Into the Final Fray : How Did Candidate Clinton Pull Off His Amazing Political Resurrection? A Large Part of the Answer Can Be Found in President Clinton and the New, Transformed ‘Yes, But’ Presidency.

By at least some measures, these should be triumphant days for Bill Clinton.

The president is launching his reelection campaign, the last race of his career, with polls that show he can beat any opponent handily. He has more than $20 million in his campaign accounts and no opposition in his own party. Thanks to a long battle over the federal budget, he even has a campaign slogan that he likes: Television commercials this fall will portray Clinton as the man who defended Medicare against heartless budget-cutters. And all this reflects a feat of remarkable political skill; scarcely a year ago, Clinton was flat on his back, steamrollered by a Republican congressional landslide that amounted, as well, to a blunt repudiation of the president. To have bounced back in only a year is a remarkable comeback.

Yet the mood in the West Wing of the White House is not triumphant. Clinton’s aides look grim, not victorious. They still bustle from meeting to meeting, still work from 8 in the morning to well past 8 at night, but they no longer wear the cocksure panache that marked their first two years in power and so annoyed the rest of Washington, Republican and Democrat alike. Instead, the president’s men and women seem both weary and wary. They have seen Clinton’s standing with the public soar and plunge like a roller coaster; they can’t help fearing that any giddiness they feel today may only portend a sickening drop tomorrow.

In public, Clinton appears buoyant and inexhaustible, but inside the White House he, too, is grimly realistic about the kind of year this will be. One day in December, advisor George Stephanopoulos walked into the Oval Office to give Clinton the good news that a CNN poll showed him beating his most likely Republican opponent, Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, by 53% to 34%--a landslide margin of 19%. Clinton glanced at the figures and dismissed them with a fleeting smile. “It isn’t true,” he said.

But there is a more profound reason for unease in the White House than just the ebb and flow of a president’s popularity. Bill Clinton is reinventing himself again, and some of his own supporters--in Congress, as well as in the White House--are worried about where he is going. This supreme political tactician, perhaps the most gifted campaigner of a generation, has pulled out every stop to wage his what he hopes will be the greatest comeback of his life. uphill fight for reelection. But has he revived his candidacy only to compromise his presidency?

For much of Clinton’s success this past year has come at the expense of programs and priorities that the president and his aides once held dear. A Democrat who came to office promising to retool the economy, promote high technology and retrain laid-off workers has found himself echoing the Republican creed: The first imperative of government is to balance the budget within seven years. That transformation has been the key to Clinton’s resuscitation as a viable candidate--but it has left some of his own aides wondering what they came to Washington for.

“This is not much fun,” one White House official groused during the endless rounds of program-cutting that dominated this winter’s negotiations on the budget. “This is not what most of us came here to do.”

What’s at stake, of course, is much more important than the wounded ambitions of White House aides--more, even, than the outcome of this year’s election. Clinton likes to talk about history; one of his favorite themes this year has been the choices that the American nation must make as it moves from a 20th century industrial economy to a 21st century information economy. But, as the president sometimes adds, such an epochal economic transformation normally brings a political transformation as well. What’s at stake in this battle is not only whether the Democratic Party enters the new century with its leader in the White House, but whether the party even survives.

Clinton and his aides say they are fighting for a basic idea--the proposition that Americans want the federal government to play an active role in promoting economic growth and providing a safety net for the poor--against Republicans who believe that the best government is the least government. But to preserve that idea, Clinton has accepted one of the GOP’s main priorities: the idea that a balanced budget--something the president had previously given only halfhearted attention--should be the first goal of federal fiscal policy. And at the same time, he has virtually abandoned some of his own long-held aims.

“Our main goal is to preserve what we can, so that there is at least a framework of federal programs still there, instead of destroying things entirely,” a member of Clinton’s cabinet explained.

Instead of a reformer, Clinton has become what political scientists call an “accommodator”--a president who accepts that he must work within a policy framework designed by his opponents, like Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower in an earlier, Democratic age. He has become a “yes, but” president. “Yes, we have to balance the budget, but let’s do it in such a way that increases our investment in education,” he said in California last fall. “Yes, middle-class people ought to have tax relief . . . but let’s don’t cut taxes so much just to fund tax cuts for people who don’t need it.”

“Eisenhower said: ‘Elect me, I’ll run the New Deal more efficiently,’ ” argues historian Michael Beschloss. “Clinton says: ‘Elect me, I’ll wind down these programs more fairly.”’

Clinton and his aides reply, in effect, that history has given them little choice. Voters say they like the idea of a balanced budget and will punish any candidate who stands in the way. And despite his handsome polls, this president still feels himself at the voters’ mercy. He needs to win not merely across the nation but also in each of a dozen battleground states, including California, Illinois, Michigan and Ohio--the political equivalent of drawing an inside straight. To do that, he must not only wage a campaign of extraordinary skill, but also pray that the Whitewater investigations of his (and his wife’s) conduct fail to produce new charges, and pray, too, that his decision to send 20,000 American troops to Bosnia doesn’t turn into a quagmire.

And even then--even if he wins--his second term would likely he a time of limited choices and narrowed ambitions. For even if Clinton were reelected by a wide margin, there is no foreseeable electoral scenario that would give him a working majority in both houses of Congress. He would still be condemned to waging a long and difficult holding action: trying to hold off Republican enthusiasm for eradicating federal programs, looking for projects he can propose without spending money, and praying that the pendulum of public opinion will swing back toward his vision of a smaller but still-activist government.

“A lot of it will be rear-guard,” acknowledges Stephanopoulos, the chief guardian of the liberal flame inside the White House.

Four years of Bill Clinton as a “yes, but” president?

Stephanopoulos shrugs. “There are worse things,” he says.

*

When Bill Clinton and his brain trust began plotting his race for the presidency in 1992, they had much grander ambitions than merely holding the White House for eight years against a conservative Republican tide. Clinton had a historic project in mind: to rebuild Americans’ faith in the federal government by devising new programs that would meet the nation’s needs without making old mistakes. On an inauguration day bright with the promise of a new beginning, he proclaimed: “We pledge an end to the era of deadlock and drift.”

The Clinton agenda included reviving a recession-battered economy; “reinventing” government to make the bureaucracy more efficient; “ending welfare as we know it”, and creating a national health insurance system. If he could enact this ambitious blueprint, Clinton believed, he would build a new Democratic majority and prevent the Republicans from cementing their hold on the middle class.

It didn’t work.

The economy recovered from its election-year recession, but voters didn’t give Clinton much credit. Longer-term economic worries like stagnant income and corporate layoffs resisted any quick fix. The new administration’s drive to reinvent government met with some modest success but not enough to convince voters that Clinton was as devoted a budget-cutter as his Republican critics. Indeed, Clinton’s decision to work closely with Congress’s entrenched liberal Democratic leadership persuaded many voters that his promise to be “a new kind of Democrat” had been hollow.

In what most aides later decided was a strategic mistake, Clinton did not move quickly on welfare reform, the plank that most clearly distinguished him as a centrist “new Democrat.” Instead, he concentrated his energies--and those of his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton--on passing a complex health-care proposal. The plan’s opponents fought it, successfully, as a giant new federal bureaucracy. Coupled with other decisions that reflected Clinton’s liberal side--notably his attempt to reverse the armed forces’ ban on homosexuals in uniform--the southern centrist president found himself painted as a tax-and-spend cultural leftist.

“The Clinton who ran for president in 1992 talked about personal responsibility and welfare reform, and that was very dangerous for Republicans, who fear a conservative Democrat more than anything,” said Fred Steeper, a Republican pollster. “But somehow he got ‘off-message’ . . . and that opened an opportunity for Republicans in 1994.”

The 1994 congressional election turned Clinton’s presidency upside-down. The Republicans seized control of both houses and defeated 35 incumbent Democrats in their biggest sweep since 1946, the year Clinton was born. Clinton campaigned across the nation--although some Democrats asked him not to show up in their districts--and invited voters to make the election a referendum on his administration.

Clinton was “blown away” by the results, an aide recalled. He looked stunned as he tried to explain the election in the White House briefing room the next morning. He raged privately against the high-priced pollsters and political consultants who failed to save him from the debacle. He seemed to resent the voters for failing to appreciate what he had done in his first two years; for most of 1995, he salted his speeches with what one aide called “the laundry list,” a recitation of what had been achieved unnoticed.

But characteristically, Clinton also went to work on his own analysis of what had gone wrong. What the president came up with ironically matched the diagnosis of several Republican strategists: that he had drifted from the New Democratic centrism that won him the presidency and made decisions that allowed his opponents to paint him as a liberal. “I lost the language,” Clinton said.

Sometimes, to his advisors’ despair, he gave his contrition full rein, apologizing to wealthy fund-raisers for “raising your taxes too much” and phoning a newspaper columnist to denounce his own welfare reform proposal as too weak. “We ought to take away his calling card, put a pay phone on his desk,” one aide groused at the time.

Some White House aides, notably Stephanopoulos, toyed with the idea that Clinton could redeem himself--and win his office back--by repeating Harry S. Truman’s 1948 “Give ‘em Hell” campaign. Truman staged his comeback by reaffirming his fidelity to the New Deal, proposing a national health plan, education programs and an increase in the minimum wage, and then denouncing the “do-nothing Congress” when it didn’t comply. Stephanopoulos even sent to the Truman Library for a 1946 White House memo urging a strategy of confrontation. “It’s amazing how it stands up today,” Stephanopoulos said. In the famous memo, advisor James A. Rowe Jr. tells Truman: “In the end the constitutional power of the president is what matters. You get killed when you try too hard to satisfy the elites’ longings for compromise . . . .The president only has the bully pulpit and the veto.”

*

But Clinton wasn’t sure he wanted confrontation.

In deference to the Republicans’ success--and the polls that showed that voters liked the idea of the new broom sweeping through Congress--the president made an earnest show of cooperation with the new speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich--notwithstanding Gingrich’s previous description of Clintonites as “the enemy of normal Americans.”

Inside the White House, Clinton and his aides began plotting a strategy for his political resurrection around three goals.

The first was to find a way into the legislative process despite the GOP majority, to avoid the hideous taint of irrelevance; “1995 has been about getting his presidency back,” a senior aide said.

The second was to rebuild his image as the centrist New Democrat the voters thought they elected in 1992.

And the third was to cement his support among key Democratic groups to avert a crippling challenge from within the party.

“We worked to put the political side of the house in order early; we all saw the lesson of Bush [who delayed paying attention to the exigencies of his reelection campaign] in 1992,” a senior aide recalled. “Clinton screamed at scheduling meetings to make sure we were doing enough in the important states.” Clinton visited California six times in 1995 alone.

The White House’s internal organization was revamped to put politics first. Clinton’s political advisors conferred every morning with a conference call at 8:45. His campaign consultants trooped into the building every Thursday evening to review the presidential staff’s plans for each coming week.

And Clinton surrendered, at last, to aides’ pleas that he make an effort to act more “presidential.” His public appearances were cut back on the theory that he was cheapening the currency of presidential statements. His impromptu news conferences in the White House briefing room stopped, and he gave up chatting with reporters after his morning jog, a habit that produced the very unpresidential TV image of the chief executive “sweating and wearing a baseball cap,” an aide noted. Even his neckties were a matter for strategic planning. “We scrubbed the schedule and got him to give up the Save the Children ties”--cheerful but wild--”when he was going to be on camera.”

The president’s remake of his own image was first noticed after the bombing of the federal building in Oklahoma City in April--an episode his handlers now recall (a bit coldbloodedly) as a political turning point. Clinton’s success at filling the role of father figure for a grieving nation actually produced a significant uptick in his polls. Foreign policy helped, too. Clinton was painfully uncertain about international affairs during his first two years in office, and one result was a series of vacillations on such unforgiving battlegrounds as Bosnia, Somalia and Haiti. But over time, Clinton gained confidence in his ability to make foreign policy decisions--and also learned the virtue of sticking with a course.

Clinton’s main tactical achievement of the year, however, was the feat of moving rapidly to the center and stigmatizing Gingrich’s Republicans as extremists, while somehow avoiding a primary challenge from his own party’s liberal wing.

With a move to the right followed by a move to the left, the president zigzagged across the political terrain, insisting all the while that he was merely carving out a third way between the two parties’ tired orthodoxies. He offered to work with the Republicans to cut spending and promised to sign as much of their agenda, the “Contract with America,” as he could; then he denounced GOP conservatives for seeking to restrict abortion rights and weaken federal gun control. When Republicans proposed turning the federally funded school-lunch program into block grants under states’ control, he was partisan: “What they want to do is make war on the kids of this country to pay for a capital gains tax cut.” But he later endorsed a Senate Republican plan to turn the main federal welfare program into the same kind of block grant. He warned that Republican budget cuts would “dismantle Medicare as we know it,” even though his own 1993 health-care plan would have restructured the program to save money, too.

On one level, Clinton was merely resorting to the kind of exaggeration that Newt Gingrich and his Republicans had used to stigmatize the Democrats as profligate liberals. But he was also shoring up his support among traditional Democratic groups--and, not incidentally, discouraging potential rivals like Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey, New Jersey Sen. Bill Bradley and Missouri Rep. Richard A. Gephardt from challenging his claim to renomination.

By May, however, Clinton was worried about the slow beating he was taking from the Republicans on one issue where they still held the advantage: the federal budget.

Gingrich and his colleagues had promised to balance the budget within seven years. Clinton had submitted a budget that didn’t even come close--a phony budget, some aides now admit, put together merely to force the Republicans to propose draconian cuts in Medicare and other popular programs.

The Republicans were going to send him bills to cut spending and balance the budget--and polls showed most voters agreed with their goal. Clinton didn’t want to look like a simple obstructionist. “I didn’t come here to produce a pile of vetoes,” he said. The president was in a box.

*

The first time--it was in 1994--that White House chief of staff Leon Panetta said the president was getting advice from someone he puckishly called “Charlie,” other aides were mystified. Some thought “Charlie” was a composite figure, a wry little figure of speech to describe the dozens of outside politicians and power brokers Clinton loves to consult. But it gradually dawned on them: “There really was a Charlie and that Leon had to deal with him--and we didn’t know who it was,” a senior aide said. “It was very weird.”

Charlie turned out to be Dick Morris, a New York political consultant who had worked for Clinton on and off since the Arkansan’s first run for governor in 1978. The reason for secrecy was a matter of some embarrassment on both sides: After years as a Democrat, Morris had gone to work for a string of conservative Republicans, including North Carolina’s unreconstructed Sen. Jesse Helms and Senate whip Trent Lott. Many Democrats loathed him; his new Republican clients were distressed to learn that he had moved back across the line to help Clinton. But the president and his wife wanted his advice.

Morris had engineered the greatest comeback of Clinton’s early political career, his 1982 campaign to recapture the governor’s office after voters turned him out in 1980. Even in those days, Morris was controversial; Clinton aide Betsey Wright feared that the New Yorker would “take this moral man and corrupt him in the evil ways of politics.” But sharper politics was exactly what the Clintons wanted. Morris seemed to function as Clinton’s political trainer, helping him sharpen his focus and harness his actions to a strategy. “Morris helps the president crystallize his thoughts,” one senior aide explained.

Morris gave his strategy a portentous name, “triangulation,” and explained it--with steepled fingers--as a high and subtle concept. By moving toward the center and acting independently of both Republicans and Democrats in Congress, he said, Clinton not only occupied the great middle ground but raised himself above all other politicians as well. The president’s erstwhile supporters in Congress quickly noticed that the impact on them was not very subtle: They were left out on a limb. “When he triangulates,” complained Kerrey, “he strangulates the Democrats in Congress.”

The turning point, and the proof of Morris’s influence, was Clinton’s decision in May to accept the Republican goal of balancing the budget in 10 years or less. Panetta, a veteran budget negotiator, had sketched out a yearlong strategy of forcing the GOP to propose cuts in Medicare and other popular programs, culminating in tough negotiations in the fall. But Clinton, abetted by Morris, was increasingly uncomfortable with that hard line. “We don’t have the option to be as irresponsible as they were,” the president said, referring to the Republicans’ refusal in earlier years to cooperate with his economic plans.

Inside the White House, an aide said: “It was like war breaking out.” Vice President Al Gore, a Southern centrist like Clinton, agreed with Morris that the president had to embrace a balanced budget. Panetta and Budget Director Alice Rivlin were willing to devise a balanced budget but wanted to delay longer for maximum negotiating leverage. Liberals like Stephanopoulos and Tyson didn’t want to commit to a balanced budget at all.

After two weeks of infighting, Clinton suddenly announced that he wanted to balance the budget in 10 years--a concession that Panetta had hoped to hold in reserve. Stephanopoulos was “despondent,” a colleague said. Congressional aide Pat Griffin was “in a panic”; how would he mollify Democrats who had been denouncing the Republican budget at the president’s urging? As Clinton’s new position hardened, liberal Democrats were indeed furious. “Most of us learned some time ago that if you don’t like the president’s position on a particular issue, you just have to wait a few weeks,” sniped Wisconsin Rep. David Obey. But some analysts saw good reason for the move. Said Rutgers University political scientist Ross K. Baker: “The ship has just deserted the sinking rats.”

Clinton’s decision to embrace a balanced budget plan was not taken on principle; until the last minute, most of his aides were earnestly explaining to reporters why aiming for a balanced budget was a bad idea. The effect of the decision, coupled with Clinton’s unwillingness to seek deep cuts in Medicare spending, was to require huge reductions in the category known as “discretionary domestic programs”--all the projects in education, environmental protection, worker training and technology that the administration once hoped to expand.

Instead, it was a decision made for reasons of political marketing. It changed the terms of the debate and freed Clinton from having to defend the unpopular idea that a balanced budget wasn’t a worthwhile goal--even though he may have believed it.

And in the end, it turned out to be brilliant politics. Even Stephanopoulos, who worried that a balanced budget would make it impossible for Clinton to fund any new programs, professed himself a convert. “This is not going to be an election about balancing the budget,” he explained. “It’s more likely to be an election about Medicare.”

*

When the final battles of winter were joined over the federal budget, Clinton was at his tactical best.

Balancing the budget in seven years was the centerpiece of the Republican agenda, and forcing the president to endorse it should have been the new majority’s crowning achievement. Instead, Clinton turned it into at least a short-term victory for his side. When the Republicans tried to force his hand by withholding money to run the government, he surprised them by standing firm. As in Arkansas, Clinton was proving steadier and more disciplined at campaigning than he had ever been at governing.

Clinton’s pollster, Mark Penn, told him the public liked a president who conveyed a sense of optimism about the future, the way Ronald Reagan had. Clinton went one better; he told voters--in a distinctly Reaganesque formula--that they could have their balanced budget and keep their favorite programs, too.

“We can balance the budget without the deep cuts in education, without the deep cuts in the environment, without letting Medicare wither on the vine, without imposing tax increases on the hardest-pressed working families in America,” he said. “I am fighting for a balanced budget that is good for America and consistent with our values. If they’ll give me the tools, I’ll balance the budget.”

“He’s having it both ways,” a former White House official said, half-admiring and half-disapproving. “He’s agreed to balance the budget in seven years. But he’s standing there like Horatio at the bridge, defending programs that people like.”

Clinton “solved” his budget paradox--cutting spending without cutting programs--by producing a plan that postponed the biggest cuts until the first years of the next century, when his successor will be in office. By then, he argued, the economy will have grown so big that plenty of tax revenue will be available to rescue that next president from the consequences.

“I think that the benefits of a balanced-budget plan will be very considerable economically,” he said in an interview. “If we can keep this recovery going and get interest rates down some more and get some more investment up . . . then I think we will generate revenues, in the context of a long-term fiscally responsible plan, to invest more in education and research and technology.”

Meanwhile, Clinton worked to devise a campaign message that allowed him to strike some traditional Democratic themes without proposing what Democratic presidents usually do, which is to spend government money. In his State of the Union address in January, he proposed a long list of low-cost initiatives: a higher minimum wage, more portable health insurance (but not a universal health plan), some modest expansions of scholarships and job training. He proclaimed the new limits on government activism a virtue, so long as it could somehow be tempered by mercy: “The era of big government is over,” he said, “but we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”

At the same time, stealing another page from Republicans, he embraced the idea that the federal government should promote a return to traditional “values” in American life. He announced new federal guidelines to safeguard the exercise of religion by students in public schools, denounced violence on television, announced new regulations to deter teenagers from smoking, and even made a point of declaring himself in favor of school uniforms. In terms of political strategy, Clinton was abandoning James Carville’s 1992 guideline--”It’s the economy, stupid”--to embrace one of the Republicans’ 1994 buzzwords: “Values matter most.” “These are the issues people care about: education, safe streets, a sense of community,” a senior White House aide said. “Race doesn’t poll as high,” he added mournfully. “The president cares about it, but most of the public doesn’t.”

Clinton has talked broadly about the “unfinished business” of his first term and his desire to take it up again in the second: education, technology, welfare reform, deficit reduction, health-care reform, crime, environmental protection. “I was elected,” he said, “to fix a broken government, to relight the dormant fires of the economy, to make sure that working families reap the just reward of their effort and are able to pass their children the same dream that they had, and to end the sort of something-for-nothing mentality that had crept into our country by restoring the values of responsibility and work and family and community.”

But having accepted the fiscal straitjacket of a balanced-budget plan, how much could a second Clinton Administration do? “If the president is reelected, in 1997 we’re about back to where we were in January 1993,” said William Galston, a former domestic policy advisor now at the University of Maryland. “Within a consensus on fiscal restraint, there will be an effort to maintain public sector efforts in some areas: education, job training, environment, the basic safety net. Then the question is: Can the branches work together in the context of an electorate that has clearly rejected both extremes?” In other words, in the best case scenario, a second Clinton term would be a long experiment in making divided government work, in trying to build a functioning alliance of moderate Republicans and centrist Democrats.

For much of the past year, Clinton has sought to place these transient political struggles in the context of history. The United States is “on the edge of a new era, a new century, a new millennium, a time of great change. We are moving from an industrial age into an information- and technology-driven age.” And as a result, he says, the voters are making “hundred-year choices.”

The question that worries Clinton is: What hand has history dealt him now? Can he somehow become once again the president of great possibilities who entered the White House in 1993? Or is he fated merely to struggle against a Republican tide that his party is powerless to forestall forever?

Even if he does win reelection, Clinton will have two strikes against him: not only the Republicans’ conviction that history is on their side but also a curse that every second-term president suffers. “There are very few successful second terms in this century, and it is not coincidence,” historian Michael Beschloss notes. Second terms seem to breed excess in presidents and impatience in the electorate. Lyndon B. Johnson’s second term began with legislative success but ended in the chaos of Vietnam; Richard M. Nixon’s collapsed in the cataclysm of Watergate; Ronald Reagan’s wandered into the morass of the Iran-Contra affair and simply ran out of steam.

“History likes winners,” Beschloss observes. But history’s test of the Clinton presidency will rest on more than the Arkansan’s prodigious ability to wage a brilliant election campaign. The test is whether his vision--and his party--will survive the experience.

If Clinton does well, Beschloss said, he may yet be remembered as the architect of a new political order, a verdict like this: “He worked the political miracle of retooling the Democratic Party and himself to get elected in a time when the country was not in sympathy with the Democratic Party’s natural instincts.”

But he isn’t there yet. Clinton still runs the risk of being remembered as little more than a supremely gifted campaigner, a man whose epitaph, in Beschloss’s words, would be: “He did whatever he had to do to get reelected.”