In fear that he is in `perilous' shape, Clinton plots his next comeback
by Kenneth T. Walsh
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Despite his public bravado, Bill Clinton admits to friends that his presidency is in trouble. The voters, he worries, increasingly see him as "part of the problem" in Washington -- either too liberal to challenge the power structure or too weak to break political gridlock. Clinton is particularly distressed by a new round of polls and focus groups conducted by the Democratic Party in five regions across the country. The findings: Few Americans think the president has accomplished very much, many don't trust him and only 4 out of 10 voters think he is doing a good job. And White House strategists predict that the Democrats could lose 25 seats in the House and four or five seats in the Senate this November, jeopardizing the president's working control of Congress. Clinton calls it a "politically perilous" situation and has demanded that something be done about it.
The result is a new 100-day strategy, leading up to the November 8 midterm elections, designed by the White House to engineer still another Clinton comeback. The rescue plan has four elements:
Clinton will go all out to win congressional passage of comprehensive health care reform. He will also trumpet the $32 billion crime bill that cleared a House-Senate conference committee last week.
If successful, Clinton will highlight those legislative victories while campaigning for Democratic candidates this fall in an effort to vindicate his presidency as one of accomplishment.
The White House will emphasize six initiatives that Clinton pollster Stan Greenberg says are most popular with voters: requiring three-time violent felons to serve life terms in prison without parole (though the three-strikes-and-you're-out law didn't originate with Clinton); putting 100,000 more police officers on the streets; cutting the federal bureaucracy by 270,000 workers; reducing the deficit by 40 percent in one year; boosting the incomes of 15 million middle- and low-income workers through the earned-income tax credit, and reforming the welfare system. Except for welfare reform, all of those initiatives have been enacted or are close to passage, and the idea is to demonstrate that Clinton's presidency has made a difference.
Perhaps most important, Clinton will attempt to stitch these themes together by arguing that his programs will improve life for the "forgotten middle class" -- an idea he used to good effect in his campaign but hardly a public relations touchstone of much of his presidency.
Drawbacks. There are two big problems with the rescue plan. One is that the public's sour mood has been fueled by the Whitewater mess and could be hard to shake as questions persist. Hearings began last week, and this brought the issue embarrassingly back into the spotlight as current and former aides were hauled before Congress. Yet because the focus was so narrow, the hearings seemed more sideshow than substance -- and Democrats hoped the public would begin to dismiss the entire Whitewater matter.
The second problem with Clinton's comeback strategy is that passing health care reform will be a herculean struggle. Democrats in the House and Senate differ on many fundamental issues, including whether to require employers to pay for workers' health insurance (so-called employer mandates). But White House strategists don't think Clinton has any choice except to accept the best bill he can get, even if it falls conspicuously short of his announced goal of insurance coverage for all Americans funded mostly by employers. "If we fail to pass a health care bill, Bill Clinton will seem like an incompetent," says a senior Democratic strategist. "We won't be able to say we've ended gridlock, and we'll lose control of the Senate. We can't afford to let that happen."
The White House problem is that a final bill cannot bear the Clinton label. As House Majority Leader Richard Gephardt outlined his artful compromise last week, one briefing chart was labeled "Key Differences From the Clinton Plan" -- and included the promise that it would not have "large, government bureaucracies." Gephardt called his measure -- which seeks universal coverage by 1999 funded by employer mandates, a 45-cent tobacco tax and Medicare savings -- "a brand new bill."
Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, meantime, was working to produce a plan less ambitious than the House version. His would require employers to pay half of their workers' insurance if 95 percent coverage is not achieved by the year 2001. But passing any kind of mandate in the Senate could prove problematic, and there are other options floating -- including subsidy plans to phase in Clinton's goal by first targeting children or workers between jobs. But Senate Republicans might try to delay a crucial vote this week on even the scaled-back bill -- and a long delay will hurt the chances for passage of any plan this year.
Agent of change. Chronic troubles with his agenda, his public relations and his staff have forced Clinton to make some changes and contemplate more. For instance, advisers agree he is no longer intent on filling the government with Friends of Bill (FOBs) or Friends of Hillary (FOHs). "Just being a pal no longer counts the way it did in the beginning," says a Clinton adviser. "[Clinton] realizes you can be loyal to him even if you didn't go to kindergarten or Oxford with him."
Some FOBs and FOHs have lived up to Clinton's expectations and their own high ambitions, including Labor Secretary Robert Reich, Deputy Secretary of State Strobe Talbott and U.S. Trade Representative Mickey Kantor. Those who have succeeded have tended to be policy specialists with orders to address specific issues. In contrast, the longtime Clinton pals who have gotten into trouble over the past year have tended to be operations and political specialists. Their stature won't grow this week as one notable FOB, Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger Altman, is grilled about his role in the Whitewater mess (next story).
Missteps by top aides have been particularly striking because Clinton's network of friends at first seemed so impressive. But as the administration's problems mounted, Clinton has turned to Washington insiders without a history of friendship with him or the first lady. First, the president named Washington veteran Lloyd Cutler -- never part of Clinton's inner circle -- to replace FOH Bernard Nussbaum in the extremely sensitive job of legal counsel. By all accounts, Cutler has settled down a shaky operation and brought some much needed seasoning to some of the administration's most important deliberations on such things as getting the Clintons to support congressional Whitewater hearings and disclosing much of their private financial history.
Then Clinton named Leon Panetta, a longtime congressional insider, as his new chief of staff. Panetta has shaken up staff operations by making firm assignments and demanding follow-up reports and by focusing most White House energy on winning legislative victories. Panetta is also examining options for a serious staff shake-up. One big early test will be his choice of a successor to Cutler, whose temporary White House duty ends next month. Aides say Panetta wants his own person in the post -- rather than an FOB -- and he is pondering a big shift by making counsel a staff disciplinarian. He's also thinking about hiring a noted media expert to run communications operations and perhaps even a top-notch political adviser to prepare the White House for Clinton's re-election campaign.
Despite such changes, some of Clinton's advisers wonder if the new moves go far enough. For one thing, the rescue plan is being fashioned largely by domestic and political advisers, and it does not account for foreign-policy blowups that could occur in Haiti, Bosnia and other hot spots. Management of foreign policy, some advisers fear, remains myopic.
