and responsibility that the presidency demands.
But another part of it may be the age itself How does one establish authority–how does one lead–now, given the false sense of intimacy and very real cynicism that seem natural by products of the information age? Is the authoritative Great White Father style of presidency dead? Can any other style work? The president often wonders about these things, aides say. He keeps up with all the latest information-age management strategies–especially the notion of leadership as a creative partnership (in more senses than one). He has created a chaotic White House, but a very postmodern one, where management is more horizontal than hierarchical: “This place resembles Goldman, Sachs a lot more than it does General Motors,” says economic adviser Bob Rubin, speaking of his notoriously collegial investment-banking alma mater.
More important, Clinton intuitively understands how to send a message in the information age. He demonstrated it during the campaign. He knew that communication was now two-way interactive (there is, in fact, a school of marketing experts that believes the era of one-way communication–of old-fashioned advertising–is over; people are now too sophisticated to simply be told what to buy). Early in the campaign, George Stephanopoulos said, Specificity is a character issue this Year,” a statement he lived to regret. As a candidate, Clinton excelled at giving the appearance of specificity; in truth, he was a more credible listener than talker. His great political skill was empathy. Which was more than George Bush could manage–and, ultimately, it was enough to win.
The agony of empathy soon became evident, though. It was a slim reed upon which to build a presidency. Clinton spent the first six months eschewing his national megaphone–the bully pulpit–and listening like mad. He listened to Congress and learned to talk its language (and accede to its demands). He avoided the national press and tried to send his message through town meetings and local media. By August, when he just barely squeaked an eminently responsible budget through a disdainful Congress, he was convinced he was doing something wrong. He got proof positive when he viewed a tape assembled by his media consultant, Mandy Grunwald, contrasting the way he spoke during the campaign (clear, simple, principled and action-oriented) with the way he was speaking as president (murky, jargonal, legislatific, process-oriented). He held a series of meetings in the White House solarium to talk about it. “He decided Ross Perot was wrong,” says an aide. “He didn’t want to get ‘under the hood’ and be mechanic in chief. He also didn’t want to be “commentator in chief’ communicating through sound bites on the evening news.”
He went to Martha’s Vineyard and came back speaking English, from the heart. Different aides noticed the change at different moments. Mark Gearan, his communications director, saw it immediately, on the morning Clinton returned from vacation: he tossed away his prepared text at an interfaith prayer breakfast and began to riff on a book he’d been reading, Stephen Carter’s “The Culture of Disbelief.” David Gergen noticed it several weeks later, When Clinton gave a slam-bang speech supporting NAFTA, while three former presidents stood behind him Paul Begala noticed it when Clinton was completely unfazed when the wrong speech turned up on his TelePrompTer the night of his health-care address to Congress. Begala later asked him what he was thinking at that moment. (“Oh Lord, you’re testing me,” Clinton said, then shrugged: “OK.”) All of which was a rehearsal for the one truly great speech of his presidency: on Nov. 13, in Memphis, to black ministers, on the subject of race, crime and morality.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS SAYS MEMPHIS WAS A break-through in more ways than one. “It was where we really learned how you can communicate in this culture, how you lead,” he says. There were four elements. The first, in a way, was most important: “It wasn’t planned. We didn’t know it was coming. We didn’t do any buildup; we didn’t alert the press that he was going to make a “major address.’ There’s such an innate distrust of staging now that the more you plan something like this, the more skeptical people are. This surprised everyone, including us.” Although it didn’t surprise them completely, which was element two: “It has to come out of beliefs that are already there, things he’s already done–we knew he was going to let loose on this topic sooner or later, you could just sense it. It was a natural process.” Three: it can’t skim the truth. Fancy rhetoric can’t overcome the absence of candor. Clinton told the ministers that the disintegration of the black family was causing a moral and social disaster. He told them Martin Luther King would be ashamed. Four: “You have to get lucky,” StephanoPoulos says, “We were lucky The New York Times put the speech on the front page. Then everyone picked it up.”
There is also a fifth point: it won’t last. The ability to communicate, to inspire confidence, is transitory. Especially for this president. “He’ll say something that hits home,” says Stan Greenberg, “and people will say, “Yeah.’ And then they’ll think twice: wait a minute, he’s a politician’.” Worse, he’s Bill Clinton–that callow, womanizing, draft-dodging, prevaricating, tax-raising, social-engineering phony. This is a man who had a 27 percent disapproval rating on the day he was inaugurated; even if he were forced to fight another gulf war, and won spectacularly, it seems unlikely that he could ever enjoy the near unanimity of approval George Bush did for a few fleeting weeks after the war. At the same time, it seems unlikely that Clinton will ever truly be accepted as president without proving himself in a real crisis, the sort that demands split-second, life-or-death public judgments. It may not be a war. It may just be a moment of personal stress or peril, an unexpected confrontation when the world is watching–and his truest self comes clear. For Ronald Reagan, it was the assassination attempt and a line that sounded like it was borrowed from the movies: “Honey, I forgot to duck.” That was a man who mistook movies for real life–and got the rest of us to believe him.
And even if Bill Clinton passes that test, there will always be something about him–any one of his multiple thirsts and appetites, some aspect of his voracious ambitions (for himself and the country)–that will prove unsettling. The same mercuial complexity that makes him difficult to impersonate will make it difficult for him to win a consistent base of support–and in his frantic efforts to empathize with all the people all of the time, he may find that he is destined to annoy too many of them too often. “Moderates will always suspect he’s drifting to the left,” says an aide. “Liberals will always think he’s selling out.” And conservatives will always be appalled by the sheer energy, the plunging forward and rooting around in areas–health care, especially–where a more incremental approach might be prudent.
Even for those who find the spectacle exhilarating, the constant, Clintonian churning–the razor-thin congressional margins, the gaffes and controversies and new initiatives, the whiff of scandal–can be exhausting. There was an almost audible national sigh of relief last summer when the president went on vacation (his poll numbers began to rise the moment he arrived on Martha’s Vineyard). But that churning may be the nature of creative leadership in this nervous age of wires, sensitivities and instant feedback. Bill Clinton seems a perfect creature for the moment. His restless struggle is not just our public theater for the next three to seven years, but a reflection of our deepest uncertainties-about what works, what comes next, what this is all about.
