Thursday wasn’t much easier. On the way to Georgetown University, Clinton worried about the speech he was about to give. Should he use that joke about the COP? (“Term limits [are] looking better to me each day.”) Or would it offend the new Republican powers? Wearily, he decided to chance it.
An unfamiliar sense of hesitation and anxiety pervades a White House that until now was filled with confidence, if not overconfidence. Aides had entertained notions of the “Doomsday scenario”–losing the House and Senate. But until the exit polls arrived on Tuesday, everyone dismissed it. Chief of staff Leon Panetta carried the first numbers to the Oval Office: would-be Senate majority leader Jim Sasser was down 13 points. There was no Clinton temper tantrum. News this bad was numbing.
As the returns rolled in. pundits blamed Clinton personally for the debacle. In his private quarters. he stayed up until 2 a.m.. calling the losers. Later that morning, as the shaken staff gathered. one aide read out the name of every Democrat who lost a congressional race. Silence fell. It was like hearing a list of soldiers lost in battle.
Insiders say Clinton is already showing signs of the Comeback Kid’.s fighting spirit. But they yearn for the kind of opening that helps a president act presidential: an air-traffic controllers’ strike, say, or an act of aggression by Saddam Hussein. In the absence of such a dramatic moment, Clinton will have to try to project a more winning image. One new role now under consideration: national Comforter-in-Chief, exhorting the nation to shed its poisonous cynicism as Roosevelt did in the Depression. But as COP adviser Don Sipple notes, the Republicans won in part because they come across as “disciplinarians,” while Democrats come across as “therapists.” As comforter, Clinton would have to sound stalwart, not soft. But before he can look to the future, he will have to move the White House past its own despair.
