Clinton Puts Bully Pulpit Mike to Work

The president’s foreign and domestic roadshow, which began three weeks ago and is scheduled to continue at least through a trip to China in June, has given him a welcome opportunity to look presidential amid allegations of illicit sex and cover-up that have bedeviled him most of the year.

But around the country, many Americans wonder, despite Clinton’s key role in the peace and power-sharing agreement in Northern Ireland, if there is not a certain “Wag the Dog” quality to Clinton’s travels--an effort to divert attention from his troubles at home, if not by manufacturing an international crisis, as in the recent movie, than at least by calling attention to other concerns.

The father-son tobacco-growing team of Gilbert and Leroy Cannon, for example, took a cynical view of the president’s hey-I’m-a-statesman-not-a-jerk campaign.

“To us tobacco farmers, it looks like he’s traveling down here just to distract attention from Paula Jones and all that mess,” said Gilbert Cannon, 57, a tobacco farmer who turned out for Clinton’s visit to Carrollton, Ky., on Thursday by protesting Senate legislation (which Clinton supports) to impose new costs and regulations on tobacco.

“Tobacco is a diversion,” added his 36-year-old son, Leroy.

After returning from Africa last week, Clinton traveled this week to Kansas City, Chicago and Carrollton. He plans another domestic trip next week before leaving Wednesday for Chile. And in May it’s off to Europe.

At a Chicago fund-raising dinner Tuesday, convened during a rainstorm in a tent at a private home, the president explained the philosophy that keeps him going despite all his troubles this year.

“I was thinking when all this storm came up, when the tent began to sway, this is the way I live every day in Washington,” Clinton said, to the laughter of the crowd. “Believe me, I’ve found that if you just keep standing up, most of the time the tent won’t fall. And if the storm blows over you, you won’t melt. Ninety percent of it is just showing up every day. It gratifies your friends and confounds your enemies.”

The president has tried to adhere to this strategy through recent months. But over the last week or so, he has been able to get the microphone working on his bully pulpit.

His goal this week--particularly since Congress was out of session--was to conduct a conversation “straight from the Oval [Office] desk to the kitchen table,” presidential advisor Rahm Emanuel said.

So, the president launched a dialogue in Kansas City about reforming Social Security, highlighted plans for improving school buildings while in Chicago and went to tobacco country to discuss the need to increase taxes on the lifeblood industry there. All were issues with broad middle-class appeal.

White House officials conceded that the week was particularly intense but suggested that its style and substance were nothing new.

“The reality is what we did this week is what we’ve been doing all along--both on the issues we’ve been emphasizing as well as how we communicate them,” said Doug Sosnik, counsel to the president. “The biggest difference is the press decided this week to pay more attention to what we’re doing and not be fixated on the scandals.”

To be sure, with the dismissal of the Paula Corbin Jones lawsuit last week and a relative lull in independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr’s investigation, the Clinton sex allegations that have monopolized the media for most of the year subsided substantially.

“What he’s been able to do in the last week is to recapture the bully pulpit,” said Norman Ornstein, a political analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank in Washington.

It was a “combination of skill and some luck” that enabled him to fill the vacuum with his agenda, Ornstein said.

But even as the president appeared to be regaining his stride, White House officials were quick with reminders that more stormy days lie ahead. Starr continues his investigation of Clinton’s relationship with former White House intern Monica S. Lewinsky, and Starr’s report to Congress is likely to produce a new wave of trouble for the president.

“That report will be full of page after page of political and personal venom,” Emanuel predicted.

Political analysts agreed that the president is merely experiencing a breather.

“He’s pretty much like a boxer who has taken a pummeling in an early round. His handlers have put ammonia under his nose and sent him back into the fray. He’s doing better, but the 15th round hasn’t come--so we don’t know what the decision will be,” said Ross Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

Trying to run a presidency despite the onslaught of controversies is nothing new for Clinton or his team of advisors.

“This is the classic two-track Clinton presidency,” said Larry Sabato, a professor of government at the University of Virginia. “You run a train down the policy track while at the same time another steam engine is on the second track of scandal.”

Nonetheless, the three foreign trips the president has planned over the next two months will make it easier for him to put the focus on something besides his troubles at home.

“It’s remarkable that he could continue, but he did,” said James Thurber, a political analyst at American University. “What the president is trying to do is push his own agenda and show leadership by going to the American people over the head of the Congress. He’s trying to govern, he’s trying to be presidential. This week he succeeded. We’ll have to wait to see what next week brings.”