Chapter Forty-three

ARGUMENT WITHOUT END

Clinton had made it to the end—still standing after everything, his political fortunes and personal dignity intact, if a bit scuffed by the long ride. There had been many seasons during the preceding decade when this result was in doubt. From the moment he sprang to national notice in the 1992 campaign, Clinton was identified with crisis—and recovery from crisis. The victory that year was followed by a stumble-prone transition and an opening two years that were among the most tumultuous encountered by any modern president. He persisted. Following the Democratic repudiation in the 1994 elections, Clinton bested the Republican efforts to render him irrelevant in 1995 and 1996, and in the process won the argument Newt Gingrich had provoked about the role of the federal government in national life. Clinton defied the effort to evict him from power in 1998, then thwarted the predictions that he would hobble through his final two years as a political cripple. In his closing days in office, Clinton himself pondered the mystique surrounding his gift for survival. “I had a high pain threshold,” he explained. “I remember once I was in an accident in a car in high school, and my jaw hit the steering wheel real hard, and it was the steering wheel that broke, not my jaw.”

The subject demands a less mystical explanation. Clinton survived the crises of his presidency for three principal reasons.

Foremost among these is that he assembled a competent policy record. As ever in his life, there were contradictions and frustrating excursions. In the main, however, it was a record defined by responsibility. However heedless he could sometimes be in his personal life, Clinton brought a dutiful sensibility to his public life. His governing values were informed by the elite side of his character. He gravitated instinctually to the worldview and policy prescriptions of a certain breed of progressive-minded expert. His policy anchors were people like Bob Rubin at Treasury, Donna Shalala at Health and Human Services, Bill Perry at the Pentagon, and Al From at the Democratic Leadership Council. By the end of Clinton’s term, the issue that had been in doubt at the beginning—whether Democrats had credible ideas about the role of government in a rapidly changing global economy—was put to rest on favorable terms. Clinton had implemented a mild but innovative brand of liberalism that favored economic growth over redistribution, insisted that government pay its way rather than rely on budget deficits, and embraced free trade rather than taking refuge in protectionism. One can argue over how much credit any president deserves, but the larger picture of American life at the end of the Clinton years was unmistakable. Twenty-two million jobs had been created over eight years. The budget was in surplus. Crime was down; so were welfare rolls and teen pregnancies. Home ownership was on the upswing, as were median incomes for African-Americans and Hispanics. These changes were the result of the productive energies of Americans, but no one who recalled the sense of national drift in 1992 could fail to credit the Clinton administration for at a minimum serving as an essential catalyst. Lapsing into down-home blarney, Clinton often liked to say, “My old daddy used to say, if you find a turtle on a fence post, chances are it didn’t get there by accident.” Clinton survived his challenges in part because at the end of the day his policies were seen by most Americans as succeeding.

But this is not the only reason. If elite values nurtured in Georgetown, Oxford, and New Haven shaped one side of his presidency, other values nurtured in Hot Springs and Little Rock shaped another. Clinton’s presidency was anchored to an authentically populist spirit and animated by a genuine connection between a politician and common folk whose support he needed. Countless times Republicans believed they had Clinton cornered. The reality was that they never really told voters anything about the president—about his diverse excesses and vulnerabilities—that the voters had not long since supposed to be true. Nor could opponents break the bond of affection between Clinton and many followers who saw him fondly as a leader who fundamentally liked people and wished to be liked. During the impeachment drama, if blacks, women, or labor unions—all Democratic constituencies who on various occasions had reason to be aggrieved with Clinton—had ever abandoned the president, he might very well have been sunk. They did not abandon him. His presidency survived because most citizens accepted him as he was, and wished him to stay where he was.

Finally, one must note the phenomenon seen so often in his story: the blurring of function and dysfunction in the Clinton style. Voluminous appetites got him into trouble. Voluminous appetites carried him out of trouble. No president had a greater capacity for the work of politics and governance—it was often hard, even physical, work, across long hours and multiple time zones—or any greater emotional and intellectual attraction to his job. Clinton was not a conventional figure in his lifestyle or psychology. But, across a lifetime, he had settled on personal and professional habits that worked effectively when he most needed them to—the essence of the survivor’s ethic.

The survivalist approach to life and to the presidency imposed certain costs. Clinton’s presidency was largely a defensive project. He spent six of his eight years devoting as much energy to halting what he regarded as the excesses of the Republican congressional majority as advancing his own agenda. As a politician, he prospered much more in those years when he could respond to the Republicans and position himself in opposition than during the opening years, when Democrats controlled Congress and Clinton could set Washington’s agenda. Many of his largest achievements, moreover, had a defensive character. Balancing the budget and overhauling the welfare system—two consequential accomplishments—were historically conservative goals. Clinton’s task was to implement these goals with a more progressive cast. The imperative of survival also forced Clinton to limit his reach. One mission of his presidency had been to force the Democratic Party to reconsider and refashion the liberal agenda, a task that necessarily involved some discomfort to traditional constituencies and to protectors of the party’s old order in Congress. Come 1998, when Clinton needed every Democratic vote possible in order to survive the Republican attack over Monica Lewinsky, the work of challenging his own ground to a halt. He had no political latitude to push for reform of the entitlement programs for the aged, Medicare and Social Security, both of which faced soaring and unsustainable long-term costs, or to continue to push his party on the issue of trade, as he had done bravely during the passage of NAFTA at the outset of his presidency.

The trade-off he made between ambition and necessity was consistent with a larger theme of his politics. One of the continuing dramas of his presidency was the contest between competing strains of romance and realism in the Clinton character. The romantic in Clinton was a politician of florid imagination who viewed himself on history’s stage in a line of heroic presidents who left large imprints on their times. In such a mood, he was scornful of limits, less attuned to political hazards, the most devout believer in his own abundant possibilities. It was this spirit that had pervaded 1993 and came crashing down with the failure of health care reform and the mid-term elections of 1994. The realist in Clinton was an accommodator who accepted political limits and tried to work within them. One irony of this tension, as it played out over eight years, is that Clinton in the end proved to be a more effective and more consequential president during those times when he was disciplined by political caution than when he was motivated by vainglorious dreams.

For his undeniable competence in many arenas, Clinton left office with a weak claim on membership in the elite gallery of truly large presidencies. All presidents must react to circumstances and play the hand they are dealt. The greatest presidents, however, manage simultaneously to create their own circumstances—to impose their own values and purposes on the age. Clinton was a hyperkinetic man, and a president of undeniably activist intentions. Yet beneath the flurry of activity he frequently displayed a certain passivity. It was often his habit to let matters drift before choosing, after agonizing debate, his ultimate course. This was his pattern in the Balkans in 1993 and 1994, in the confrontation with Republicans in 1995, and in deciding what to do about welfare reform in 1996. Those episodes all ended to his advantage. The same passivity was on display as he confronted the Paula Jones case in 1997, with disastrous results. A presidency that spent so much of its time operating on defensive premises, and recovering from self-inflicted wounds, was ill suited to presidential greatness as conventionally defined.

Perhaps the times in which he governed were ill suited as well. There were great engines of energy and change at work in American life in the 1990s. These engines were found on Wall Street, where markets amassed and distributed capital in unprecedented sums. They were in Silicon Valley, Seattle, and northern Virginia, where technology entrepreneurs created a revolution in how people work, learn, and communicate. They were in Hollywood, where the entertainment industry made American popular culture a saturating influence around the planet. In the best light, Clinton was a brilliant modernist who understood the transformational character of his times and helped prepare his country to take advantage of them. Even in this light, the fact remains that the 1990s was one of those eras when the great currents of history did not flow primarily through Washington and the national government.

All this is not to say that Clinton will not have a long historical echo. He was too vital and too vexing a character to be easily forgotten or dismissed. He was one of the great personalities to occupy the White House. It seems likely that, decades from now, his personality will be producing arguments—about his character, about his enemies, and about the long-term consequences of both—that would be entirely familiar to a contemporary audience. There’s no reason to suppose that a man who caused so much debate in his own time will have a settled and stable reputation in posterity. “History,” said the historian Pieter Geyl, “is an argument without end.”

Indeed, what is most striking about the argument over Clinton’s legacy so far is its volatility. Four years out of office, he has already seen his reputation go through several cycles of decline and revival. The controversy over the pardons he issued during his last hours in office prompted predictions at the time that he had permanently shattered public sympathy and would never be embraced even by Democrats. But this storm receded soon enough, and by the summer of 2001 Clinton nostalgia was at full flood, as he opened his post-presidential office in Harlem before an ecstatic crowd of thousands and wall-to-wall cable news coverage. The attacks of September 11, 2001, sent Clinton’s historical stock down anew, as commentators cast a censorious gaze on the failure of his campaign against Osama bin Laden and his willingness to tolerate the continued reign of Saddam Hussein in Iraq. Yet his successor’s record on these same problems—bin Laden still at large in early 2005, and a war in Iraq filled with unforeseen complexities—put Clinton’s caution in a better light. And the failure of two successive Democratic nominees to match his election successes seemed to speak for itself about the forty-second president’s political skills. For demoralized Democrats trying to figure out how to respond to the political challenges of the Bush era, the most common question was “What would Clinton do?”

It is a sign of the diverse strands of his political appeal that the question would produce quite different answers among different groups of Democrats. By the end of his presidency, he had transcended the ideological fissures within his party that earlier caused him such difficulty. The centrist “New Democrats” claimed him as their own, but so too did the traditional liberals. A politician sometimes criticized for trying to be all things to all people ultimately succeeded in being just that, at least for his own party. In the end, what unified Democrats around him may have been less specific programs or ideological touchstones than a certain native faith in progressive government that Clinton exemplified. In the final year of his presidency, Clinton often cited to his aides and public audiences two books that had deeply engaged him. One was The Tipping Point, by The New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell. The other was Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, by Robert Wright. His attraction to both revealed something about how he saw the world, and his role in it. The Tipping Point was an illumination of how incremental efforts can produce cascading changes in society. One did not need radical reforms to make a difference; it was enough to chip away at problems with persistence and intelligence, much as he had tried to do. The argument in Nonzero was more sophisticated. It was that the instinct for social progress was inherent in the human species, and that progress is achieved by human interactions that are not zero-sum propositions, propositions, that is, in which one side’s gain must be someone else’s loss. The imperative for the modern world was to promote relationships and social endeavors in which all sides win. Clinton was enthralled by the book. With academic language and high-concept metaphors, it articulated a kind of idealism and progressive faith that Clinton had felt at an elemental level his entire political career. The world could do worse than to possess more of this faith.

Another irony of history awaited Clinton upon his exit. This president had little patience for his successor in office. Clinton regarded George W. Bush as an amiable man, and he was early to comprehend—as far back as 1999—that the Texas governor was a more effective politician than most Democrats realized. But Clinton regarded Bush as an incurious and smug man who seemed to think that the White House was an inheritance belonging to the Republican Party generally and his family specifically. For his part, Bush ran against Clinton while never mentioning his name. Even many voters who happened to like Clinton nodded in affirmation at Bush’s pledges in 2000 to “restore honor and dignity to the White House” and to “change the tone in Washington.” Whatever their personal feelings, however, Clinton and Bush are likely to be tethered to each other historically. Their presidential styles are such distinct opposites that it is hardly possible to talk about one without invoking a contrast with the other.

As a politician, Clinton made it preeminently his task to capture the center while trying to tame the more ideological elements of his party. Bush has celebrated ideology, and has worried less about placating the center than about rallying the enthusiasm of his party base. On the world stage, Clinton was a pluralist who believed the United States in most instances was better served exerting influence by persuasion and by acting in a community of nations. Bush has been devoted to American exceptionalism, believing in the supremacy of force over persuasion and serving regular notice that the United States is ready to act alone to protect its self-interests. The starkest contrast is in the nature of their minds. The philosopher Isaiah Berlin famously invoked the Greek fable about the hedgehog and the fox to classify the intellectual habits of artists and statesmen: “The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.” Clinton was a classic fox. He was driven less by ideology than by experience and contingency. His words and his actions could at times seem contradictory, his true intentions and priorities opaque even to the people closest to him. Bush proved to be a classic hedgehog. In the wake of the September 11 attacks, he tended to see all decisions through the prism of security and the terrorist threat. The challenge of leadership, as Bush framed it, was above all a matter of conviction, in which the hard part of governance was not deciding right from wrong but pursuing right with sufficient devotion in the face of setbacks and criticism. In the Clinton and Bush presidencies, history has crafted an experiment of sorts about which model of leadership is more productive.

The experiment may not be over for a long time. Just fifty-four years of age upon leaving office, Clinton may have decades left in the public arena. What projects lie ahead? Some of his own advisers have urged a campaign to position Clinton to be secretary-general of the United Nations. It is an arresting (if still implausible) possibility: Clinton as a kind of “president of the world.” This prospect no doubt generates more enthusiasm in some precincts than in others, though Clinton himself is said to be intrigued.

There is another large figure on the political stage whose fate will help shape how Bill Clinton is remembered. Hillary Rodham Clinton counts with her husband as one of the most arresting personalities of her era. In the Senate, with her own power and liberated from the derivative roles she played during most of her husband’s career, she has proved to be a vastly more appealing and effective politician than she was as first lady. Though she now has more independence, the Clintons’ relationship remains as symbiotic as ever. She has the potential to come to her husband’s aid in the court of history just as she did so often in the political arena. If Hillary Clinton were to become president, or even to remain as a leader of the Senate for a sustained tenure, she could help determine how history views Bill Clinton’s presidency. With a longer lens, the flamboyant personal dramas of those eight years might well recede, and the remarkable fact of one talented couple dominating Democratic politics over a period of decades would move to the foreground. The story remains unfinished, as do the controversies these two leaders inspire. Here, truly, is an argument without end.