After 4 Years, Public Finds It Likes Clinton

As President Clinton arrives in Chicago today, the dark days of winter 1995--when he saw his sinking presidency sucked into the vortex of the full-throttle Republicans controlling Congress--are sure to be lost in the exhilaration of being on top again.

With the election just two months away, Clinton can claim a popularity among voters that, to the astonishment of his opponents--and some of his friends--rivals that of Ronald Reagan on the eve of the 1984 election: Well over half of American voters now tell pollsters that they approve of the job Clinton is doing.

Many political factors account for part of the change, but those who study human behavior and the nature of leadership--from classicists and historians to psychologists and psychiatrists--offer another, perhaps surprising, conclusion: More people, they say, are coming to the still-tentative conclusion that they might actually like the guy.

Charmed by his boyish earnestness, their moral outrage now largely spent, many voters seem willing to forgive and accept Clinton’s personal foibles, this argument holds. Even Clinton’s well-known vacillation, contends one prominent psychiatry professor, may be a personality trait that the public subliminally believes is more in tune with the fast-pace of change in the modern world.

Voters respond not just to traditional news. They “have some kind of human reaction to the president,” says Harvard psychiatry and law professor Alan A. Stone. “Human beings have this inner sort of radar system which they use in judging other human beings . . . and he comes up on the radar screen as a decent human being.”

Clinton is the reach-out-and-touch-someone president, exuding empathy to fretful voters, particularly women uneasy about their futures. His bear hugs and devouring handshakes, his misty-eyed focus on the targets of his attention, his craving for the touch of crowds--all are perceptible even across the airwaves.

No one pretends that Clinton isn’t vulnerable to another public backlash. Even some of his most ardent supporters concede that while the personal popularity he enjoys now is wide, it is not deep. In conservative circles, he is still Slick Willie, the greasy pol who couldn’t tell the truth if his presidency depended on it.

Radio host Rush Limbaugh’s list of Clinton lies is as popular on the right as is his video clip of Clinton at Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown’s funeral--footage that supposedly reveals the president as an emotional quick-change artist.

One joke making its way through the politically right side of the Internet has St. Peter guarding rooms full of clocks inside the Pearly Gates. Each clock represents a human and his time left on Earth. Asked why some clocks are running faster, Peter replies that each time a person tells a lie, the hands speed up, shortening their life span. Asked where Clinton’s clock is, Peter replies, “I keep it in the back room. It comes in handy as a ceiling fan.”

Frustrating to GOP

Nevertheless, Clinton’s popularity frustrates Republican strategists. “This is a guy that people have a love-hate relationship with because they know psychologically that they’re not supposed to like him--because he’s a bad boy, because he’s done things that aren’t socially acceptable,” says Republican pollster Frank Luntz, who has conducted dozens of focus groups with voters this year.

“But they like him,” Luntz adds. “The truth is, when he speaks, this man is hypnotic. People do think Bill Clinton feels their pain. He’s a big man, not scary, more like the Pillsbury Doughboy. He’s your best friend in school, the person you want to hang out with when you’re feeling down or bad.”

Jerrold M. Post, psychology professor at George Washington University, adds that Clinton “has a remarkable capacity, through the medium of television, to convey human contact. . . . There is a feeling that he is talking with you, and talking to you.”

Much attention has been paid to how Clinton has learned to govern as a moderate. But, perhaps as important, he also has learned how to adopt the posture of a president. At first, Clinton “didn’t understand the need for reserve in a president, the dignity of the office,” says presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. “His demeanor is more serious now.”

The smirking baby-boomer politician who bared his underwear preference on MTV and treated newspaper readers to shots of his chunky white legs while jogging in shorts is now often photographed full-suited; he is seen somberly offering comfort to plane crash victims or rebuilding burned churches.

Earnestly at Work

During last winter’s budget battles, he was pictured earnestly working from behind his Oval Office desk, while Republicans were seen by television viewers shouting to the public from behind podiums. Clinton has let his light hair deepen into mature gray; the half-rim glasses he wore when he vetoed the budget bill added to his image of age and credibility.

Pollsters for the Center for National Policy looked at swing voters in three cities for a study released in April and found a disturbing level of free-floating anxiety. These voters experienced a sharp contrast between the values they live out in their own lives and their missing sense of national values or identity.

Republicans initially were able to tap into the discontent that contrast engendered. But their success proved short-lived, says Dwight Jewson, a psychologist and consultant who helped conduct the study. Clinton, by contrast, has figured out how to assuage the anxiety among voters by stressing positive themes of national unity and direction, Jewson says.

Several experts, including Republican Luntz, compared Clinton’s communication style to that of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s. Today, electronic images of hope and empathy coming from the White House are the modern-day equivalent of FDR’s comforting fireside chats during the Depression. Like FDR, Clinton also draws high levels of hostility, Luntz notes.

Robert Jay Lifton, professor of psychiatry and psychology at the City University of New York, has a name for Clinton’s characteristic see-saws: The “Protean self.” Named for Proteus, the Greek sea god of many forms, what Lifton describes is a fluid personality that emerges most often during historical periods of extraordinary dislocation.

Lifton contends that this many-sidedness--a result of being exposed to a modern plethora of ideas and experiences--enables a leader to respond quickly to changing times and to avoid getting caught in dead ends. “Americans don’t singularly embrace [this style] but they are getting used to it,” Lifton says. “Perhaps there is a sense that this is a contemporary style with more relevance for our world.”

The Slick Willie tag so popular on the right doesn’t stick more broadly, says Abraham Zaleznik, Harvard psychoanalyst and author of numerous books on management and leadership, because while people view Clinton as a “naughty boy,” someone who gets in trouble by trying to please too many people, they don’t see him as a greedy man intent on self-enrichment.

Despite Clinton’s bad-boy image, he has succeeded in looking presidential, Zaleznik adds. “He has the appearance of vigor, youthfulness, of being part of the turn of the century,” he says.

Trustworthy, but Dark

In comparison, Clinton’s Republican challenger, Bob Dole, wins the character/trustworthy contest hands-down in public opinion polls. But behaviorists say Dole is a darker, more remote presence, less likely to connect with a public seeking warmth and reassurance.

Since ancient times, the most popular leaders have tended to be the ones who clearly take pleasure from their positions of power, says Susan Ford Wiltshire, former chairwoman of the classics department at Vanderbilt University. “We like people who like the work. That’s the common thread,” she says. “Bill Clinton believes in his work and approaches the work of government with gusto.”

Whether Clinton really is a more fitting product of the American psyche than Dole will become clear Nov. 5. If Clinton wins, however, he might enjoy another small bump in approval ratings. “In America,” says historian Goodwin, “people respect success.”