Clinton’s Problems With Congress--as Old as the Constitution : Separation of powers ensures tension between executive, legislative branches. Today, challenges are more daunting.

“I’ve watched the Congress, man and boy for 40 years,” Lyndon B. Johnson once recalled when he was at the peak of his presidential powers. “And I’ve never yet seen a Congress that didn’t ultimately take the measure of the President it was dealing with.”

Four months after taking office, President Clinton has already had more trouble with Congress than he bargained for. His wobbly start in office turned last week’s struggle over his economic plan in the House of Representatives into a do-or-die drama in which, his backers asserted, the future of Clinton’s presidency hung in the balance.

Despite his narrow victory in the heavily Democratic House, Clinton’s ambitious agenda for change faces more tough sledding on Capitol Hill unless he can do a better job of overcoming impediments, alluded to by Lyndon Johnson, that were designed into the U.S. government two centuries ago and have frustrated presidents ever since.

For openers, consider the separation of powers written into the Constitution by framer James Madison. This provision assures that the executive and legislative branches will almost always be at each other’s throat, even when, as in Clinton’s case, the same party controls both branches.

The genius of Madison’s system of checks and balances, devised to prevent the abuse of political power, is that its effectiveness is derived from the tendency of politicians to promote their own interests.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” Madison wrote of the relationship between the Congress and the President. “The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place.”

That system has worked so well that it hamstrung Madison himself when he became President, moving him to complain to his colleague Thomas Jefferson that the rebellious Congress he faced had become “unhinged.”

Clinton has had ample reason to feel the same way about the 103rd Congress. He suffered a major defeat in April when a filibuster by the outnumbered Republicans in the Senate doomed his plan to provide immediate stimulus to the economy.

He then had to bargain frantically with members of the nominal Democrat majority in the House to pass a compromised version of his budget, and now must look ahead to an even tougher struggle in the Senate.

Though the Madisonian barriers have frustrated presidents since the birth of the Republic, the challenges facing chief executives have become even more formidable in recent years. Not only are they now held responsible for solving more problems, such as the ebb and flow of the economy, but they have a harder time mustering support because of the fragmentation of society.

One unrelenting headache: the rise of special interest groups with potent resources and single-minded agendas, inspiring allegiances that often overshadow the tenuous ties of party loyalty.

“There are far more economic interest groups defined in more different ways than we have ever had before,” points out presidential scholar Alonzo Hamby of Ohio University. “You can’t even begin to encompass it by saying, ‘business, labor and agriculture.’ ”

Thus as he struggles to get his budget through Congress, Clinton has to fight on two fronts. On one hand, he must deal with the opposition of oil-state lawmakers, notably Democratic Sen. David L. Boren of Oklahoma, to his proposal for an energy tax. And on the other hand, he must take into account the resistance of senior citizens and other influential constituencies to proposals by some in Congress for cutting into Medicare and Social Security benefits.

Yet while such concessions may be necessary to avoid the gridlock Clinton pledged to vanquish, experience suggests that giving ground leads to more demands.

“When you have all these interest groups out there, they figure that this is a guy who can get rolled and will change his position,” warned University of Texas political scientist Walter Dean Burnham. “And so the President’s room for maneuver is severely limited.”

And in addition to economic competition, Clinton has to contend with rivalries among racial, ethnic, religious and cultural interests that neither the Founding Fathers nor all but his most recent predecessors ever dreamed of.

“Nobody knew what percentage of the gay vote (Franklin D.) Roosevelt or (Harry S.) Truman got because no one measured things that way,” Hamby said. But gays made a recognizably significant contribution to Clinton’s election, and his efforts to keep a campaign promise to allow gays to serve in the military have consumed political capital that could have been used to push his economic proposals.

“For a President to succeed you need a crisis that is acute enough so that interest groups are paralyzed, like in 1933,” Burnham said. That is when Franklin Roosevelt took over the presidency, launched the New Deal in the midst of the Great Depression and in the process created the modern presidency with all its potential for accomplishment and frustration.

But even so skilled a political practitioner as Roosevelt ultimately found that his reach exceeded his grasp. “He could enunciate great visions, but when it came down to getting things done, it was play-by-play and day-by-day,” said his biographer, James MacGregor Burns. “And in the end, he was hobbled by Congress too.”

Another requisite for presidential success is a huge majority on Capitol Hill. “You can’t make bricks without straw,” Burnham said. “If you don’t have the numbers on your side, you have great difficulty getting things done.”

On rare occasions, presidents have succeeded in getting significant laws enacted without the backing of a big majority from their party, as President Ronald Reagan did at the start of his first term in 1981, when Congress approved his economic measures even though Democrats controlled the House.

But critics say the bargains Reagan made with Democrats to get his massive tax-reduction package approved ultimately led to structural economic problems that have compounded the difficulties facing his successors.

“I think Clinton has been done in by the ghost of Ronald Reagan,” said Johns Hopkins political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg. “The core of Reaganism really led to the development of the enormous federal deficit, which then constrained all the possibilities for Reagan’s successors.”

For Clinton, the problem is even more vexing than it was for President George Bush, because, unlike Bush, Clinton believes in activist government and needs more revenue to fund his agenda.

If you have a complex and ambitious agenda like Clinton does, “then all the complications of the separations of powers system come into play,” said presidential scholar Bert Rockman of the Brookings Institution.

Even so, Clinton had an opportunity to foster relationships with Congress when he first took office. “The Democrats in Congress wanted to work together” because they were mindful of public disgust with the gridlock in Washington, said James Ceaser, professor at the University of Virginia.

But Clinton lost this opportunity, many feel, by not taking Congress into his confidence enough. Clinton’s youthful White House “closed off the policy process to those who could help in the development of policy, and more importantly could help in developing political support,” Ceaser said.

But perhaps more important, Clinton “has been unable to convince the public of the merits of his policies,” said Stephen Wayne, a Georgetown University specialist in presidential politics. The one exception may be his economic speech in February before a national television audience and a joint session of Congress.

Even critics concede that it’s way too soon to write Clinton off. And ultimately the same strengths that sparked his comeback campaign for the office may lift his presidency.

Asked during the campaign by presidential scholar Burns how he would deal with gridlock, Clinton answered: “Persistence.” And that quality can certainly help him wear down the barriers he faces.

Still, history suggests that a successful comeback depends on the President establishing a clear political identity around which potential supporters can rally.

“The thing that made Reagan so successful was that nobody in this town ever questioned where Ronald Reagan stood on anything,” Rockman said. “But people never knew where Jimmy Carter stood, or George Bush either.”