In his book, Behind the Oval Office, Dick Morris described a telephone conversation with Bill Clinton in August 1996 on the question of Clinton's place in history. Clinton agreed that he was not a top-tier president, but wondered what he could do to make it into Morris's second tier with Harry Truman, Theodore Roosevelt, Andrew Jackson and Ronald Reagan. (Morris said Clinton must do three big things: make welfare reform work; balance the federal budget; and smash international terrorism; along with some smaller things.)
So what is Clinton's legacy? Popular democracy is Andrew Jackson's legacy. The national park system is part of Theodore Roosevelt's. The New Deal, which created the modern federal government, is Franklin Roosevelt's. Watergate is Nixon's. There are legacies of neglect, such as Reagan's bequest of a huge federal budget deficit (offset by his legacy of drawing the cold war to a successful close). Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and George Bush, three of the last five presidents, arguably left no real legacy at all. The same is true of the late 19th century presidents in the murk between Lincoln and Teddy Roosevelt.
We know something else about presidential legacies. Matters which loom large now will fade in retrospect. Clinton's popularity-and his survival as president-has relied heavily on the extraordinary strength of the economy, now in the eighth year of the longest peacetime expansion. But, over time, even this impressive statistic is likely to diminish in importance. A disastrous economy can define a presidency as it did for Herbert Hoover. But a thriving economy tends not to create a legacy. If it did, Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and Nixon would be considered greater presidents than FDR and Truman.
There is already a rough consensus among historians that Clinton is a significant president. He stands to be remembered, most obviously, for causing a huge scandal and getting impeached; but also for getting re-elected, something no Democrat since FDR had achieved. But Clinton will also be remembered, like Andrew Jackson and FDR, for changing the nature of the American presidency. Where those two presidents expanded the role of the presidency, Clinton has reduced it, both in the negative sense of stripping away some of its dignity, and in the positive sense of making adjustments demanded by the historical moment. Coming to the White House from the state governor's mansion in Arkansas, he has recast the presidency on the more modest model of his previous job.
In one sense, the public doesn't expect much from a state governor; in another sense it expects a great deal. A governor is expected to address whatever issues arise, from upgrading the skills of the work force to reducing traffic congestion. Financial constraints deny governors the possibility of grander schemes, but they can distinguish themselves with creative social policy ideas. In smaller states, the governor is a familiar figure whose blunders and foibles are as well known as his cartoon caricature. If the governor proves himself intelligent and capable, people are willing to indulge some rascality on his part.
Governors, of course, do not shape foreign policy. Clinton will be remembered as primarily a domestic president, perhaps the first in a line of domestic presidents who followed the end of the cold war. Clinton ran on domestic and economic issues in 1992, in answer to George Bush's international focus. His platform, "Putting People First," elaborated a series of ideas about how to make government more effective. He has subsequently improved a range of federal agencies and programmes-but more than that, he has restored the feeling that government can work.
The most under-appreciated thing Clinton did during his first year was to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, a programme by which the federal government supplements the income of low-wage workers. Clinton's notion was that if you work full-time you should not have an income below the poverty line. This commitment exemplified his reformist liberalism. As a successor to the New Deal-Great Society model of ever-expanding social benefits, Clinton proposed a more modest model, based on what he has described as an exchange of opportunity for responsibility, a model based on more limited expectations of what the federal government can do-a "New Covenant."
Clinton's subsequent successes, like national service and welfare reform, have come from applying this notion of a limited social contract. His early failures occurred when he strayed from it, most notably in the case of reforming healthcare. It is possible that a better designed and more politically astute health plan could have placed his presidency on a stronger footing. But Clinton botched his plan, set himself at odds with moderates in both parties, and failed to see how his "managed competition" scheme could be portrayed as old-fangled liberal big spending.
What Clinton did not then grasp was the depth of the discontent with the way government was working. When he took office, trust in government had been eroding for 25 years. In 1964, 76 per cent of Americans told pollsters that they thought they could trust government to do the right thing all or most of the time. In 1994, the year Clinton's healthcare plan fizzled out, those who said they trusted government bottomed out at 19 per cent. This disillusion was based, in part, on the failures of government in welfare and housing, in crime and education.
This loss of confidence attached itself to Clinton's attempt to award the federal government another huge responsibility. Not until the ascendancy of the Gingrich Congress did Clinton fully grasp the depth of disenchantment with Washington. But from that point on, he realised he had to grapple with a corrosive scepticism. Michael Waldman, Clinton's chief speech writer, recently reported him saying: "FDR's mission was to save capitalism from its excesses. Our mission has been to save government from its own excesses so it can again be a progressive force."
The idea of Clinton as the saviour of liberal government will strike some as perverse. Following the 1994 election, many Democrats felt that he was trying to jettison the party's core beliefs. The lightning rod for this anger became his consultant Dick Morris, whom Democratic traditionalists regarded as the author of a sterile, poll-led, centrism. Clinton was ridiculed for proposing micro-interventions such as free walkie-talkies for neighbourhood watch groups.
But Clinton was beginning to understand that the issue was one of public trust. While devising governor-scale programmes which encapsulated his New Covenant, he proceeded to address the two biggest causes of that mistrust. First, he agreed to the Republican goal of a balanced budget. But where the Republicans wanted a balanced budget as a means of reducing government, Clinton saw it as a way to reinvigorate it. From his first economic plan in 1993, he regarded the deficit as a problem serious enough to warrant putting many of his pet projects on hold. He then discovered that by operating within a balanced budget he could argue for expanding spending in areas such as school construction, without being accused of irresponsibility.
His second decision was following through on his campaign promise to end welfare "as we know it." Clinton saw welfare as disruptive of the proper relationship between government and citizen. The system was unpopular not just because it was a waste of resources, but because it offered something for nothing.
Members of Clinton's cabinet objected to his decision to accept a modified Republican bill based on the idea of block grants, and a few of his policy-makers resigned in protest. But in the past year it has become clear that Clinton did reform welfare in the way he said he would, with the results he anticipated. Welfare rolls declined, from 5m families in 1995 to 3m in June 1998. An economic downturn could curtail this progress, but at present the national picture is one of declining levels of dependency with scant evidence of increased misery.
There has been progress, too, in other areas where government had been seen to fail. The Department of Housing and Urban Development began breaking up pockets of concentrated poverty by tearing down parts of the worst urban housing projects and moving to voucher-based subsidies. Cities have also benefited from two changes for which Clinton can scarcely claim credit: a big drop in crime and the end of a long-term increase in out-of-wedlock births. It is too early to say whether these developments have permanently reversed the 30-year slide in faith in government. But from its low in 1994, confidence in government had recovered more than 20 points by early 1998. Impeachment has driven it down a bit-but to nowhere near its lowest level.
before clinton was elected in 1992, conventional wisdom held that the Democrats faced a crisis. They had lost five out of the previous six presidential elections. White working class and suburban middle class voters were abandoning the party because of its liberal positions on crime, welfare, foreign policy and "values" issues. How could the Democrats become politically competitive again in an era when what the party once stood for-an expanding federal role-was proving less and less popular? The party itself was deeply divided over how and whether it should evolve. On one side was a group of centrist reformers clustered around the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC). On the other was a rump of liberal traditionalists, including unions and minority groups.
But Clinton has faced the problems of his party methodically and effectively, and has restored to the Democrats the kind of well-oiled national political machine they had before 1968. He has been able to take crime and other reliable wedge issues away from the Republicans, while unifying a party which was itself divided over how to tackle these issues. In 1992, both New Democrats and traditionalists supported Clinton in the belief that he was, at heart, one of them. Inevitably, both sides were disappointed. But by the 1996 election, Clinton had again forged a new alliance.
Many people are puzzled about how Clinton has been able to appease liberal constituencies while flouting their principles-confronting unions with Nafta, poor blacks with welfare reform, teachers with charter schools and feminists with Paula Jones. The simplest explanation is that he has won elections. Clinton has created a sense of partisan pride powerful enough to quell the narcissism of small differences. The thrill of putting up a good fight against a common enemy has overcome ideological scruples.
It has not always been pretty, or even ethical. Since 1992, Clinton's style has always been to play politics in as ruthless and relentless a way as the Republicans. In the 1980s, Reagan and Bush were charged with relying on polling to an unprecedented degree; Clinton has gone one better, market-testing his rhetoric, then deploying it with a numbing repetitive precision. He dug deeper for dirt on his opponents, devised more effective 30-second attack ads and showed great ingenuity in exploiting loopholes in the campaign finance law (in the 1980s the Republican advantage in fundraising was almost five to one; by the 1996 campaign, funding was almost even).
Since the Lewinsky scandal, the disgruntled Democratic "base"-those who might be thought to be less than keen on Clinton's small-bore, poll-driven, corporate-friendly centrism-have been the president's staunchest supporters. Among blacks, Clinton's approval rating is as high as Reagan's rating was among conservative Republicans. This is testament in part to the feeling Clinton evinces over racial issues, as well as to black sensitivity to judicial unfairness. But it also speaks to a different kind of party, one in which the members will settle for half a loaf.
Republicans, on the other hand, now face the problem of a radical base which has lost its willingness to postpone gratification. The adage that Democrats look for heretics while Republicans seek converts no longer applies. To a great extent, the parties have switched places. And Clinton's political formula is now almost universally regarded as a winning one for the Democrats. Contenders for the 2000 Democratic nomination-Al Gore, Bill Bradley and John Kerry-have all positioned themselves as Clinton Democrats.
clinton's political successes will still have to be weighed against his personal reputation. At some level, Clinton cannot escape being a historical joke. He is forever the priapic president, taking his place alongside the drunken president, Ulysses S Grant, the napping president, Calvin Coolidge, and the treacherous president, Richard Nixon. Clinton will always be the one who had oral sex with a 21-year-old intern in the Oval Office, got caught, lied, caused a national spectacle and saw it undermine his second term. In a longer view, Clinton's libido may not differentiate him from FDR (who died with his mistress, not his wife) or John Kennedy (who arranged orgies in the White House swimming pool). But Clinton was more reckless because it was clear the press would not protect him as it had protected his predecessors.
Nor can Clinton escape his reputation for being slippery. He is not the first president to lie, or to lie under oath. But he will be remembered as someone who played games with the truth. Clinton is the president who said he never inhaled, and who told a national television audience, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" and considered it true because his definition of sexual relations did not include oral sex.
It will also be recalled that he was disloyal to friends. Early in his presidency, Clinton failed to stand by nominees in trouble, even old friends. He has taken advantage of faithful aides, disposing of them when convenient-as with Harold Ickes, whom Clinton threw overboard after Ickes finished the dirty work involved in getting him re-elected. His sexual incontinence was itself a betrayal of people who spent years working for him, some of whom faced their own legal problems because they helped protect him. Clinton will be remembered as a cad.
But more significant than what the impeachment episode says about Clinton's character is what it tells us about American mores at the century's end. Clinton is not just the beneficiary of the arrival of a more tolerant moral standard; he is personally responsible for its application to politics. He was the first presidential candidate publicly to acknowledge that he had committed adultery. Some have argued that based on the famous television appearance in which he admitted causing pain in his marriage, there was an implicit bargain between Clinton and the voters. If we elected him, he promised to sin no more. But the real proposition was that Clinton stood for office on the basis of what he could do rather than who he would be. Such a promise is built into his view of government. The notion of a New Covenant implies a change in expectations. Washington no longer delivers solutions to our problems; it helps us to solve them. Not looking to government as a saviour implies no longer putting politicians on a pedestal. If they hold up their end of the bargain by governing well, we won't go beyond ours by judging them harshly for their human failings.
The compact which Clinton embodies has emerged as America's de facto standard of political morality. The US is still less dismissive of marital infidelity than, say, France. But like the Europeans and Canadians, Americans now distinguish public from private, and forbear from judgements about the latter. The new rules have not taken hold everywhere. Much of the press has yet to assimilate the concept that most of the public no longer considers intrusive reporting about private lives relevant to democratic decision-making. None the less, a president with a rare ability to compartmentalise his psyche has ratified a new attitude to the private lives of public figures.
So has traditional morality simply receded? No, the same public which has forgiven Clinton his trespasses still holds to a strict morality and has endorsed Clinton's own emphasis on "values" in government-what Michael Sandel of Harvard describes as his repudiation of "moral neutrality" in public policy. The harmonisation of these apparent contradictions arises from the increasingly subtle distinction Americans are making between the public and private realms. Sociologist Alan Wolfe argues in One Nation, After All that while American suburbanites are far from relativist in their moral views, they shrink from judging the private behaviour of others, and dislike moralising when they see it practised. At the same time, they want public policy to support their values.
The Lewinsky scandal writes these distinctions large. Few approve of Clinton's behaviour. Yet the majority objects even more to casting stones at the president for mistakes in an area where he is answerable to his family and his God, not to voters or the media. Voters care more about how he applied his values in public-welfare reform, for example-than how he violated them in private.
one of the big mysteries which will face future historians is why a Republican Congress pursued Clinton in the way it did. What can explain the hatred of Clinton, which has grown in intensity through his time in office? Was it interests threatened by his policies, following the pattern of FDR? Unlikely, as Clinton has hardly been a foe to the moneyed classes. On policy grounds, Republicans might be expected to embrace a president who shares their views on free trade, balancing the federal budget, crime and welfare.
The commonest explanation is that hatred for Clinton is an expression of "a culture war." In their strenuous dislike of the president, conservatives are fighting a battle over the 1960s and its legacy. Clinton is the first baby-boomer president, the first who dodged the Vietnam draft and admitted to smoking marijuana. His conservative opponents, many of the same generation, see such a figure as a threat to the moral order.
But the culture war argument does not do justice to the antipathy towards Clinton. There are three psychological profiles of Clinton-hating, which at times have blurred together. The first type of Clinton-hater is liberal, and he derives his hatred from the 1960s. For him Clinton is an inauthentic person who uses public interest as a cover for private ambition. This view is manifest in much of Clinton's press coverage and draws no line between the personal and the political. The problem is not that Clinton committed adultery or lied about it. Indeed, these lapses have inclined liberals to support him. What they object to is that Clinton cares more about winning than about principles such as human rights in China and campaign finance reform.
A second kind of hostility to Clinton is neither liberal nor conservative, but comes from the Washington establishment. Sally Quinn has written that the Clintons "dissed" Georgetown society by neglecting its advice and avoiding its company. This is true, but the falling-out goes well beyond a social snub. By ushering in an era of a less ambitious federal government, Clinton has made the Washington establishment less important, less central to the concerns of the nation than it was in the days of SALT treaties. And by creating the Lewinsky scandal, Clinton has turned the US presidency into an international laughing stock.
The third kind of Clinton-hating is conservative, but it is related to the liberal kind in its aversion to a Democrat who plays politics to win. Instead of being pleased that Clinton has enacted parts of their agenda, Republicans are furious. With the end of their monopoly on such issues as crime, welfare and balanced budgets, Republicans have to contend with Democrats over issues where their positions are less popular: education, the environment, social security and issues such as abortion and homosexuality. Clinton's seizure of the centre has driven them to the right, empowering Republican radicals.
A year ago, Clinton invited a group of historians to a private talk. This was just before he was to give his deposition in the Paula Jones case. The right, he inveighed, controlled most of American politics. They had both houses of Congress, the think-tanks and the big money. He was all that stood against conservative control over the whole apparatus of government. Republicans would never accept him as legitimate, one of the participants remembers the president thundering at nearly midnight, because he was blocking their ascent to power. A few weeks later, the First Lady described her husband's opponents as a "vast right-wing conspiracy."
So why, despite this political assault, has Clinton remained so popular? The identification seems to have worked in two directions. It is partly the public's identification with Clinton, the underdog who refuses to quit. To a public which consumes large quantities of confessional entertainment and self-help advice, Clinton's turmoil is familiar. His progress through stages of sin, denial, contrition and forgiveness has humanised him. To a public which had already accepted Clinton faults, the Starr report arrived not as a shocking indictment, but as a juicy soap opera with footnotes. Clinton's screw-ups are a comforting reminder that he is no better than the rest of us, and does not think that he is, either.
Even more important is the way Clinton identifies with people. No one who has ever seen him at a town meeting can fail to be impressed by the way he engages with ordinary people. In public forums, Clinton is indefatigable, requiring his aides to pull him away from people who want to shake his hand at the end of an evening. He is, unlike any other politician of his generation, in his element with a crowd: black, white, religious, academic.
Clinton-haters of all kinds often describe as fakery the president's caring about the problems of ordinary folk. They think his "I feel your pain" act is a fraud. In their anger at him, there is something of the mystification with which the liberal intelligentsia beheld Reagan's popularity with the rest of the country. It is as if Clinton's bond with the public was based on some kind of black art. In Reagan's case, this was put down to the power of his acting (a power never attributed to him during his screen career).
In both the popular defence of Clinton and the elite attacks upon him, there are echoes of the passions evoked by two former presidents: Andrew Jackson and FDR. Jackson, like Clinton, was twice elected on the basis of a powerful mutual identification with the public. Conservatives feared Jackson's popularity because it represented a different version of democracy from the one the founders had envisaged, a kind they saw as close to mob rule. FDR had a similar bond with ordinary people, which opened up a well of resentment. People who called Roosevelt "that man" felt that as a patrician populist he was a phoney.
Clinton's bond with the public is based less on economic unfairness than was Jackson's or Roosevelt's and more on a kind of post-ideological pragmatism. He has devised an idiosyncratic populism based on the sense of him as a personally flawed but public-spirited and highly intelligent leader, ready to fight for the people who elected him.
Some day the loathing which Clinton provokes may be understood in the context of his role in creating the first post-cold war presidency. He is likely to remain an equivocal figure, a man of significant accomplishments and flawed character, who created gratuitous troubles but defined a social transformation in surviving them. Clinton may come to be remembered as the most paradoxical president: an undisciplined man who reformed government and in so doing restored trust in it-while inspiring almost none in himself.
