His achievements were modest, but voters would have given Clinton a third term if the law had allowed it
Martin Kettle
As the British and the Irish were able to see for themselves during his recent lap of honour visit to Northern Ireland, Bill Clinton has always been acutely aware of himself as a figure in history.
The United States system, with all its paraphernalia of presidential libraries and icono-graphy, lends itself to such vanities, and Clinton is a more than willing celebrant of his own achievements. He has been keenly conscious of how his years in office will be seen by historians and he is constantly comparing his own experiences with other presidents’ careers. He reads about his predecessors widely, thinks and talks about them constantly. His current fascination make of it what you will is with Ulysses S Grant.
Towards the end of his first term, more than four years ago now, he had a remarkable conversation of this kind with his rogue adviser Dick Morris, in which the two of them tried to rank Clinton in the hierarchy of American presidents.
Eighteen of Clinton’s predecessors deserved to be ranked in the top three categories, Morris suggested. The first rank of presidents was reserved for those who did great things in great times: Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt. The second was for those who did great things but in less compelling eras: Jackson, Polk, Reagan (in Morris’s view, but not Clinton’s), Theodore Roosevelt and Truman.
In the third tier, reserved to presidents who did some great things but whose claim to higher rank is contestable for some important reason, Morris placed Madison, the two Johnsons, Arthur, Cleveland, Kennedy, Nixon and Bush.
“Good list,” Clinton responded. “Where do I fit in?”
“Right now, to be honest, I think you are borderline third tier. It’s too early to rank you yet, but you are right on the cusp of making third tier,” Morris responded.
“I think that’s about right,” Clinton agreed.
Clinton then asked Morris what he would need to do over the next four years in order to achieve second-tier rank. Morris suggested three big things and four medium things.
The big things were to make welfare reform work, to implement the balanced federal budget and to smash international terrorism. The medium things were to begin to eliminate cigarette smoking, to establish national standards in school education, to make further progress towards universal health care insurance, and to use the power of the presidency more emphatically on “non-economic lifestyle issues”.
“Good list,” Clinton said, for the second time in the conversation. “I’ve got it down. I’ll think about it a lot.”
Four years on from that conversation, perhaps the most unexpectedly striking thing about it is how realistic it still seems, in spite of all that has happened in between. Clinton has in fact carried out much though far from all of Morris’s agenda, and has notched up some other positive achievements too.
Welfare reform has been far more painless in the years of plenty than most of its opponents claimed in 1996, although the truest test will come in times of hardship. The federal budget has been conclusively balanced, again on the back of taxes on prosperity and full employment which have turned the years of deficit into years of surplus. Only the international terrorist agenda remains largely where it was four years ago.
On the medium level agenda, the progress has been less obvious. The battle against big tobacco waxed and then waned, leaving Clinton unable to convert major interim victories into a conclusive ending. American education standards have risen in many respects, as several recent official and unofficial reports have indicated, but the overall picture still remains patchy. Health insurance reform remains a major area of impasse, a challenge for the next administration. And Clinton’s ability to use the presidential bully pulpit has of course been massively compromised by events since 1996.
Most people would instinctively say that Clinton’s second term has consisted of four blighted years. At their centre has been the one thing that most people who have lived through the period are certain to remember about Clinton for the rest of time the Monica Lewinsky affair. The Lewinsky crisis consumed the Clinton presidency for the whole of 1998 and much of 1999, and very nearly brought it down. Its shadow has lain heavy across the administration for the final year and a half that Clinton has remained in office. No president since Nixon leaves office so synonymous with a major scandal.
Nobody knows that better than Clinton himself, of course. (One odd consequence is the curiously affectionate and respectful tone towards Nixon which has entered some of Clinton’s recent end-of-term interviews.) It explains why so much of the past 18 months was taken up with a search for some achievement that could be venerated as Clinton’s “legacy”. Given the reality of his impeachment and acquittal, and the continuing hold of his Republican enemies on both houses of the Congress, there was never much chance Clinton could claim any domestic legislative legacy, a judgement that is amply confirmed by the autumn budget impasse on Capitol Hill this year.
If Clinton was to bequeath himself an achievement, in other words, it would only be fulfilled in foreign policy. Nobody can say that Clinton did not try. In Ireland, on nuclear weapons, in relations with Russia, on world trade, in relations with Vietnam and North Korea, and above all on the Middle East, Clinton has invested monumental amounts of time and considerable stocks of credibility.
In the end, for a variety of reasons not excluding his own misjudgements, he has largely failed. Go through the list. He will leave office with the Middle East in as bad a state as it has been for years, with relations with Iraq unresolved, with Russia in neutral, with China uncertain, with Europe fraying, with Northern Ireland still tense. He dared to go to Vietnam and Pakistan, but not to Cuba and not to North Korea. It is a modest record for modest times.
And yet it would be a mistake to write off either Clinton or his second
term as though the Lewinsky crisis was the only factor of any significance in those years. For one thing, Clinton is leaving office with precedent-defying job ratings. Even now, 60% of Americans approve of the job he is doing (the peak of approval was reached in the month that the Starr report was published). After eight years his ratings exceed those of Reagan, a point that many Republicans cannot even bring themselves to think about.
What is more, as he himself observed in a recent Rolling Stone interview, there is little doubt that Clinton would have stood for a third term last month, had the law allowed it, and equally little doubt that he would have easily been re-elected. It is important to attempt to understand all this, both because of a general duty to try to judge things properly, and also perhaps because, by understanding the Clinton phenomenon correctly, we may also be able to understand the George W Bush phenomenon a little better.
Clinton has never been easy to summarise. The conventional thing to say is that he is a good president but a bad man, and it is by no means a false conclusion. The polls seem to bear it out, and so do the pollsters. “When assessing his positive job performance, it is hard to believe that Americans do not idolise this very successful president,” says the Wall Street Journal’s polling expert Peter Hart. “But when assessing moral virtues, it is hard to understand why he is not setting new records for hatred, surpassing the visceral repugnance for Nixon at the time of Watergate.”
Yet Clinton would not have survived so well if this were the only central truth about him. If enough people really thought he was a bad man, he would have been forced to leave the White House over Lewinsky. But this was the time of his highest popularity. Conversely, if he was really such a great president, then Al Gore would surely have become his successor on November 7. But this did not happen either. The only way of resolving the Clinton paradox is to recognise that for most people, and even most voters, the presidency is much more marginal to their concerns than it is to those who write and obsess about it.
November 7 was clearly not a rejection of Clinton, since he remains intensely popular. It was, in part, a rejection of Gore for, one presumes, his personal failings and for his campaign. So it is hard not to conclude that Bush has ended up as president partly because of the vagaries of the electoral system, and partly because a lot of middle-of-the road Americans think he will continue to deliver the kind of presidency Clinton offered them. To the committed on either side, this seems incredible, but the committed are simply not typical.
Another paradox. The general goodwill that has suddenly enveloped Bush since he finally managed to win the presidency is hard to square with the visceral feelings immediately preceding the resolution of the Florida conflict. When the US supreme court rode in to rescue Bush’s chances, the polls showed that nearly 60% of Americans wanted the counts authorised in Florida to continue. A few days later, 80% of Americans said they were pleased Bush was president.
To partisans, these figures are irreconcilable. You either want Bush to win and welcome the supreme court rescue act, or you want Bush to lose and are outraged by it. Yet Americans weren’t like that. They wanted the counting to go on until it was stopped. Once it was stopped they preferred it not to start again.
The crucial thing about modern American politics, I suspect, is that most people take them seriously but not all that seriously. They admired Clinton for the job he was doing. They liked his centrism. They instinctively disliked the zealots who wanted to take him away from them. But they didn’t like him. They weren’t all that interested in him. They didn’t mind whether he went to Vietnam or not, or whether he went to Cuba or not. They weren’t even much concerned about rising petrol prices or foreign trade penetration. They want tax cuts, but they don’t mind paying taxes. As long as the sun comes up in the morning, there’s food in the fridge, something to watch on the television and ordinary life is tolerably possible, politicians are going to be somewhere in the back of people’s minds, not near the front of them.
That’s why Bush won. He didn’t hector people or tell them he was going to fight, as Gore did. Fighting isn’t important for most people, except for some men, and that kind of man tends to vote for Bush anyway.
The truest thing I heard on the campaign trail this year was a nice old man in Minneapolis who just said that he was voting for Bush because he seemed like a guy you could have a beer with. It doesn’t matter that Bush is exactly the sort of person you wouldn’t have a beer with, because he doesn’t drink any more. What matters is that he seems unthreatening, just like Clinton always seemed unthreatening. He’s not going to do much, and anyway it doesn’t matter. He’s not going to step out of line unnecessarily. If he does, then he’s more of a fool than he seems.
It’s odd that political analysis should have come to this. But American politics has come to this too. In good times politics doesn’t matter to most people. In good times political support is sometimes wide and sometimes narrow, but it is never deep. That’s what makes Bush the man of the hour, for these are indisputably good times. But it also what ensures that, when the US economy stumbles, as it will one day, he will never be forgiven for presiding over events, even if he has no great control over them.
And it’s also what makes Clinton so paradoxically successful in spite of his failings. In his final year as president, Bill Clinton achieved remarkably little to live in the memory or to bequeath to the history books.
Yet Clinton remains in some strange but important way the absolutely defining figure both of the year and of modern America. He has shaped and marked the actions of others, friend and foe, intimate and stranger, even while having little to show for it himself as he prepares to leave office and to face the independent prosecutor once again in a few weeks’ time.