Clinton Reins In Ambition as He Heads for Hustings

Riding a wave of euphoria from his most dramatic comeback yet, President Clinton heads out to the hustings today striving to get a new lease on his second term in the White House.

But the circumstances and skills that have helped Clinton escape the doom widely forecast for him are not likely to aid in fulfilling the high expectations he once set for his presidency.

Although last week’s dismissal of the Paula Corbin Jones lawsuit gave the president a sudden psychological boost, politicians agree that the robust economy has been the biggest factor in his surviving the most threatening controversy of his fitful tenure.

“The public is inebriated with the economy,” said Democratic pollster Alan Secrest. “Very little else seems to be punching through the public consciousness right now.”

That mood, which amounts to a vote against impeaching Clinton, is also tantamount to a vote for preserving the status quo in general, analysts said.

That would mean tough sledding for the sort of sweeping change Clinton promised when, as a presidential candidate in 1992, he vowed to reform health care and shrink the gap between rich and poor.

Right now more Americans are without health insurance than when Clinton entered the White House and, by some measures, the gulf between rich and poor has widened. Yet Clinton is doing handsomely in the polls.

“He’s riding along on good times,” said University of Wisconsin political analyst Charles Jones. But, as Jones points out, “his job-approval rating is not some storehouse of political advantage that he can draw on.”

Moreover, the tactics Clinton has used to respond to the controversy--keeping mum about the allegations against him while concentrating on discrediting his critics--are not conducive to establishing the public confidence required to make fundamental policy reforms.

“He has been successful in building support for himself,” said George Edwards, director of Texas A&M;’s Center for the Study of the Presidency. “But he has forgotten about being an agent of change.”

To be sure, no one is writing off the president as irrelevant to the political process. “He has survived in a hellish environment and put through a mini-agenda that gives his party something to work with,” conceded one Democratic pollster, who asked not to be identified and who still blames Clinton for the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994.

*

It is this agenda that Clinton will be promoting during this week’s two-day road trip. He will conduct a town meeting in Kansas City, Mo., as part of the yearlong debate he has proposed on Social Security and he will visit a school in Chicago to plug his ideas for educational reform.

But many scholars play down the significance of these proposals and contend that they have been designed more to avoid controversy than to deal with deep-rooted problems.

“It’s fine to be for child care,” said Edwards. “But to get that through [Congress] on a meaningful scale you have to fight some serious battles. You do have to spend money or take money from somewhere else. Those kinds of battles Clinton is not winning or even fighting.”

On the political battlefields, Democratic operatives contend that the controversies surrounding the president have created more of a problem for Republicans than for Clinton.

“The more Republicans talk about it, the worse off they are,” asserted Democratic pollster Mark Mellman, who recalled that New York Sen. Alfonse M. D’Amato’s poll ratings suffered because of his aggressive conduct during Senate hearings into the Whitewater case in 1995.

As for the president himself, his partisans contend that he has benefited from an understanding electorate.

“They think he is lying about matters that are very personal and that they know many Americans lie about and would expect to lie about,” contended Harold M. Ickes, Clinton’s former deputy chief of staff, who was summoned to help the White House deal with the Monica S. Lewinski controversy.

Ickes contends that voters will view the end of Jones’ sexual harassment case as a sign that the other charges against the president lack substance. “The public doesn’t make much distinction” between the various allegations, he said. “They see all this lumped together. And the White House has been good at characterizing it that way.”

*

Still, as Ickes conceded, “if you throw enough mud, some is bound to stick. This has not helped him and has probably damaged him in the eyes of neutral people.”

That damage would be enough to hinder the president if he were to undertake bolder initiatives than he has on the table.

“Anything he proposes that rests on people believing in him and his convictions would be in trouble,” said James Ceaser, a University of Virginia presidential scholar. “He doesn’t have the trust of Republicans, or of Democrats either, for that matter.”

But Clinton’s credibility may never be put to that test because, some scholars believe, he is no longer interested in pushing bold ideas. “This scandal is a misfortune, but the fact is that if we hadn’t had scandal we wouldn’t have had anything but nickel-and-dime proposals anyway,” said Yale University political scientist Bruce Ackerman.

The president, scholars complained, has tended to bypass fundamental national problems, such as the financial pressure of government programs that provide automatic benefits. For example, critics contended, his proposal to use the budget surplus to “save Social Security first” overlooks the long-range financial problem looming over the program.

“What he is saying is, ‘First, I’ll see what everybody thinks and then talk the problem to death,’ ” said the University of Wisconsin’s Jones, referring to Clinton’s proposed yearlong debate on the issue.

But even as he pursues his limited agenda, Clinton may find himself handicapped because the personal controversies swirling around him could limit the versatility that has been one of his strengths in policy debates.

On some occasions he has been a masterful counterpuncher, exploiting the weaknesses of his opponents. When the conservative Republican revolution threatened long-cherished benefit programs in 1995, Clinton “made Social Security and Medicare into a battering ram” against the Republicans, Ackerman recalled.

As Ceaser points out, Clinton could not have achieved his greatest legislative accomplishments, the North American Free Trade Agreement and welfare reform, without Republican cooperation.

But the controversy has moved him closer to Democrats in the House, who have rallied behind him in adversity, Ceaser said, thus making it harder for the president to collaborate with the other side.

“I don’t see him doing much with the Republicans until it’s absolutely clear that the scandal has gone away,” he added.