The president had been going around saying that package raised taxes too much and cut spending too little, and laying off blame for it not just on Republicans, but also on the congressional Democrats, who in truth he had strongly pressured at the time to vote with him, and who (also contrary to his new version of events) had unsuccessfuly tried to get him to make deeper program cuts, not the other way around. But, hey, it was probably only flip-flop number eight-hundred million trillion in the history of world political discourse, so what was the big deal?
The question is a fair one. I think I know the answer. It is not that, in addition to being a classic flip-flop, the president’s accompanying account of how the tax legislation came into being was misleading, though the rearrangement of facts couldn’t have helped a lot. The real answer is that this particular maneuver seemed to cap a process that has been underway, fitfully but still recurrently, since the Democratic shipwreck at the polls last November. In all the White House blaming of them and efforts to distance the president from them, recasting Clinton as a victim of his own party and a man who deep down shares the various disgruntlements that caused the electorate to punish it, Clinton’s fellow Democrats, standing bleakly at the rail of the sinking ship and scanning the horizon for help, believe the only thing they see on the choppy waters is not a rescue mission at all. On the contrary, to their unhappy eye, the tiny speck in the distance seems to be the captain himself, energetically rowing away, all alone in the vessel’s only lifeboat. Admittedly there’s nothing they can do about it. But surely they can’t be expected to like it.
My own next question is this: who will like it? It is true that no one is exactly enamored of either of the political parties as such anymore; even the most thoroughgoing partisans these days affect to be independent thinkers, outsiders of some sort and definitely not creatures of their party. And it is also true that the dispossessed Democratic congressional majority, like the Republicans who replaced it, can sometimes be awfully hard to love. But then, can’t we all. The point is that even given all this generalized unhappiness with the parties, the spectacle of a president who appears to have spent so much time and thought since last November’s election disaster looking for ways to save himself, and at his own party’s and colleagues’ expense, if necessary, is not a winner–with anyone. At that primal and, I think, supremely important, level of politics where people are stirred by feelings about the quality and character of a leader, leaving such an impression would be, on a scale of one to ten, about a minus fourteen.
This conviction of mine about primal-stir politics versus issue-adjustment politics runs directly contrary to the most sacred tenets of a large part of the campaign priesthood, one of whom the president has come to depend on in the aftermath of the 1994 elections for counsel. I am referring to those among the political consultants who have this “positioning” fetish, as I see it, constantly advising that if their client moves 40 feet “right” on this issue and about three and a half more yards to the fabled “center” on that one, with a little further fine-tuning to come as the situation develops, well, the field will be his. They know everything about politics-you can’t deny them that–in the minutest detail. But some of them don’t seem to know the big thing. In their presence I can’t help being reminded of my own experience a while back when, in going through some storage boxes, I came across a few old English lit papers I had written in college. They were on some of the great 19th-century novels, like “Madame Bovary” and “Anna Karenina,” powerful fictional expressions of abiding social, sexual and psychological truths. On rereading the papers I found to my amusement that there was absolutely nothing concerning these novels–their prose structure, their use of imagery, their historical placement-that the cocky 19-year-old kid appraising them didn’t understand. Except what they were about.
I think I am hearing something similar whenever I encounter this business about so-called “triangulation” being the salvation of Bill Clinton in the coming campaign. It is apparently the brainchild of his currently reigning consultant and means some sort of cynical acrobatic whereby the president will position himself (what else?) between the Democrats and Republicans for now on a number of carefully chosen issues to gain political support and believability. That’s what they call “triangulation.” It’s supposed to look like a triangle. I think it looks like going over the side and abandoning the crew, claiming all the credit and laying off the blame. At this point voters don’t say, “Well, that crew was nothing much to write home about in the first place.” They say, “I don’t like that.” And, in a campaign in which it is at least conceivable that your candidate will be running against a military officer with a record of exceptional loyalty to and concern for those under his command, and in which leadership is an overriding concern, it strikes me as borderline mad to be counseling this kind of publicly visible, self-protective flight–and also to be accepting such counsel.
With the aid of a powerhouse consultant you can position yourself right into oblivion, all the while thinking how smart you are, rather in the manner of that self-confident 19-year-old paper-writer. Clinton is smart – a famously quick study. He must be smart enough to know what all that anguished noise was really about when he was caught in the act of trying to jettison his own past record and his allies–and smart enough to do something about it.
