Missing the Bully Pulpit: Clinton’s Inability to Communicate

America’s most successful chief executives have been preaching Presidents--men with a vision of where the country needed to go and a facility for leading it there. For Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wil son, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson and Ronald Reagan, the White House was a Bully Pulpit from which they could win Americans over to a cause imbued with moral and practical good sense. The second Roosevelt, borrowing from the Bible, may have put it best: “Where there is no vision the people perish.”

Throughout our history, Americans have been most drawn to the activist presidents with a coherent idea of how to achieve a more prosperous, just and peaceful society. Administrations with a Square Deal, New Deal, Fair Deal, Great Society, and Reagan Revolution have been more popular and accomplished than those without a core idea of how to advance the national well-being.

But Americans are lukewarm toward a President who seems to stumble from one problem to the next without any clear sense of his overall intentions or, if they exist, any ability to communicate them to the public. Sadly, this describes President Bill Clinton.

This has been particularly true in foreign affairs, where Americans are always reluctant to tread and do so comfortably only when they have a clear idea of what potential and actual sacrifices in blood and treasure mean. The crusades to end war and defeat Nazism and communism appealed to the national belief in purifying world politics and making the world safe for democracy.

But having a good cause is not enough, even for the most righteous of our presidents. They must also be effective communicators--politicians with resonant voices, an infectious smile, a buoyant manner, a kindly demeanor, an extraordinary ordinariness.

There must be the magical phrases that stick in people’s minds and seem worth repeating. Wilson gave speeches that were so lyrical you could have danced to them. Franklin Roosevelt, the greatest of our great communicators, invented the “fireside chat,” the warm, homey, hearth-side talk broadcast from his living room in the White House to every one else’s across the country. “I miss the way the President used to talk to me about my government,” people told Eleanor Roosevelt after her husband’s death.

“In human affairs, the public must be offered a drama,” Roosevelt told Charles de Gaulle at the Casablanca conference in January, 1943. And such dramatics, staged by a master playwright and actor, were the stuff of political leadership on major questions vital to the life of the nation.

By contrast, recall the failure of Herbert Hoover. Described as dour, uninspiring and rigidly puritanical, critics complained that “a rose would wilt in his hand.” Witness the defeat of Jimmy Carter, a man of transparent decency, whose most memorable speech glumly described the country’s “malaise” and made him an easy political mark for the charming, easy-going Reagan.

Clinton knows all this. Moreover, he is one of the most intelligent and attractive personalities to have held the presidency in this century. His skill as a speaker and with the press are more than a match for any politician currently on the national scene. His address to the Congress earlier this year arguing the necessity of health-care reform was beautifully crafted and compellingly delivered.

Which brings us to his current difficulties with Haiti. True, for the moment, the Carter-Sam Nunn-Colin L. Powell negotiation with the military junta appears to have saved the President’s political life. Averting a military clash that would have cost American lives and opening the way to the restoration of Father Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power, the agreement is being hailed by the Clinton Administration as a triumph of the President’s diplomacy.

But Clinton and his advisers would do well to consider how close they came to political disaster. Whatever the merits of putting U.S. forces in Haiti--and much can be said against it--Clinton’s greatest failing, once he decided to exercise the military option, was the decision to proceed without public and congressional backing.

How could someone as astute and practiced in U.S. politics as Clinton have decided to commit himself to a military action supported by only 31% of the public and less than a solid majority in the Congress? Surely, the President knows that even initially popular responses to aggressions challenging or seeming to challenge America’s national interest lost part, if not much, of their appeal once lives began to be lost.

Franklin Roosevelt spent more than two years preparing an isolationist America for involvement in a war that meant far more to its well-being than Haiti could ever be. Truman and Johnson, despite widespread national support for combatting the communist threat, lost political control in the waves of recrimination that engulfed their policies in Korea and Vietnam.

By contrast, George Bush, in the most masterful episode of his term, brought 90% of the country to his side with the shrewd preparations that preceded the military response to Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. However overdrawn, comparing Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler and the Iraqi attack to Czechoslovakia and Munich, was a clever political appeal that won Bush not only public support but also a strong congressional endorsement.

To be sure, the distressing thought of a hostile Iraq in control of Persian Gulf oil made Americans more receptive to Bush’s appeal for intervention in the Gulf than they would be to any argument about toppling a military dictatorship in Haiti. Still, a candid presidential case against inhibiting the flow of Haitian migrants fleeing economic privation and political terror in their country would have had resonance with many Americans.

Clinton did make the case to the American public about the criminality of the current regime. But what about Aristide? It is doubtful that more than a handful of Americans know enough about the man to make the idea of sacrificing American lives to re-establish his power compelling. But the fact that he was the only democratically elected president in that benighted country’s history and that he is a Catholic priest with a genuine moral compass would mean something to Americans.

America’s past failed hopes of bringing democracy to Haiti by landing the Marines in 1915 is enough to make the current involvement seem like another episode in a long list of Caribbean misadventures. But even if Clinton’s decision to use U.S. muscle to advance democracy’s cause and block another flood of poor immigrants to our shores ends badly, there is still no excuse for his failure to practice the politics of foreign policy more effectively than he has.

Before he confronts the next inevitable overseas crisis, he should recall how presidents like Roosevelt and Kennedy, his two favorites, prepared the way for tough responses to complicated world problems. Roosevelt, for example, lived by the proposition that a successful policy abroad required a stable consensus at home--one nurtured by presidential persuasion. Haiti, so far, is a demonstration of how not to win domestic support for a risky foreign policy.

Let us hope that Clinton will not take a narrow escape from a Haitian political disaster as a reason to ignore what his lead-up to the invasion should teach. Shuffling around a press secretary has nothing to do with a President’s ability to talk to the public. Clinton must recognize that the best of our presidents have done a lot of on-the-job training. It could make the difference between remaining in the White House or joining all those other one-term Presidents in this century who lacked the wisdom and eloquence to advance their political fortunes and the national well-being.