Clinton Marches to His Own Drummer : Presidency: Failure to meet expectations means he’s doing a fair, typically middling job.

Pity the poor ideologues, activists and those with a hard-edged political philosophy, for they are condemned to eternal disappointment with the people they help to propel into the White House. Influential beyond their numbers at the beginning of the presidential primary season, when their modest voting strength is magnified in low-turnout elections, their influence fades in the fall, and by Inauguration Day they have become a disposal problem for presidents who are seeking the nation’s center of political gravity.

It is a plight shared in the past by right-to-life groups and the ultraconservative Heritage Foundation; this year, by gay-rights activists, the ultraliberal Americans for Democratic Action and the ultracentrist Democratic Leadership Council. Presidents abhor doctrinal purity as nature abhors a vacuum--none more so than Bill Clinton.

The gravitational field of the Oval Office exerts a strong pull on every president’s ideological compass. For Richard Nixon, the product of a highly conservative Southern California milieu, the lure of the White House was so strong that as vice president he eagerly helped grease the skids under right-wing hero Sen. Joseph McCarthy. But winning the presidency wasn’t enough. Nixon was determined to be writ large in history; thus his apostasy on the first sacred tenet of postwar conservative philosophy when he pursued and secured ties with Communist China.

The naive faith that political ideology can survive the crucible of expediency has been sorely tested in the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. Just when you think he is comfortably bedded down in some nice philosophical niche, he leaps out of it and materializes in some other pigeonhole, but only long enough to catch his breath before bounding clear out the window.

How do you map his avant-garde fanfare on gays in the military and his ultimate landing in Sam Nunn’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell halfway house? His health-care reform proposal has both wings of his party flapping. His championing of NAFTA found him standing side-by-side with the National Assn. of Manufacturers and the ultraconservative Rep. Newt Gingrich. His advocacy of the Brady handgun bill was applauded by liberals. He is outspoken on civil rights, but has allowed the civil-rights division of the Department of Justice to go leaderless. He chooses a surgeon general who raises the possibility of legalizing street drugs. He goes into the most Stygian lair of the Cold War, the National Security Agency, for his next defense secretary. He has appointed more women to high posts than any other president, yet appears to hold them to more exacting standards than he does men.

But is Bill Clinton’s ideological crazy-quilt really all that unusual? He may differ slightly in degree from his predecessors, but not at all in kind, because there is one paramount truth about the presidency and it is this: The job transcends the idiosyncrasies of the individual. So great are its institutional imperatives, so overwhelming the symbolic burden of representing the needs and interests of all Americans, that presidents of whatever ideological stripe come to resemble each other more than they resemble their political fraternity brothers.

Seats in the House and Senate and chairs in governors’ mansions can be comfortably occupied by zealots; extremism in the Oval Office is a rarity. Even Ronald Reagan, the man most often cited as the exception to the rule, trimmed his sails considerably once in office. Ask David Stockman, Reagan’s first budget director, who charged in his memoirs that his boss blew the opportunity of a lifetime to dismantle the welfare state. When the solvency of the Social Security System was imperiled in 1982, Reagan bailed it out with the enthusiasm of a New Dealer--which he once was.

Bill Clinton is closer to other modern presidents in his ideological indeterminacy. The “New Democrat” label that he sported in the 1992 primaries and his association with the middle-of-the-road Democratic Leadership Council enabled him to set himself apart from his rivals who ended up splitting the liberal vote. Not everyone was taken in by the centrist facade. The Democrats’ 1972 candidate, George McGovern, characterized Clinton as a liberal Trojan horse who would take the country sharply leftward once in office. Both the DLC group and the McGovernites have had their expectations thwarted by the bewilderingly protean quality of Clinton’s politics. Just as one party faction prepares to bear him off on their shoulders in triumph, they find themselves searching instead for the tar and feathers.

Clinton’s philosophical eclecticism does not mean that he is without any guiding principles. It means, rather, that where he comes out on any given issue cannot be inferred automatically from some body of political dogma.

One thing’s for sure: You’ll never hear anybody around this White House proclaiming, “Let Clinton be Clinton.”