The Job Is Governing, Not Fund-raising

Over the past seven years, President Bill Clinton has traded in the bully pulpit of the presidency for the roast-master’s podium at the $5,000-a-plate dinner. Since January 1997, Clinton has spoken at more than 350 fund-raising events, an average of one every three days. He is the most prodigious presidential fund-raiser in U.S. history, soliciting nearly a billion dollars in donations.

But, at that same time, he has all but abandoned presidential speechmaking, rarely deigning to employ the majesty of his office to build support for his policies. Except for the constitutionally mandated State of the Union addresses, Clinton has not summoned a joint session of Congress to lobby for pressing items on his national agenda. Rarely has he addressed the nation from the Oval Office or stumped for programs on a whistle-stop tour.

Strangely, this president so concerned with his legacy and so unable to translate his popularity into concrete achievements, has largely squandered his political gifts. Insurance industry ads torpedoed his health-care plan, and since then, Clinton seems determined never to be outgunned on the airwaves. He prefers to govern through campaign commercials, to sway the American people only indirectly, through 30-second spots. But the results have been indifferent. Nearly all his plans languish. Or they remain merely campaign positions, effective political wedge issues like gun control, rather than genuine policy achievements.

Americans might well wonder how much more Clinton would have accomplished if he spent less time on the rubber-chicken circuit and more effort winning support for his policies. Certainly, Clinton’s preference for television commercials, purchased with soft money, over direct communication with the American people sharply differs from his predecessors’ behavior in the White House. Through major addresses, presidents have led a reluctant nation to war and prepared Americans for the responsibilities and sacrifices of international leadership. Presidential speeches have explained the necessity of reforming the banking system and the tax code; they roused public opinion to move a recalcitrant Congress. In forsaking this tradition, Clinton has both diminished the office of the presidency and marked a quiet revolution in U.S. politics.

The first modern president, Theodore Roosevelt, envisioned the White House as a “bully pulpit.” Roosevelt realized there was no real difference between presidential rhetoric and presidential power: Speechmaking was one of a president’s most important actions. TR understood that public speaking--establishing priorities, forging consensus--would become a powerful tool for national leadership. He used the White House, the publicity easily mobilized by the presidency, as a political big stick. Sometimes he lobbied for dubious causes like spelling reform, but he also persuaded Americans to embrace his passions for conservation, military preparedness and physical fitness.

While TR popularized the term bully pulpit, his rival Woodrow Wilson first recognized and systematically exploited its full potential. Wilson was the first president in more than a century to appear in person before Congress. He used the resources of his office to set the legislative agenda on Capitol Hill. Most important, the former Princeton professor viewed himself as an educator and the president as the tribune of all the people. He repeatedly went over the heads of Congress and local political bosses, cultivating support for his reforms through extensive speaking tours. In 1919, when his greatest monument, the peace treaty that would establish his beloved League of Nations, faced defeat in the Senate, Wilson refused to compromise. Instead, he took the case to the country, expounding the treaty at whistle stops across the nation. The frail leader traveled so vigorously that he suffered a serious stroke on the road, a collapse that crippled his presidency and ultimately doomed the treaty.

After the arrival of radio, President Franklin D. Roosevelt turned the White House into the nation’s fireside--reassuring a Depression-weary populace, explaining his controversial decisions and building constituencies for such revolutionary programs as Social Security. Radio, FDR understood, allowed the executive to govern more effectively and independently, to circumvent the vested interests and conservative newspaper editors who often blocked reform.

Moreover, FDR held two press conferences every week, a morning session to supply scoops to the evening papers and an afternoon meeting to favor the overnight editions. He built such close rapport with the White House press corps that newspapers became a regular way for the president to address the nation and to lead public opinion on important domestic and foreign-policy questions.

President Ronald Reagan avoided informal, unscripted appearances, but he earned the sobriquet “great communicator” through his tireless advocacy of his controversial agenda. Reagan loved the awesome majesty of the joint session of Congress; he often assembled both houses of Congress, pressing the assembled lawmakers and the nation to accept his supply-side tax cuts in 1981, and support the Nicaraguan contras in 1983.

He also addressed the nation from the Oval Office, introducing Americans to the Strategic Defense Initiative, facing down the nuclear freeze movement and assailing the Soviet downing of Korean Air Flight 007. And he used his speaking engagements around the country not only to raise money and stump for GOP candidates, but to sell his program. He pressed business leaders to support his schemes for privatization, praised enterprise zones when speaking to African American organizations and called on evangelicals to battle against the Evil Empire.

Even uninspired orators like Presidents Jimmy Carter and Lyndon B. Johnson understood that the moral authority and political effectiveness of the office relied as heavily on what the president said as on what he did. Johnson’s speeches moved civil-rights legislation and the war on poverty to the top of the national policy agenda. After the bloody events in Selma, Ala., in 1965, Johnson stood in the well of the House of Representatives and committed the nation to remove the insidious barriers that had long denied black Southerners the right to vote. Embracing the anthem of the civil-rights movement, Johnson declared, “We shall overcome.”

Like Wilson before him, Carter felt a duty to educate the electorate on complex and difficult issues. Carter also believed that the president, as one of only two nationally elected officials, should appeal directly to the people rather than rely on more parochial, narrowly interested local and congressional leaders. He lectured the nation about the need for energy conservation and asked Americans to put aside their credit cards in the battle against inflation. Carter’s wooden delivery and overly earnest style won over few Americans, but he still realized that without effective “jawboning” he could not hope to transform American life.

Clinton has abandoned this tradition. After the initial disappointments of his health-care and national-service plans, he has hardly even attempted to build a national consensus for his policies. Even his top priority, racial reconciliation, has fallen by the wayside as the president concentrates instead on raising ever more campaign dollars.

Clinton’s presidency marks the culmination of a silent revolution in national politics. Americans not only carry on elections through TV commercials, but increasingly debate policy and decide issues through 30-second spots. Fund-raising has become so all-consuming because governing itself relies heavily on paid political advertising.

Soft money can win elections, but it cannot steer the nation toward new, ambitious objectives. That requires rhetorical leadership--persistent, persuasive argument from the bully pulpit. The genius of Clinton’s predecessors was to harness the symbolic powers of their office to serve concrete political aims. Their words led the nation toward war and peace, new initiatives and ancient verities. By becoming fund-raiser in chief, Clinton has dissipated that legacy. His own reputation, and the presidency, will suffer for it.