Clinton Seems to Live and Die by the Word

President Clinton, who built a political career on the persuasive power of his oratory, couldn’t find the words to stop his impeachment by the House.

Now, as he tries to govern despite being branded by the ignominy of impeachment, he finds he must do so without his most valuable asset.

Realizing the damage done to his credibility, he has in recent days adopted a new strategy on issues from impeachment to Iraq: letting others speak for him and letting his actions speak louder than his words.

“People who use words well have to be extraordinarily careful because it’s very easy for a word user to become a word abuser,” said Benjamin R. Barber, director of the Walt Whitman Center for the Culture and Politics of Democracy at Rutgers University and an informal advisor to the president. “As long as Clinton was understood to be using words to tell truth and to bridge the gaps between Americans, he was admired. When he used the same exact facility to evade the truth and play the legal game, his facility with words became a reason for suspicion.”

As one former aide put it: “He tried to talk his way out of it and he failed. Now he’s tongue tied. There’s no dictionary big enough to help him out this time.”

Clinton once relied on a combination of personal charm and a lawyer’s quick command of language to prevail by speaking directly--to a wary public on TV, to an undecided voter at a campaign rally, or with a recalcitrant congressman in a back-room schmooze.

Now, he uses other means to pursue his duties and defend his administration.

Yielding Microphone After House Vote

Clinton responded to Saturday’s historic House vote to impeach him by first allowing others to speak for him. House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.), who has been at frequent odds with Clinton over the years but rose passionately to his defense on Saturday, declared the presidency intact and denounced the impeachment as an example of ugly partisan politics. The president’s chief of staff, John Podesta, and Vice President Al Gore also spoke, underscoring that the power of incumbency still protects Clinton.

First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton had a “silent but powerful presence,” Barber said. “When Hillary is seen with him, she’s saying, ‘I know he lied, but I trust him.’ Maybe we can trust his words more because Hillary is trusting him.”

The way the administration announced and provided updates on the military action in Iraq also showed this shift in approach.

Although Clinton made brief speeches at the beginning and the end of Operation Desert Fox, they were backed up by much longer news conferences by others who put their own credibility on the line for him. In a telling gesture, Defense Secretary William S. Cohen, a former Republican senator from Maine, went to Capitol Hill to brief congressional leaders and give them his assurance that the mission in Iraq was justified in military terms and not a cover for the president’s political problems.

“He was unable by his words alone to persuade the public or Congress that the bombing of Iraq was not politically motivated,” said Michael Sandel, a Harvard University professor of political philosophy. “There he had to emphasize and rely upon the words of his national security team and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”

The president is well aware that regaining credibility of his speech will not be easy after that memorable moment when he shook his finger at the American public and denied a relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky and then continued the deception for most of a year.

“That is not a process that is going to happen overnight,” said a senior White House advisor. “It’s going to be a challenge he’s going to have for the rest of his presidency.”

For Now, Silence May Be Golden

Over the last two weeks, as it became obvious that Clinton was in peril of impeachment, the usually talkative president’s words on the subject, in public and private, were few.

His one public appeal to undecided Republicans was made with great reluctance 10 days ago, just before his trip to the Middle East. Hindsight suggests he should have trusted his instincts. The remarks only exacerbated his problems with moderate Republicans, most of whom ended up voting to impeach him. It may even have turned more of the public against him. Respondents interviewed after the statement were slightly more critical of the president than those interviewed before it for a poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press (50% before and 55% after).

He also did not find words to woo two undecided House Republicans who accompanied him on the Middle East trip. A senior advisor on the trip said the president was very “delicate” the one time the subject came up, while jetting home on Air Force One. White House aides had hoped Reps. Rick Lazio (R-N.Y.) and Jon D. Fox (R-Pa.) would be so impressed with the president’s foreign policy that they would be persuaded to vote against impeachment. But both, in the end, voted to impeach.

By offering several apologies--the first one, on Aug. 17, defiant and the next few increasingly contrite--the president used up his credibility on the topic. At least with members of Congress, his ability to defend himself with words was further diminished by what they saw as legal hairsplitting. During the last weeks, the president seemed to have no verbal ammunition left.

“His words had done him in,” Barber said. “You can’t use words to restore confidence in a distrust of words. People would think: ‘There’s “Slick Willy” trying to use words to crawl out again.’ ”

This distrust has infected the way members of Congress and the public hear the president when he is speaking on other topics as well.

In a public opinion poll conducted by the Connecticut-based Roper Center a week ago, 42% of the people surveyed said the president “cannot be trusted.”

“This most loquacious of presidents seems to be at a point where he’s been rendered speechless for all practical purposes,” Sandel said. “The failure of his words has gone beyond the impeachment matter to other areas of policy. He will not be able to mount the bully pulpit, which earlier was a very effective part of his presidency.”

The international arena is the one area where the president’s rhetoric still has almost full strength, aides and analysts agree.

“He will still be able to try to mediate international disputes as he has done in the Middle East and Ireland, but he will no longer be able to direct or shape the national conversation,” said Sandel.

Words Played Into Campaign Strategy

But the larger reality, said Sandel, is that Clinton has debased the currency of his own words over time to such an extent that he could no longer talk his way out of impeachment.

That is a big loss for this man.

In New Hampshire in 1992, his aides realized that there was a direct corollary between the number of primary votes Clinton won and the number of people Clinton was able to meet and talk to.

This was true even if the only Clinton that a voter had come into contact with was the one talking on television about how he understood America’s problems and his vision for its future. The candidate’s press office distributed thousands of videotapes of Clinton speaking, knowing that those who received them were--by a large percentage--more likely to vote for him.

“His voice has been important, there’s no question,” said one former aide. “As president he has this marvelous thing, whenever he opens his mouth the cameras have to record it. He has an opportunity every day to tell the country what he’s doing for them, and he’s damn good at it.

“Whatever charisma is, he has it. When he looks at you with those big eyes and he grabs you by the elbow, it’s like nobody else exists in the world. I feel he has the ability to reach through the television screen and do that. But that ability has been heavily damaged by this entire mess.”

Some Clinton supporters argued that the president will again find his voice.

“Any time in the past when anyone has doubted the strength of Bill Clinton’s words, they’ve eventually been proven wrong,” said Don Baer, a former director of communications for Clinton’s White House.

Baer and some other Clinton supporters believe the president can continue to use words to his advantage, but they concede that there may be some limitations.

For instance, talking about personal values and negotiating with Republicans in Congress, whose lack of trust in the president was stated so definitively by their vote Saturday, may both prove too problematic.

“Whether he has the private voice to speak to people on the other side in Washington to find compromises: That’s an open question,” Baer said.