The leader of the last remaining superpower stood at the top of the key, holding the basketball high above his head. “Shoot! Shoot!” the assembled entourage shouted.
He hesitated, perhaps because he hadn’t even come close on two previous attempts. Then he launched a high, hard missile that smashed into the backboard with enough force to make it vibrate before ricocheting straight into the net.
A lucky bank shot, without finesse, basketball experts would say, but for President Clinton it symbolized a fundamental truth about his young administration: He errs spectacularly, then adjusts to correct his mistakes. Yet even when he scores, the deficiency in his game still shows.
This scene in riot-torn South-Central Los Angeles last Tuesday, where he played in a carefully staged pickup basketball game for the benefit of cameras, showed three sides of the Clinton presidency: skilled at image, clumsy at execution, yet still eager to take on the nation’s toughest problems.
But the time to learn is short. The grand expectations of his first few weeks of office have given way to serious doubts about his administration’s ability to govern even as a political melee over his tax program-and health care after that-approaches.
“He’s got to indicate what his priorities are,” said Rep. Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill), chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee. “He’s doing a good job, but he’s still learning. What I like about him is that he has all the enthusiasm of Lyndon Johnson, whom he reminds me of in so many ways, although he doesn’t have Johnson’s experience.”
The political world that Johnson dominated in the 1960s by force of personality, party discipline and compromise has yielded to a new political era dominated by modern communications and by an undisciplined political establishment in Congress heavily resistant to change.
As much as any modern politician, Clinton knows that governing today is markedly different from those Democratic glory days. Yet, after four months of modest success with an ambitious, unfocused legislative program and the embarrassing defeat of his economic stimulus bill, he’s still groping for a formula for achieving his agenda.
Something more profound also is at stake. Gridlock during the Bush administration was blamed on the fact that a Republican president couldn’t get anything through a Democratic Congress. Now, Clinton is having the same problem with gridlock, especially with a tax increase bill designed to slash the federal deficit, an increase he did not spell out during the presidential campaign.
“This (bill) really is going to test whether our form of government, given the rise of populism in the country, can work,” said Rep. Robert Matsui (D-Calif.). “The president is trying to make some hard decisions (to reduce the deficit). We’ve got to make this thing work.”
With these coming battles, visions of Jimmy Carter’s presidency dance not so lightly in the administration’s head. Although Clinton was born with political skills that Carter never managed to acquire, the comparison inevitably will be made if the tax bill, especially with its unpopular levy on energy, winds up in the gutter.
“I think the plan is disintegrating,” said Rudy Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “It reminds me of the story of the dog-food manufacturer who spent millions marketing a new dog food, only to learn that the dogs didn’t like it.”
The challenge to his plan by Senate Democrats, led by Sen. David Boren of Oklahoma, underscores that Clinton did not do his political homework in crafting the package and raises the specter that the new administration could quickly become immobilized by a political crisis of its own making.
Clinton’s first few months in office betray little consistency of performance.
He was on the verge of committing U.S. forces in Bosnia and sent his secretary of state to round up support from the U.S.’s major European allies, only to have them reject his formula. At the last minute, he backed away from military intervention, avoiding a quagmire that could have undermined his presidency.
Even if this made his early deliberations on Bosnia appear to be lacking in foreign policy wisdom, Clinton wound up in what many experts believe is the right decision: trying to contain the fighting rather than jumping into the middle of a civil war with no clear outcome and ill-defined American interests.
But consistency is difficult when there is no road map. As the first president elected since the end of the Cold War, Clinton and his advisers are charged with the enormous responsibility of trying to remake American foreign policy in an era of ethnic conflict and looser alliances.
On the domestic front, economic policy is just as muddled. Clinton finds himself in the middle of a jobs crisis caused by a profound restructuring of industry, the emergence of a global economy, defense downsizing and sluggish economic growth.
But Clinton has been at the brink of failure on several occasions, only to step back and start anew. The “Comeback Kid” who overcame scandal and near oblivion in 1992 possesses a resilience that even his critics find impressive.
He will need that resilience, and then some, as the hard decisions loom. Unlike Ronald Reagan and others who have held his job, Clinton does not appear to view many of his proposals as sacrosanct. He already has jettisoned significant parts of his plan without apology, indicating a flexibility that LBJ might have admired.
Taking Rostenkowski’s advice, Clinton dropped a proposed investment tax credit and decided to raise the corporate tax rate by only 1 percentage point instead of 2. Rostenkowski said this decision will make the overall deficit reduction package more palatable to large corporations and improve its chances of passage.
“If there is an affection I have for him, it’s because he’s willing to take on the big problems,” Rostenkowski said. “Over the past 12 years, I saw those problems inflate.”
But in taking on the big problems, Clinton frittered away an early advantage by trying to do too much and by permitting Senate Republicans, led by Sen. Bob Dole of Kansas, to define his package as a “tax and spend” program. The GOP scored additional advantage by labeling his tax plan “the biggest tax increase in the nation’s history.”
In current-dollar terms, that is true, but in a relative sense-as a percent of gross domestic product-the 1982 tax increase bill proposed by Reagan was bigger. In addition, said Barry Bosworth, a Brookings Institution economist, the Clinton plan by 1996 would raise tax revenue from 18.5 percent to 19.5 percent of annual economic output, about where it was during much of the 1980s.
The lack of party discipline in Congress and the troubles of his economic plan have given the president little choice but to take to the road. And that he has done in the last two weeks with trips to Chicago, New York, San Diego, Los Angeles and Cleveland.
This is, in effect, a second presidential campaign to win the hearts of voters for a program that he formulated after the election to respond to a deteriorating deficit picture. If the questions they ask are any guide, Americans are torn by tax and spending issues.
Increasingly, they turn to the federal government for help in solving the problems of a sluggish economy. On the other hand, they now apparently don’t want to pay higher taxes to address these problems.
In a stop at suburban Los Angeles Valley College, Clinton noted that the protesters outside carried two conflicting signs: One said don’t spend more federal dollars and the other called for closing the border to illegal immigration. He said his defeated stimulus package had called for funds to increase the number of border guards, and added, “You can’t have it both ways.”
For now, the political impact of the Clinton road show on Congress seems limited. It may be therapeutic for Clinton and help him sharpen his message, said Rep. Matsui, but many voters simply don’t comprehend complex budget issues. Clinton’s efforts have yet to generate a groundswell of public support for his programs, and his quickness to compromise strikes many as a sign of weakness.
This does not bode well for his health-care plan, which Clinton hopes to unveil next month. Many members of Congress believe he should get his economic program through before he tackles this monster, which could well determine the fate of his administration.
Rostenkowski believes Clinton should “narrow his view to the problem at hand, get that one behind him and go on to the next one.”
He said he’s told Clinton that “this is a problem so gigantic that it is going to sap all your time, both personal and public. It’s the nation’s No. 1 vexing problem.”
