Blessed with a large and durable lead in the polls, an inept and discredited opponent, an economy that seems to be plotting to elect him, and an electorate strongly inclined to prefer anyone who is Out to anyone who is In, Bill Clinton can afford to briefly stop thinking about how to win the presidency and start thinking about how to win it in the way that will do him the most good.
This election threatens to be about nothing except whether the country can stand four more years of George Bush. If Clinton wants to be an accomplished president as well as a winning candidate, it`s in his interest to focus the campaign on something larger-something he wants to achieve when he reaches the White House. Otherwise, he may find himself with no mandate for anything, defenseless against a Congress made up of Republicans who wish him ill and Democrats who plan to put him to work pulling their plow, not his own. This is not an enviable position. Ask Jimmy Carter, who arrived in Washington lacking any clear program beyond restoring wholesomeness to the post-Watergate government-and thus poorly equipped to influence either Republicans or Democrats on Capitol Hill. Before long, he had alienated both, doomed his administration to futility and caused himself irreparable political damage.
Carter was not the first or the last president to be elected largely on the virtue of not being his opponent: Richard Nixon in 1968 and 1972 and George Bush in 1988 are among the others. Plenty of presidential campaigns have conspicuously avoided any but the most peripheral issues. Few of those winners, however, have been great successes in office. It helps a lot for the victor to be able to say the citizenry endorsed his program as well as him.
If Clinton doesn`t much care about his program, of course, it doesn`t matter whether he wins a mandate for it or not. The beauty of being a Democratic president is that you can let your Democratic Congress make all the policy decisions for you, legislating to its heart`s content while you limit yourself to nothing more strenuous than showing up for bill-signing ceremonies.
But judging from his delight in the minutiae of policy, Clinton doesn`t yearn to let other people do his thinking and acting for him. He appears to be neither a pushover nor a Don Quixote, which means he will have the task of constantly coaxing members of Congress to do things his way rather than their way-and making them enjoy it. The greatest asset he could have in this effort is the voters` embrace of his program, which would dramatize to other elected officials the political advantages of being associated with it.
Ronald Reagan demonstrated as much in 1981, when he won passage of a tax program most Democrats found wildly repellent, even though Democrats controlled the House of Representatives. A sufficient number of Democrats sided with Reagan not because they yearned to see a Republican president succeed, but because they knew what the citizenry wanted and were afraid not to provide it. In legislative politics, as in electoral campaigns, the most reliable motivator is not hope but fear.
If Clinton wants to discourage Congress from opposing him, he needs to give voters the chance to vote for something besides Bill Clinton. The problem isn`t that he`s avoided specifics: just the opposite. He has offered a nonstop cascade of specifics, which rush by the benumbed voter in a blur.
Clinton has a detailed economic plan, whose elements are as unknown to the average voter as the Bhagavad-Gita. Americans will probably vote for it anyway, on the assumption it can`t be worse than the current one, but neither they nor Clinton will know what they are approving. Contrast that with the clear (if not entirely plausible) economic plan offered by Reagan in 1980: Cut taxes, reduce regulation and balance the budget. Reagan succeeded as president for the same reason he succeeded as a candidate: He made sure Americans knew what he was about.
George Bush`s 1988 victory wasn`t entirely due to the fact that he wasn`t Michael Dukakis. He also made the election a referendum on raising taxes. He may lose this year partly because he ignored the outcome of that referendum.
Making the election a referendum on policy is what Clinton hasn`t done. For all his breadth and depth in understanding how programs work, he hasn`t found the two or three big things he wants to do as president and made them understandable to the people whose votes he seeks.
Clinton has the brains, the energy and the political skill to be more than an ordinary leader. But if he wants to do something more inspiring than accumulate papers for the Bill Clinton Presidential Library, he needs to figure out what that something is, and soon. The first Wednesday in November will be a bit too late.
