Chapter Seventeen

BALANCE

Memorial Day weekend of 1995 arrived to find all the White House’s top hands busy at the office. Their holiday assignment was to attend to presidential anxieties. Clinton had grown increasingly agitated over his strategy for confronting the year’s preeminent domestic controversy. Once again, as in 1993, the subject was the federal budget: its size, and the reach of the national government in American life. Unlike 1993, when the new president had seized Washington’s agenda, now he was emphatically in the role of observer and critic.

This was the heart of Clinton’s problem. With the year nearly half over, he was tired of observing and criticizing the Republican budget without having a proposal of his own. As they gathered in the Oval Office, Clinton listened to George Stephanopoulos explain, as he and others had explained many times in the preceding months, the merits of continuing with the current strategy of excoriating excesses of the Republican budget plan and not muddying the debate by presenting a credible alternative. This time, however, the president turned on his young retainer with acid sarcasm: “That’s fine. When people say, ‘Where’s your plan?’ I’ll say, ‘Oh, I’m just president of the United States. You want me to have a plan?’ ”

As this outburst made plain, the “rope-a-dope” strategy that Clinton had reluctantly fashioned in concert with congressional Democrats the previous winter was no longer tolerable to him. Extracting himself from a stale strategy and its supporters, though, was complicated, with political and even psychological dimensions. Clinton desperately wanted liberation from the clammy embrace of Democrats on Capitol Hill and from his own White House team. He could get it only by an open break with ostensible friends—precisely the kind of personal conflict he would always avoid unless absolutely necessary.

In theory, the Democratic approach for the first part of 1995 had a certain smart-aleck logic. Newt Gingrich, showing admirable fealty to his promises, was leading the new Republican majority on a purposeful march to cut both taxes and spending, while putting the nation on a glide path toward a balanced budget within seven years. Democrats had responded by merrily denouncing the hardship these cuts would cause, particularly in popular entitlements like the Medicare health program for senior citizens. (The Medicare reductions were not literal cuts but reductions in the rate of growth.) As Gore put it, Republicans needed a “rendezvous with reality.” In other words, they needed to confront the obvious truth that it was a lot easier to talk about balanced budgets in the abstract than to implement the specific policies needed to make them happen. Only at the end of the year, after Republicans had been softened by the rhetorical barrage, would Democrats put forward constructive ideas of their own.

Clinton had been ill at ease with this theory from the beginning, and grew ever more so as the months wore on. As a political matter, he simply did not accept the judgment of senior staff aides like Panetta and Stephanopoulos that Democrats were scoring points with the public. When presented with polls showing opposition to specific Republican budget cuts, Clinton, echoing what Morris had been urging in their private consultations, responded, “That’s not right! People will forgive Republicans the details because they have a plan.”

Beyond politics, the obstructionist approach offended Clinton’s sense of virtue. By no means did he agree with Gingrich’s prescriptions for the deficit and for the problem of rising Medicare costs, but he did agree on the diagnosis. These were large and worthy problems; the previous year’s debacle over health care reform had been his own attempt to grapple with them. He deplored how Republicans then, and during the 1993 budget battle, had vilified his proposals while refusing to meet him halfway. Indeed, Clinton treasured his resentments. As Gene Sperling, who had been heavily involved in the budget debate, described the mindset, “How could he hold on to his view of how they screwed him on health care if he did the same thing to them on the deficit?”

For weeks, his White House staff had tried to restrain him. But they could not keep him corralled. The stereotype of Clinton as a supremely guileful and deceptive politician was essentially wrong. On important matters, his real sentiments always surfaced, no matter how the staff tried to keep him “on message.” In this instance, he broke free in late May during a telephone interview with New Hampshire Public Radio, in which he responded to the interviewer’s needling by casually endorsing the idea that the budget indeed could be balanced within ten years. Ten years was not as ambitious as the Republican target of seven. Even so, it obviously deviated from the White House official line, which was that budget balance by any precise date required grievous cuts in social services and risked sending the economy into recession. Horrified, White House aides coaxed a reluctant Clinton into walking back his interview comments during a question-and-answer session with reporters in the Rose Garden a few days later.

The president’s mention of a ten-year time frame was not incidental. The administration’s budget analysts had reported that balancing the budget within seven years—under the prevailing economic growth forecasts—would essentially mean rescinding most of the new Clinton domestic programs that had already been passed, and abandoning plans for anything more. (The surging economy of the late nineties, which flooded government coffers with tax revenue, would later make these deliberations seem quaint. At the time, every decision involved exquisite trade-offs between deficit reduction and the progressive domestic spending Clinton yearned for.) In May, however, Clinton learned of a Treasury Department study that showed that extending the time frame to ten years offered vastly more flexibility to accommodate both deficit reduction and some spending on new Clinton programs.

The president’s gust of irritation at Stephanopoulos had a clarifying effect. It showed there was no point arguing any longer. Clinton’s economic and political advisers reconciled themselves to the fact that he wanted a balanced-budget plan of his own, and it was their job to give him one. Even his anger came as something of a relief. It suggested he was voicing his genuine wishes; he was not merely taking stage direction from the dreaded Dick Morris.

As Stephanopoulos retreated from the Oval Office, his friend Sperling followed behind.

“George, are you okay?” Sperling asked.

“I’m fine, I’m fine,” Stephanopoulos replied. “He wants to do this. He’s never going to be able to hit the Republicans’ plan until he has one of his own.”

Clinton had wanted to announce his own new budget plan the very next day, with a televised speech to the nation. Morris, with his usual fervor, had said that unless the president embraced a balanced budget immediately, Clinton’s standing with the public on this issue would be lost irretrievably. But moving so quickly would have caused an insurrection. There was no way Panetta or Robert Rubin, at Treasury, could stand for releasing a plan that was not backed by credible numbers, vetted by administration budget experts. This would take another two weeks.

So the speech was set for June 13. Clinton was determined to reach a national audience, which required the cooperation of the television networks that had skipped his feeble East Room news conference two months earlier. To signal the gravity of the moment, Al Gore personally phoned the three network news anchors to make the request. They gave the president five minutes.

The brevity of the speech made the usual tussle about what to leave in and what to take out that much more delicate. Each side in the White House presumed that the first lady was an ally. Dick Morris said she had been “instrumental in the birth of this speech,” and when she phoned that day with pleas that the president mention his plan to increase benefits under Medicare for mammograms and Alzheimer’s care, he gladly complied. She also instructed an aide to call Stephanopoulos to tell him to “make sure the speech gives something to the Democrats.” At Stephanopoulos’s urging, the first lady prevailed on Clinton to take out a friendly and familiar reference to Newt Gingrich and replace it with a more austere reference to “the Speaker.”

The speech itself was marinated in Morris’s brand of data-driven rhetoric. Each line reflected a point that polls showed resonated with an electorate that was skeptical of government in general, but enthusiastically protective about specific items—usually the programs that benefited the middle class. Education spending was the most popular of these, leading directly to Clinton’s opening: “First, because our most important mission is to help people make the most of their own lives, don’t cut education.” Health care was next. As Clinton and Gingrich both knew, trimming programs for the elderly and the poor was essential to finding substantial savings in the budget, even though many voters regarded the Medicare program as sacrosanct. Clinton cheerfully proposed an act of fiscal levitation: “Second, balance the budget by controlling health care costs, strengthening Medicare, and saving Medicaid, not by slashing health services for the elderly.” This was a prelude to the speech’s main point, which was the core of the debate in 1995, or for that matter in any year: Who should bear the burden for funding government? The president gave his answer: “Cut taxes for the middle class and not the wealthy. We shouldn’t cut education or Medicare just to make room for a tax cut for people who don’t really need it.”

The reaction from Capitol Hill was immediate and brutal. The majority of congressional Democrats were enraged. For many, the speech confirmed what they already suspected: that Clinton was ready to save his skin and cut whatever deal he needed with Republicans. Democratic principles—and the political vulnerabilities of Democratic members of Congress—could be damned. New Jersey Democrat Donald Payne, the head of the Congressional Black Caucus, declared that Clinton’s plan was “a quantum leap backward for social policy, and it will have long-lasting, explosive results.” Congresswoman Patricia Schroeder of Colorado reflected the general Democratic contempt for the party’s leader. Republicans, she said, were playing with Clinton “like a kitten with a string.” As for Clinton’s own party, she added, “I don’t think he has even thought about Democrats over here. He’s thinking about himself and presidential politics.” Congressman David Obey from Wisconsin chimed in: “I think most of us learned some time ago, if you don’t like the president’s position on a particular issue, you simply need to wait a few weeks.”

If it was liberation from congressional Democrats that Clinton was seeking, he now had it. Despite the discomfort the speech had caused, Clinton and Morris would soon be vindicated in their judgment, on both substantive and political grounds. On substance, the president had traded in an intellectually indefensible position for one that he could advance with a straight face. On politics, the polling over the ensuing months showed that the public, particularly the moderate independent voters on whom Clinton’s fate hinged, was indeed more willing to listen to a critique of the Republican proposals when there was a credible alternative on the table.

Paradoxically, Clinton was now in an even stronger position with liberal Democrats. As Morris viewed the dynamic, the party’s congressional wing was like a temperamental dog—motivated more powerfully by fear than by affection. Many Democratic lawmakers plainly had little personal regard for Clinton. The way to keep them at heel—and avoid a primary challenge from the party’s liberal wing—was to be so popular in public opinion that Democrats saw no gain in defying the president. This analysis would be proven right again and again in the years to come.

Clinton’s decision to enter the budget debate was an obvious declaration of independence from the majority of his own staff. It was also the high watermark of Morris’s influence. The consultant remained the president’s chief strategist for the next year, but the relationship lost its Rasputin-like dimension. The president’s political standing was on the upswing, in some significant measure owing to Morris’s advice. As Clinton’s prospects rose, so did his self-confidence—and his flexibility. He no longer wished to be in the thrall of any one adviser. Instead, he was ready to resume his more familiar pattern of navigating through crosscurrents of conflicting advice, fashioning a course that was distinctively his own.

The scales began tipping within minutes of the Oval Office address. The president had adjourned immediately after the speech to watch the television analysis with a group that included Morris, Stephanopoulos, and Gene Sperling. Commentator Bill Schneider on CNN was describing the Democratic backlash, prompting Clinton to agree darkly: “That’s right. No president was ever rewarded for doing deficit reduction.” As Stephanopoulos later recounted the moment, Morris sensed that Clinton needed reassurance, and chimed in: “Remember the theory, remember the theory. We have the Perot voters out there, lying in wait. This is the moment to strike—and watch the poll numbers go-o UP!” By illustration, Morris stood on his tiptoes and wiggled his fingers high above his head. This was all too much for the president. Two weeks before, Stephanopoulos had been in the doghouse. Now it was Morris’s turn. Clinton crushed his Diet Coke can as he barked, “I did this because it’s the right thing to do, Dick. I did this because it’s the right thing to do.”

The episode showed anew how the commonplace view of Clinton as an exclusively political creature missed the mark. There was naturally an element of calculation behind the president’s budget moves. But Clinton’s mind, temperament, and self-image demanded a higher standard—that the calculations also fit within a coherent intellectual framework. Was there a unifying logic behind his tactical moves? What was he really trying to achieve as president?

The crude way of describing what Clinton was doing in early and middle 1995 was that he was lurching rightward in programs and language in order to avoid being tattooed as a liberal in the 1996 campaign. The reality, though, is that Clinton had learned—or, more precisely, relearned—to craft a politics that defied easy categorization and was indeed more sophisticated than simply embracing the most conservative position that he figured a Democrat could get away with.

For example, in mid-July, when Clinton waded into the thorny question of religion’s role in public life, and especially in the public schools, his motives were, as usual in this year of Republican ascendancy, partly defensive. Conservatives had made large gains, Clinton knew, from the perception that liberals and the courts had evicted all religious observance and discussion of morality in public schools. But he felt certain the issue could be neutralized—or even turned into something more positive for the progressive side—with a more sophisticated approach. The popular perception that religion had been banished from schools was wrong, he believed, asserting that the Supreme Court rulings actually allowed administrators and students alike considerably more latitude to honor religious observance, so long as the activity was not coercive. He was eager to make a speech laying out the middle ground, in tandem with the announcement of a new Education Department pamphlet advising schools on what their rights and responsibilities really were. The plan sent his staff into a tizzy. From the right, Morris wanted to avoid the topic, fearing that any discussion of this sensitive subject would inflame conservatives and draw attention to Democratic vulnerabilities on the issue. From the left, Maggie Williams, Hillary Clinton’s chief of staff, warned of another clumsy ideological retreat, as when Clinton had seemed to endorse a school prayer amendment in the wake of the mid-term elections. Jonathan Prince, the young speechwriter, was caught in the middle between these two formidable figures. The inevitable result was a bland and boring speech draft. Clinton saw the version and boiled over: “This is not what I want to say at all!” On the short drive out to James Madison High School in northern Virginia, he quickly recast the speech into a quite personal statement of his own values. He talked about the role of religion in his own life, where a daily prayer in school was “as common as apple pie in my hometown.” He added, “Now, you could say, it certainly didn’t do any harm; it might have done a little good.” The whole process, Prince realized, showed the effort it took for Clinton to transcend his would-be protectors and simply say what he thought.

What did he really think? On that summer’s most potentially divisive topic—the role of racial preferences—most people around Clinton believed they knew what he felt. Prejudice was immoral, and helping blacks and other minorities overcome the legacy of discrimination that was deeply rooted in America’s culture, economy, and government institutions was the right thing to do. But as for what he thought, that was a trickier proposition. How to balance the imperative of racial fairness with the political reality that affirmative action was deeply unpopular? Did he really agree with all the government was doing in the name of affirmative action? Would he try to navigate these intellectual, moral, and, above all, political shoals with clever language and better salesmanship? Or might he choose to launch a deep and substantive overhaul of affirmative action—one that would inevitably be viewed by many blacks and liberals as an unconscionable retreat? His true intentions were a puzzle even to the people with whom he was spending hours discussing these very questions.

Christopher Edley Jr., a Harvard law professor who had been tapped to join George Stephanopoulos in heading the White House’s review of affirmative action, tried to help Clinton begin his intellectual journey with a large batch of articles and speeches. Clinton read the material and announced, “Most of these people don’t know what the hell they’re talking about.” This was true enough. Clinton’s own experience, as a politician bridging the color gap and as a governor and president who saw how programs were actually implemented, gave him a keener sense of reality than the abstract musings of intellectuals. Clinton saw the problem as inherently political. Most Americans, as he saw it, believed in promoting racial equality, but their emotions were easily manipulated. “The definition makes all the difference,” he observed to Stephanopoulos. “Preferences we lose; affirmative action we win.” Yet watching the turning of Clinton’s mental gears as he solved a political problem could also be unsettling to people like Edley and Stephanopoulos. If racial justice was his lodestar, as Clinton often claimed, would not his views on the most contentious dimension of the issue be more settled? Did he have misgivings about entertaining the views of Morris, who in his Republican incarnation had helped Senator Jesse Helms win re-election in one of the most race-baiting campaigns of modern times? Morris was by no means a racist. But he and White House aide Bill Curry were eager for a form of affirmative action that moved away from race-based preferences toward what they regarded as a more intellectually and politically defensible system of preferences based on economic need. Clinton’s old allies at the Democratic Leadership Council also endorsed this notion, which plainly intrigued Clinton but would have been a dramatic departure from the status quo.

If the passivity of Clinton’s style could be frustrating—his penchant for study and delay and preference for contingent choices rather than final ones—the affirmative action debate showed how useful this style could be at times. The climate changed during the five months of study on the issue. As the results of the improving economy began slowly and gradually to be more evident, polling suggested that opposition to affirmative action might be a less potent issue than Republicans had assumed and Clinton had feared. At the same time, Clinton’s endorsement of a balanced budget had changed his own political calculus. He was not eager to disappoint the Democratic base again; indeed, doing so on this particular issue would have been akin to begging for a Democratic primary challenge from the Reverend Jesse Jackson. Most important, in the middle of the review, the Supreme Court had entered the issue. On June 12, in a 5 to 4 ruling, the justices ruled in Adarand v. Peña that affirmative action was constitutional only if “narrowly tailored” and served a “compelling governmental interest.” The ruling suggested, though the justices left the matter maddeningly unclear, that race-based preferences would pass muster only if policymakers presented specific evidence of past or present racial discrimination—a general assertion of discrimination was not sufficient—and also demonstrated why a specific program was the proper remedy. Affirmative action had been preserved, but the threshold to invoke it had risen. Now, Clinton was in the far preferable position of announcing that his administration would comply with the ruling, even as he asserted a vigorous defense of affirmative action.

This is precisely what he said at the National Archives, where the president’s podium was bracketed by copies of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution. Clinton’s speech was a success, interrupted fifteen times by applause—no surprise, from a by-invitation audience—but it also won considerable praise from outside commentators. “Mend it, don’t end it” was the catchphrase Clinton himself had settled on to describe his approach. He outlined the principles for any affirmative action program in his administration: “No quotas in theory or practice; no illegal discrimination of any kind, including reverse discrimination; no preference for people who are not qualified for any job or other opportunity; and as soon as a program has succeeded it must be retired.”

After reciting these provisos, Clinton concluded: “But let me be clear: Affirmative action has been good for America.”

The long-awaited pronouncement on affirmative action was correctly viewed as far more a defense than a critique of the status quo. As a practical matter, the administration made little effort, except as required by legal challenges, to either mend existing programs or end ones that had outlived their usefulness. Edley, though he cheered the result, reflected later that such a process could just as easily have produced a retreat from affirmative action as an affirmation. “The whole thing was very much a jump ball,” he said.

Such doubts as Edley’s were a by-product of Clinton’s survivalist brand of politics, in which policies and personnel are constantly shifted to suit new circumstances and new emergencies. However effective, this style was destined to leave both loyalists and adversaries wondering about his character and intentions. One morning early in August, one of those loyalists met with his boss to tell him goodbye. After eight months of being cut out of the president’s loop, Paul Begala told Clinton he was leaving Washington for Texas. Though he did not say so, the truth was Begala had no interest in being in Washington watching the president run for re-election under the tutelage of Dick Morris. He found the whole spectacle appalling.

The surest way to get Clinton’s attention was to leave him. While people were constantly shifting between inner and outer orbits in his universe, he hated it when they left entirely. After months of distance, Clinton now urged Begala to stay and work for the campaign. Begala declined politely. Clinton then invited Begala on a morning jog; that offer the consultant accepted. As they ran, Begala noted to Clinton that Republicans seemed to be basing their budget strategy on an assumption that at the end of the day the president would buckle and sign on to a plan that accommodated Republican demands. This was not an unreasonable assumption, given Clinton’s moves to date. Many on his own team, in fact, were worried that the Republicans had divined the president’s likely course.

Clinton was dumbfounded. “They can’t really believe that, can they, Paulie?” he said in amazement. “They can’t really believe I’ll cave to their demands.”

The moment of confrontation still lay three months ahead. Clinton was confident of his resolve, even if few others were.