Unmet Goals Beset Clinton at Midterm

It wasn’t supposed to be this way.

President Clinton rode into office 22 months ago on a wave of popular hope and a burst of optimism among Democrats that, after a generation of political exile, their party once again had a chance to restore itself in the eyes of America’s voters.

Instead, as voters prepare to go to the polls to deliver their verdict on his party, even Clinton’s own aides concede that his effort to restore Americans’ faith in activist government and to create a dominant new Democratic coalition has unequivocally failed. Instead of nailing down the final pieces of a stable, new Democratic majority, Clinton has spent the closing days of the campaign desperately trying to scare the remnants of the old Democratic coalition out to the polls.

His effort may work, at least in part. Republicans may or may not succeed in capturing control of at least one house of Congress in Tuesday’s election. Clinton may or may not succeed two years from today in winning reelection, although most political strategists in both parties think his potential challengers look far stronger in prospect than they will turn out to be in an actual head-to-head contest.

Even if the President avoids political disaster, he will awaken Wednesday with his larger goals still in tatters: Public cynicism about government stands at an all-time high, doubts about government’s ability to solve the nation’s problems remain as deep as ever and Democrats have made no noticeable progress toward expanding their support beyond the 43% that Clinton won in his election two years ago.

What went wrong?

That question has been on the minds of many of Clinton’s aides and advisers, who believe that his twin goals remain achievable in the long term. They have already begun analyzing why things got so badly off track--trying to determine how, after the election, they can start over.

The Clinton presidency, Administration officials and both Democratic and Republican strategists agree, might have been far different up to this point but for three critical strategic blunders:

* The failure to make crucial policy choices during the transition to office two years ago.

* The decision to subordinate all other issues in the interests of winning congressional support for a health care reform plan that turned out to be politically unfeasible.

* The inability to publicly articulate a rationale for the Administration’s foreign policy.

Of course, not all of Clinton’s problems can be traced to his own errors. The Republican opposition made an unusually well-disciplined and intense effort to block the President on most major issues. On one crucial issue, the economy, Clinton has also suffered politically from trends--particularly the decline in incomes for non-college-educated workers--that lie well outside the short-term control of any chief executive.

Moreover, the flaws in Clinton’s own character that have led many citizens to mistrust him and that dominated political conversation in the first several months of this year lie largely outside the control of the White House, or at least of its staff.

And the public’s souring on government did not begin with Clinton. From the mid-1980s through the onset of the last recession, roughly 40% of respondents told pollsters they believed that the government did the right thing most of the time. By the time George Bush left office, that number had substantially eroded, although Clinton has been unable to rebuild it. Last year, only 19% of those queried by the ABC News/Washington Post poll said they thought government did the right thing most of the time. Last month, only 21% said so.

But even allowing for all those problems, Administration officials and political strategists interviewed in recent weeks agree that the White House has not always been its own best friend.

On the towering issue of health care reform, many aides now openly criticize both the timing and the substance of the Administration plan--a surprising turn, considering the prominent role that First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton played in putting it together.

Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta, for example, says he accepts the criticism leveled by outside critics that Clinton erred by pushing a health care plan that would have expanded the role of government before he had convinced Americans that he had improved the government’s ability to handle its existing tasks.

“In hindsight,” Panetta said in a recent interview, “it would have been better if we had taken on welfare reform and other reform issues” before diving into health care. By taking on those subjects--reforming parts of the government that the public considers failures--Clinton could have consolidated his support and sent a message “that this President is a centrist,” Panetta said.

Clinton clearly had to “present health care reform as a proposal” and “begin the debate,” Panetta said; otherwise, he would have seemed to be walking away from a central promise of his campaign. “The real question is tactics. What would you have moved first?” The White House’s single-minded focus on health care to the detriment of all other proposals probably was a mistake, Panetta said.

Others, speaking on the condition that their names be withheld, offer blunter assessments. Health care reform “obliterated the rest of the agenda,” one White House aide said. “It sucked up all the oxygen.”

In the last year, Clinton and his aides repeatedly compromised away other goals to prevent them from interfering with health care. Protecting the health care initiative, for example, became the rationale for holding back on welfare reform, for postponing conflicts over the crime bill and for delaying key decisions on the pending world trade agreement. In the end, none of those trade-offs got Clinton what he wanted.

Even worse, the substance of the health care plan--following as it did Clinton’s successful move to raise taxes in order to shrink the federal budget deficit--tagged him indelibly in the public eye as an advocate of traditional Democratic big-government solutions.

“Not only did we not get the legislative success, but for whatever reasons, the initiative was positioned in such a way that it raised all the old fears about Democrats and government,” said Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. The health care plan allowed Republicans to raise “the negative specters of taxes and government control” and, in the process, “the flagship issue got badly sullied.”

The problems with the health care effort point up a central theme that emerges from analyses of where Clinton got off track--a theme that departs noticeably from conventional wisdom: Despite the public image of Clinton as a President overly attuned to polls and public relations, his Administration has suffered at key points from too much absorption with substance and too little attention to politics.

Particularly in the early days of the Administration, “there really was a sense of ‘that was the campaign, this is government, this is different,’ ” one White House official said. Too many people “forgot about the politics.”

In the health care effort, for example, officials such as Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen--who had long experience both with the micro-politics of Capitol Hill and the broader political climate of the country--were largely left out of the process until the proposal was well along toward completion. Those who did develop the plan, most notably White House policy adviser Ira Magaziner, had little national political experience.

Aides point to similar problems during Clinton’s transition to office, a period now almost universally regarded inside the White House as a time of tragically lost opportunities. Clinton spent most of the transition concentrating on the selection of his Cabinet and made none of the crucial choices needed to develop either an economic strategy or a political plan for his first few months in office. Because of that, Clinton entered office without any major initiatives to announce, allowing others to set the agenda for his opening weeks.

That failure set the stage for one of the Administration’s most lasting wounds--the fight over gays in the military.

The gays-in-the-military issue “sent totally the wrong signal” to the voters whom Clinton had been hoping to win over, says Republican pollster William McInturff--a view shared by most Democratic analysts. Clinton’s closest advisers had never intended to make the issue so prominent so early, but the lack of a ready agenda allowed his opponents to force the topic to the fore. To this day, the perception that Clinton’s first effort as President was not directed toward the economy, but instead toward gays, continues to damage him among a broad swath of voters.

“It’s the ‘read my lips, no new taxes’ of this Administration,” McInturff said.

The controversy over gays in the military, and Clinton’s apparent vacillation in handling the issue, set a corrosive tone for the first six months of the President’s term--erasing much of the initial goodwill that surrounded his inauguration. In the environment that resulted, other controversies, such as the fights over Administration nominees Zoe Baird and C. Lani Guinier, loomed far larger than they otherwise might have.

The other problem traceable to the transition was the lack of any coherent strategy to sell the Clinton economic plan once he decided on its contents. As a result, Clinton’s opposition was once again able to define his proposal.

Until the closing weeks of the fight, the White House did nothing to highlight the fact that the Administration’s budget plan contained a tax cut for millions of working families in the form of a higher earned income tax credit. To this day, polls show the vast majority of Americans, including those who benefited from the reduction, do not know it happened.

While those problems can be traced back in large part to a failure to make timely choices, a final strategic error--the lack of public communication on foreign policy--resulted from a deliberate decision. Clinton and his aides believed that one of the characteristics that voters held against Bush was his evident preference for foreign, rather than domestic, policy-making. As a result, as Clinton chose his foreign policy team, communicating with the public received a relatively low priority.

As foreign policy reversals piled up, beginning with the Somalia crisis in the summer of 1993 and extending through multiple failures in Bosnia, that failing harmed the Administration’s image, aides now concede. While voters may not care deeply about foreign matters, they did, it turned out, care about what they saw as a lack of competence in the Oval Office.

Clinton aides insist that their foreign policy was never as bad as it looked, and point to recent successes as evidence. But they concede they failed to explain their positions to the country. Clinton “was unable to carry it, and the people who were supposed to carry it couldn’t,” one aide said.

Aides now insist that many of those problems have been rectified. Overseas, a string of successes has boosted Clinton’s stock. The political naivete and overreaching that characterized the health care initiative have been tamed, they say, noting as an example that a new health care plan for next year will be put together by Panetta and economic policy chief Robert E. Rubin--with Magaziner playing only a “supporting role.”

But even assuming those hopeful predictions prove true, Clinton and his aides now face the toughest assignment of any--starting over.

NEXT: Administration officials look ahead at the major options for the next two years.