CHAPTER NINETEEN

The political equation Clinton faced, to be sure, was extremely difficult. Filled with hopes and plans to be the first president to concentrate on domestic issues in more than thirty years, he encountered a particularly daunting problem as he began to tackle the reality of office: the budget deficit. In his mind and those of his economic advisers, it was the last great gift of Ronald Reagan, and to a lesser degree George Bush, to the new Democratic administration, perhaps even one of the reasons for Clinton’s election. Some thought Reagan’s increased defense spending, which accounted for no small amount of the deficit, had also been among the straws that had broken the back of the Soviet empire and set in motion the series of events that had helped elect Clinton.

Other politicians and economists, many of them quite conservative, had always believed that Reagan’s supply-side economics—cutting the level of personal income taxes and thereby stimulating domestic consumption—was too theoretical a philosophy and not likely to succeed. Even George Bush in 1980 had referred to it as voodoo economics before joining the Reagan ticket and becoming, however involuntarily and uncomfortably, one of its advocates. Regrettably, it had worked better in theory than in practice. Though Republicans had in the past criticized the Democrats for their deficit financing, it was under Reagan that the deficits grew ever larger, becoming near the end of his presidency a living, organic part of the budget itself. When Reagan was elected in 1980, the deficit stood at $59 billion, a relatively modest figure when compared with the nation’s GNP. By the time Clinton was elected, the budget deficit was expected to be $300 billion, and the national debt, $914 billion when Reagan had entered office, had reached $4 trillion. It might have been morning in America as far as Reagan was concerned, but the bill for the party the night after had yet to be paid.

By the middle of the Bush term, the economy was proving predictably sluggish. Far too much of the nation’s resources were committed to servicing debt. No small part of Ross Perot’s success in his own curious and erratic campaign had come from his charts, simple, indeed almost primitive ones—as if done for schoolchildren—but effective. They showed that Americans were living well, but passing the check on to those who would come after them. Lee Iacocca, then something of a national hero for leading Chrysler’s industrial resurgence, had hit home when he had said almost casually on television one night that Americans were using their children’s credit cards. Much of Wall Street, though nominally Republican, agreed and, by 1992, was unhappy with the mounting deficits. Influential people there—the kind of men and women that other Wall Street big hitters turned to in time of crisis—thought any new administration had to show greater discipline and reduce the deficit. That would be true of any administration, but particularly a Democratic one, because Wall Street, though often the beneficiary when the Democrats were in power, nonetheless tended to regard them with innate ideological suspicion.

The taming of the deficit, it should be noted, had to be done not only in a country with a growing antitax sentiment, but where the Reagan years had embedded the resistance to taxes deep into the culture of one political party, the Republicans, and made the Democrats loath to take any action that might be viewed as increasing them. No issue lent itself more readily to the skills of modern political consultants and their advertising colleagues than a brief, simplistic sound bite showing an angry but ordinary wage earner, huddled together with his family, lamenting that candidate X or Y had raised his taxes.

Four years earlier, as they were about to take office, the Bush people had been aware of the same problem that the Clinton people now faced. But in his attempt to continue to hold on to the Reagan mantle (and survive the perils of conservative New Hampshire), Bush had made that famous promise not to raise taxes and would later find himself imprisoned by it. When Bush was elected and waiting to take office, Leon Panetta, then still a congressman and eventually, four years later, a critical figure in putting together the Clinton budget, went to the vice-presidential mansion, where Bush was still residing, to talk about economic policy. He did it at the request of his Republican congressional colleague Sonny Montgomery, and Panetta explained as bluntly as he could to Bush and his economic advisers that they had to get hold of the deficit. Otherwise it would profoundly and negatively affect his entire presidency. It would be, Panetta said, like a giant cancer eating away at everything else they intended to do.

Panetta came away from the meeting with a sense that Bush knew he was caught in something difficult, a prisoner of his New Hampshire promise, but he and the people around him intended to bring some form of economic reality to what was a mounting crisis. They seemed to be telling Panetta that it was a timing thing—a matter of figuring out when they could safely break the no new taxes pledge. Dick Darman, who was the Bush administration point man on the budget, took Panetta aside and said, “We hear what you’re saying. I think he’ll do what is right. But we have to find the right time to do it.”

Clinton had campaigned as something of a liberal-populist, with one foot always in the center. His principal economic adviser was Bob Reich, who had been one of Clinton’s closest friends since they’d first met as Rhodes Scholars on the boat going over to Oxford. Reich was a liberal economist in the New Deal/Fair Deal tradition. He believed that government had an obligation to tinker with the economy to help make society more equitable for the have-nots. He was the chief architect of Clinton’s early domestic policy programs, and many of Clinton’s ideas had their roots in Reich’s book The Wealth of Nations. Putting People First, or PPF, the Clinton economic program was called, and its founding father was Reich. PPF was relatively modest; it was aimed at the have-nots in society who were traditionally Democratic and it called for an investment of about $50 billion for job retraining, school infrastructures, preschool education, and mass transit. It was supposed to be a stimulus package for a stagnant economy, a tip of the hat to old Democratic constituencies, and was a greatly scaled-down contemporary version of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society. The investments, given the overall size of the federal budget, were hardly huge. But by the time Clinton was elected the nation’s financial leadership and general population were more concerned about deficit reduction than new social programs. The tide was clearly going the other way. “Deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit, deficit,” a frustrated Reich would later write of the first few weeks of the Clinton team’s economic discussions. “We have to cut it. By how much? That’s all we talk about in the Roosevelt Room.”1

A month before they took office, the Clinton team had learned from Dick Darman that the budget news was going from bad to worse. Instead of an annual projected deficit of $300 billion, it was likely to be much higher, $350 billion. So from the start the Clinton people did not crunch numbers, the numbers crunched them. The need to take on the deficit weighed heavily on every aspect of the Clinton administration, particularly in the early days when its members were setting their priorities and political goals. It dominated not just economic policy, but social, political, and defense policy as well. All the economic factors that had worked for Clinton as a candidate now worked against him as a president. The national economy was soft, unemployment was high, and the deficit was on the rise. Therefore, economic policy was at the very center of the administration’s purpose as it had not been in a long time, particularly for a liberal Democratic administration. This, not foreign policy, was where the president’s primary energy would go, and this, not foreign policy, was where he believed policy would bring the most critically needed change. This issue was tied most directly to the national electoratel; it was why he had beaten George Bush.

If Clinton and his top NSC advisers saw little of each other, the many meetings among his economic and political people seemed endless and often chaotic, hour after hour of talk like a college bull session. Other members of the administration, including the top NSC people, seeing how much time the president was spending with his economic people, spoke wistfully about how they wished that he cared as much about their subject matter as he did about the economy. Clinton had arrived in office surprisingly budget conscious and budget careful for a moderately liberal Democrat. Being a former governor, not a former senator, made a big difference, as he had governed a small, unusually poor state with a balanced-budget requirement. So he came to the White House, in this area at least, prepared to be disciplined on budget issues. He was therefore different from many liberal congressional Democrats, for whom the instinct to spend was the most basic part of their political creed, and who were not nearly as much in the line of fire if people resented increased taxes.

It also became clear to Clinton, as he listened to the options spelled out for him by his top economic people, that Wall Street, which represented the distilled capitalist view of the American economy, believed that the government was at something of a fail-safe point regarding the rising budget deficit. That Wall Street now expected a liberal Democrat, for whom few of its senior (or junior) people had voted, to do for it what a conservative Republican, Reagan, and a centrist-conservative like Bush had not done was one of the special ironies of the moment, and it was not lost on an often irritable new president.

Clinton was prepared to bring some financial discipline to his economic policies, but he was also furious about the tight constraints placed on him by the deficit struggle and that the numbers for the coming year were significantly worse than the Republicans had promised they were going to be. He would have to spend a lot of time doing things that economically and politically he did not want to do, instead of the things he wanted to do. He raged at this, and his rage was far greater at Reagan than at Bush. Bush, he realized, had been made especially vulnerable in his run for reelection because of the sluggish economy and the damage done to him on the subject by Ross Perot. So Clinton complained often and angrily about Reagan. He was so revered by the country, everyone loved him and thought him a great hero, and here he had left the economy in a complete mess. Everyone loves him, Clinton would say in one of his milder moods, and everyone’s dumping on me, and he’s left behind all this shit for me to shovel. Reagan, he said, has the status of a saint and he damn near ruined the economy.

The Clinton administration, forced to concentrate on the economic equation in front of it, would charter the least likely course of all for a liberal Democratic president: deficit reduction. In the past, conservative Republicans, complaining about free-spending Democrats, had favored deficit reduction. Thus during the transition period, the initial power structure of the first term of the Clinton administration was defined. The foreign policy people were generally untested, and they were operating in an area where the president felt uncomfortable. He was sure the country was looking homeward after the Cold War. That elevated the status of his economic advisers and diminished that of his national security ones. To the degree that anyone on his upper-level team was involved in foreign policy, and this was an enormous change in postwar American life, it was in foreign trade, in fighting to open markets in Japan and elsewhere in Asia. American political and military hegemony post–Cold War was now a given; by contrast, American economic hegemony seemed in jeopardy. Thus the dramatic shift in this administration as foreign policy moved from the traditional political-military sphere to a new primacy of trade.

In addition, Clinton was extremely impressed by the economic people who were joining his team. Bob Rubin’s day as a major player would come later, and by the tail end of the second Clinton administration, he would be regarded as one of—if not the—bright shining stars of the Clinton years. That was especially true on Wall Street, which was reluctant to give any Democratic president credit and which later assumed that the rise of the Dow some 6,000 to 7,000 points in such a brief time was surely due to Rubin. Though surrounded by perfidious liberals of dubious character, he had prevailed, overruling what was presumed to be, given the prejudices of the venue, their constant bad advice.

But in the beginning, the most influential figure in the first Clinton administration was, without question, Lloyd Bentsen. Bentsen’s relationship with the young president was, observers thought, the most intriguing in the entire administration, for Bentsen’s hold over Clinton was almost magical. Clinton was in awe of his treasury secretary, deferential at all times, their interaction, thought one bystander, almost worthy of a novel. Not unlike Christopher with Clinton, it was a father and son relationship, with one significant difference: it was as if Bentsen, wealthy, admired, an immensely successful man who could make other powerful men seem to cower, was the father that Clinton would have chosen. He was twenty-five years older than the president, and like Christopher, roughly the age Clinton’s father would have been had he lived. But it went further than that. Bentsen was accomplished in all ways and in many fields. Clinton, monodimensional, running even when he was not running, was successful in politics alone.

Bentsen was not merely older than the new president, he had all the experience, all the graces, and, no small thing, all the wealth that Clinton knew he lacked. Their personal stories were completely different, and Bentsen’s biography greatly overshadowed that of the younger man he now served. He was a genuine war hero, a B-24 bomber pilot in World War II, flying with the Fifteenth Air Force in Italy, not only a squadron leader but apparently the youngest bomber pilot in the European theater. He had grown up overnight in a unit where the casualties were brutal. But he had made it back whole, and even though he was shot down twice, he never lost a crewman. Before he returned home, he had flown the requisite thirty-five missions.

He was twenty-three when he flew most of those missions. He held, in an administration where war records were either minimal or nonexistent, the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with three oak leaf clusters. After the war he had gone back to what is called the Valley, the Rio Grande Valley in the southernmost part of Texas, where his father was a local power, a leading landholder and businessman who had the good fortune to find oil on his land. In that area, land, oil, and money all blended into power. Bentsen ran for Congress in 1948, his war record a critical part of his campaign, won easily, and became at twenty-seven the youngest member of the House. He was a protégé first of both Sam Rayburn and Lyndon Johnson, the two great powers of Texas politics on the Hill, and then later, as the divide in Texas politics between the liberal and conservative factions grew bigger, of John Connally back in Austin.

Rayburn was grooming him for a House leadership role, but Bentsen was restless, and after three terms, somewhat against his father’s wishes—his father had hoped he would stay in Congress and one day run for the presidency—he quit to go back to Texas to earn some money. He succeeded handsomely at that, making a great deal of it in the insurance, real estate, and oil businesses. After more than a decade out of politics, he thought of challenging Ralph Yarborough, the liberal Democratic senator from Texas. Normally Yarborough was anathema to Johnson, but by 1964 Johnson had assumed the presidency, was switching constituencies and becoming more liberal himself. He discouraged the race, even though his close ally John Connally, then governor, and a good deal more conservative than he was, badly wanted Bentsen to make it.

Six years later, with Johnson out of office, Bentsen went after Yarborough and beat him in a bitter and ugly race for the nomination, then he beat George Bush in the general election. He was elected four times to the Senate and quickly became a major figure there. He was one of the big boys in the Senate, part of the inner group that controlled policy on important economic issues. Dealing with tax matters, he was the epitome of the old Teddy Roosevelt slogan: speak softly but carry a big stick. He was very much a throwback to the old power barons of the Senate, a man who understood the place, how it operated, how to get things done, and who developed a reputation as someone you crossed at your peril. He was known, and it was considered an advantage at his level, to have a mean streak, and to go out of the way to pay back those who underestimated him.

Bentsen also had a certain toughness, almost iciness. He had been close to John Connally, the leading power broker in Texas politics, for more than three decades, but in the late eighties and early nineties, when Connally ran into various financial and political problems, Bentsen, his own ambitions on the rise, deftly separated himself from Connally. With that, their long friendship was over and they never spoke again. It was, thought men who knew them both well, a good example of how steely Bentsen could be.

In 1988, his presidential ambitions hopeless in the then Democratic Party, Bentsen had accepted the vice-presidential nomination and had run a race in which his abilities were palpable and had left many Democrats feeling, ideological considerations aside, that the ticket might have done better if he had been at the top and Michael Dukakis at the bottom. On one famous evening he debated Dan Quayle on national television and, in just a single sentence, with a terrible finality, put a ceiling on Quayle’s political career.

Despite the brief run for the presidential nomination and the vice-presidential campaign, Bentsen was not that well-known as a public figure when he joined the Clinton team. His roots were more in the past, in a time when the prime movers in the Congress exercised their power as quietly as possible, believing that the less that was known about what they did and who they were, the better, and the less they debated publicly and the more they did behind closed doors, the better. Since Bentsen held such an influential position on the Senate Finance Committee, he did not need to become a household face. Those who needed to know how powerful he was knew; those few who should have known but did not would learn soon enough. The sources of his power were in stark contrast to those of many people now arriving in a Washington that had been created by television, where power was much more fragmented, and where it was believed that the more visible you were, the more your face was known across the nation, the more powerful you were.

Bentsen’s unique position among the Clinton principals in December 1992 was the result of what feminists would call a guy thing, what happens when men are among men and they watch to see who emerges as the leader, the toughest, strongest, smartest, in the pack. Bentsen had done things that other men of his generation—and most assuredly men from the next generation or two, those who had missed the big war and Vietnam as well—wished that they had done. He wore his alpha status, his elevated place in the pecking order of powerful males and would-be powerful males, lightly, with a natural ease. His innate authority in a room of other politicians was the product of the way he had lived his life and nothing less than the sum of his career. His life and career were complete. Others in the cabinet might vie to please the president; Bentsen did not have to. In fact, it worked the other way around. The president sought to please the secretary of the treasury (asked by a reporter whether he could have voted for the Clinton health care bill if he were still in the Senate, Bentsen had icily answered, “I’m not in the Senate.”)

Bentsen had not particularly wanted—or needed—the job. Most of the Texas Democrats he knew urged him not to take the Treasury portfolio for fear that whoever succeeded him would surely be a Republican. But he took the job because he was a little bored with the Senate. He had after all those years been there, done that. Bentsen was older than anyone else in any Clinton meeting he attended, four years older even than Christopher, the senior figure from the world of the NSC. On the Richter scale by which talent was judged and admired in Washington, he was significantly more accomplished than the new secretary of state, who was considered the ultimate lawyer, which was not necessarily a compliment. The admiration of his peers as a man rather than as a mere politician came easily to Bentsen as it had never come to men like Nixon or Clinton, who had to hold positions of power to gain respect.

Bentsen had a natural grace and an ease with his peers. In contrast, Clinton’s relationships with peers were always somewhat limited, primarily to those who were like him, political junkies, and courted his friendship because they liked being around power. Bentsen’s magnetic pull worked in a room whether he had a title or not. Clinton had to be a successful politician to be important. He was never one of the boys when he was young, while Bentsen had been the boy that other boys wanted for their friend. As a man, he hunted and fished with skill all over the world. Clinton played only one sport, golf. But even there he was famed for being granted mulligans, extra shots that were never counted against his score. Golf, therefore, was an extension of his political position, not sport as an end in itself. Ambitious men were anxious to play golf with Clinton not because he was a gifted golfer but because he held power.

Bentsen’s influence over Clinton was immense. He became the dominant figure in the administration on the subject they were all struggling with and to which the president was devoting most of his time. Bentsen was a deficit hawk and had been for some time. In a memorable moment during the 1988 campaign, he had described Reaganomics: “It’s easy to create the illusion of prosperity. All you have to do is write hot checks for two hundred billion dollars a year. And that’s what the Reagan-Bush administration has done. That’s how they doubled our national debt in seven years.” Now Bentsen was in a position to do something about that debt. His two leading colleagues were also deficit hawks and exceptionally impressive men. Bob Rubin had come from Goldman Sachs and was believed to be worth more than $100 million, back when that was still big money. Leon Panetta came from the Congress and was much admired for his fairness and honesty, and for his knowledge of the Hill and the way Washington worked. All three men were pushing hard for major deficit reduction. Of all these powerful people, Bentsen seemed to stand apart, the man whom, in critical meetings, Clinton always wanted to win over. During those endless discussions about the budget deficit, Bentsen would say little. He was irritated by the length and the lack of discipline of these meetings. But toward the end Clinton would turn to him and ask, “Lloyd, what do you think?” Bentsen would answer with a sentence or two—and that was what they would do.

As the Clinton team struggled with the ugly new numbers, it became clear that the dominant figures were deficit hawks, who all came up with comparable images: a cancer eating away at the government, or a runaway train that would destroy everything else in this administration. By 1996, if they did not do something to stop it, they and the Bush people estimated, the figure would be well above $350 billion, perhaps getting closer to $400 billion a year. By the end of the century, according to reliable economic projections, it might be as high as $500 billion. If so, other industrial nations, perhaps less burdened by debt, might become leaner, tougher, and more competitive economically.

In domestic political terms, the budget deficit was a singular weapon that the Republicans on the Hill could use against any Democratic social programs that might add to the debt. Thus Clinton’s domestic agenda was stymied. Nothing, most of the president’s economic people agreed, could be achieved until the deficit was checked and some kind of turnaround begun. Not only would that be valuable as an end in itself, but it would signal Wall Street that this administration was serious, fiscally responsible, and could be trusted.

The people arguing for this course of action—Bentsen, Rubin, Panetta, and Bentsen’s deputy Roger Altman, who was also a top-level Wall Street figure and an old friend of Clinton’s from college—said that instead of the stimulus package that the Clinton team had originally planned in PPF, they should go for deficit reduction. With some luck, the effect of deficit reduction—quite possibly lower interest rates, less money spent on mortgages and servicing credit card debt, and therefore more money in circulation—might end up being the equivalent of a tax cut.

One other man was a key player in all this without seeming to be one: Alan Greenspan, chairman of the Federal Reserve Board. He was signaling to Bentsen and the other senior people that if the Democrats went after deficit reduction in a serious way, he would more than likely bring interest rates down. Greenspan had implied this himself in a long meeting with Clinton in Little Rock during the transition, where he spoke of all the benefits—both central and peripheral—that would result from a major assault upon the deficit. Among many other things, Greenspan said, long-term interest rates, then unusually high, would drop, and that of itself would spur domestic spending and juice up the economy. Because the bond market would look less attractive, he added, money would be shifted into the stock market, and the Dow would rise accordingly. Deficit reduction, he said, was a form of economic stimulus.

Clinton, listening to his own top people, sensed that they agreed with Greenspan. Nonetheless, it was an unusually risky political course for him. He might do all the things that Greenspan and others wanted about cutting the deficit. But perhaps interest rates might not come down sufficiently and perfidious Wall Street might not respond enthusiastically, or perhaps the results would come in so slowly that they would be of no help at all when he needed them most—in four years. He would be turning the single most important decision about the political future of his administration over to the whims of an alien and probably hostile place over which he had no control, Wall Street, and about which a long line of Democratic politicians had learned to be suspicious. If his administration followed the deficit reduction course, it would be pulled away from the side of its traditional constituents to the side of its traditional adversaries.

After Clinton finally decided to go after deficit reduction, Bentsen, who got on well with Greenspan, represented the president in further talks with him. Greenspan was delighted by the likelihood that this administration was tacking in the direction he had suggested. No promises were made, of course, for he would not and could not promise anything. It was not a quid pro quo kind of thing, but it was what he had hoped for, and he thought that not only would virtue be its own reward, but that lower long-term interest rates would probably be a second reward.

Bob Reich, whose populist-liberal views were being devalued in this process, thought it a form of extortion. Greenspan was not necessarily at any of the many meetings where long hours were spent discussing the politics of deficit reduction. But he was very much there in spirit, with both Bentsen and Rubin talking about how negatively Wall Street would react if this administration did not take on the deficit. To Reich and others, it was as if Greenspan were actually in the room. It struck Reich as unfair that Wall Street was able to exact the kind of leverage against a liberal Democratic president that it had never deigned to exercise with two conservative Republicans who normally represented its wishes. Why hadn’t Wall Street spoken more vigorously about deficit reduction six or seven or eight years ago? he wondered.

Reich was slowly being moved aside as a central player to a more peripheral role. It was a difficult time for him, falling in stature and assigned to work on economic policies that might have come from a moderate Republican administration. He was one of Clinton’s oldest friends, an early admirer of his rare talent, drive, and ambition. He represented the liberal or populist side of the candidate, and Reich’s views on economic policy had been important during the campaign. He had hoped for a job as the head of the Council of Economic Advisers.

But in the changed atmosphere of the grim pressure facing Clinton’s economic advisers, Reich was considered a little too radical. The price on his reinvestment and stimulus package had been put at around $50 billion, at exactly the same time the Clinton people were discussing how to cut as much as they could from the budget. Reich wanted to reach out to the vulnerable in the country as directly and immediately as possible; the others hoped to make the economy more sound and thus improve the lives of people on the lower rungs of society. Reich would become secretary of labor, his job, it sometimes seemed, to placate a large number of increasingly disgruntled labor leaders. His was not destined to be a particularly happy governmental tenure.

With the decision to emphasize deficit reduction, the progressive call to arms of PPF was effectively finished. In the eyes of many supporters, Clinton had switched sides, but it did not seem to bother him very much. His views about economic policy, his longtime friends thought, did not run particularly deep. All things being equal, Clinton probably tilted to a modestly liberal, slightly populist view of domestic action, but it was hardly a passion, and his attitude about this, as about with many other things, was tactical; he would almost always go with the prevailing winds. There was not, one of his friends thought watching Clinton swing to the deficit reduction side, a strategic bone in his body. Everything was about survival.

The liberals who wanted an emphasis on social action had lost—and were furious. Newspaper accounts of the president’s economic plans made Clinton sound like Calvin Coolidge, Reich wrote the president in a memo. The same disappointment was felt by some of Clinton’s political advisers like Carville, Paul Begala, and Stephanopoulos, who favored domestic programs, for example, of the kind the candidate had campaigned on. To Carville the key question was who this president was. Was he the person they had believed in when the campaign first began, someone who had such natural empathy for the problems of ordinary Americans and talked to his colleagues as a fellow liberal? Or was he someone they thought they knew but didn’t? At one point Carville, a born populist, scribbled a note on a small piece of paper: “Where is the hallowed ground? Where does he stand? What does he stand for?”2

But it was done. The fiscal conservatives and traditionalists within the administration had defined its economic and thus its political policy. Given the fierce new budget restraints, they had also without realizing it helped set limits on foreign policy as well, particularly the use of the military in a crisis where American involvement might be deemed optional. Obviously the cost of any good-sized armed intervention, a war that demanded the use of a large force over time, would throw the budget calculations completely off. In the mid-sixties, at the high point of postwar American economic hegemony, Lyndon Johnson could take the country to war by lying to his own budget people, most particularly the Council of Economic Advisers, telling them that it was going to be a small war when he had already agreed to give the military more than four hundred thousand men. Those days were long gone; the contemporary budget restraints were far more draconian.

In February 1993, when the president went before a joint session of the Congress to talk about his economic package, a quite surprised and uneasy Alan Greenspan found himself sitting between Hillary Clinton and Tipper Gore—involuntarily a poster boy for the new Clinton program. Reich, sitting in a somewhat less favored spot, looked at the president and decided that he seemed to be speaking that night to only one person, Greenspan.3 Clinton now had a new target for the occasional quick flashes of his anger—his own economic advisers who had turned him into a centrist, cautious politician whose main contribution was going to be limiting the debt. “Goddamnit, I’ve become Eisenhower,” he said.4 Sometimes, even as he went ahead on this more conservative path, he sounded as if he were arguing with himself. “Where are all the Democrats?” he once said sarcastically. “We’re Eisenhower Republicans here and we’re fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits, free trade, and the bond market. Isn’t that great?” Then he would go into a tirade that, even if everything worked out and Wall Street reciprocated his favors, “I don’t have a goddamn Democratic budget until 1996.”5

Occasionally he would refer to the people who had pointed him in this direction as “they,” as if they were aliens from outside his own government who were forcing him to do things he didn’t want to do. His complaints had a touch of self-pity, and he would sometimes protest when he was with more liberal staff members about what had happened. He made it sound as if he were a prisoner of his own administration. There were those who had witnessed similar scenes over issues of foreign policy—an angry, indeed somewhat petulant Clinton railing against the injustice of being president. He was irritated to have to move from campaign rhetoric, which was easy and where you could be for all kinds of good things at the same time, to governance, where you were confronted by a constant series of hard and mean choices. When you campaign, Clinton was learning, there was always a right thing to be for, but when you are president, there was almost never an easy right thing to choose. It was more often than not an imperfect choice of the lesser of two evils.