Don’t Judge the Race by the First Stretch : Presidency: Clinton intends to outrun the forces of lethargy.

The fun game over the past weeks has been to put a gauge beside President Clinton’s first 100 days.

But the President will no more be judged by the first 100 or 200 days or two years than a thoroughbred is declared the Derby winner at the far pole. He will be judged on what he achieved that lifted the quality of the nation, and how well he avoided bloody involvement in some swamp with a strange-sounding name. All else is tracings on dry leaves in the wind.

What we are now seeing in the White House staff is a shakedown cruise by young sailors who worked the local lakes and lagoons pretty well but are now on their first ocean voyage. A good many have not yet deciphered the unfathomable ways of the republic’s home town, which swarms with bushwhackers on the Hill and in the press. They will learn that theirs is a transitory occupation, that they don’t know all the answers simply because some are so unknowable. They will learn what they need to know because they are smart, tireless and armed with purpose. Their principal instruction will come from the acquirement of political “judgment,” which is that mysterious little elf that tells one which fork in the road to take when there is no more information in the computer.

The press is crowded with foolish observations, mostly negative, about the President. Too many journalists would have retitled “Hamlet,” if it were written today, (in Sir James Barrie’s words) as “The Strange Affair at Elsinore.”

This President’s gifts of persuasion, knowledge and intellect are the most impressive in the White House in many years. He has the potential to become one of the great Presidents of this century.

What few in the press have illuminated is the courage in Clinton’s daring to take on budget reduction, for example, before which other presidents declaimed but did not act. If he has too many issues on his political plate, it is because he resists lethargy. He understands the ancient wisdom of Heraclitus’ advice to political leaders: “Where there is no strife, there is decay; the mixture which is not shaken soon decomposes.”

The President is displaying what most leaders avoid--putting to hazard his political future by taking on change at too fast a pace for cautionary planners. But no leader can lay claim to greatness unless he is ready to confront the messy issues that both stir his ambition and obstruct his aims for the people he has sworn to serve.