The Clintons; Americans are still trying to figure them out and they're still learning basic lessons
by Kenneth T. Walsh, Matthew Cooper, Gloria Borger
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One year to the day after the Clinton era began, a top White House aide recalled one of the first dilemmas that confronted the new administration upon taking office. "We wondered what to call her," says the aide -- referring, of course, to the omnipresent Her in the White House, Hillary Rodham Clinton. "We thought `Mrs. Clinton' might sound sexist. `Ms. Clinton' didn't seem right. And anything with `Rodham Clinton' seemed way too clumsy." The solution is surprisingly informal: "We call her Hillary."
White House aides are not the only ones searching for the right words to describe this couple. At the dawn of the Clinton administration's second year, the rest of America is often baffled by the unique team in the White House. If anything, their bafflement may soon grow: The Clintons themselves have decided to change their public image. Heretofore, they've presented themselves as a team. "If you elect Bill," Mrs. Clinton bragged during the campaign, "you get me." But nowadays, it's clear they want the world to know that he is very much in charge; she handles specific assignments that he gives her.
One telling example of how eager she is to suppress the idea that she runs the ship of state: Last week, she agreed to consider an interview with U.S. News only on the condition that it be about health care and children's issues and only if this magazine agreed not to use her picture on the cover. U.S. News would not agree to those terms, and the interview was dropped. It was clear that her main purpose was to avoid being portrayed as copresident.
Well, is she? There is no Geiger counter that can measure her power, and it does not help, of course, that the quality of their marriage -- one in which he acknowledges causing pain -- is a topic that has become entangled in the world's examination of their work. That means there will always be an element of mystery about the state of their union. The president insists there is no copresidency. "I never said that," he told U.S. News. "Somebody else dreamed that up. There are big chunks of the presidency that she doesn't even comment on. And then when she does comment, I quite frankly like it. I like to discuss things with her, and even if sometimes we have good, healthy arguments, it's kind of a constructive thing."
What can be said after a year's worth of observation is that her unprecedented power is wielded both overtly in running the administration's massive health reform proposal and in less examined ways, from personnel decisions to crafting her husband's public image. The Clintons may not want to be judged as a team, but that probably is the standard they will have to live with.
Certainly, the public largely accepts the arrangement. A U.S. News poll finds that a majority of Americans approve of their work and a plurality say she has "the right amount" of power. Yet there are trouble signs. The Clintons have slipped measurably as role models in voters' minds. And the roller-coaster quality of the presidency dismays voters. Only last week, Bobby Ray Inman, citing conspiracies, withdrew his nomination as defense secretary (story, Page 48).
The uppermost question remains: How do they do things? Here are some answers:
Is she more liberal than he is? The perception of Washington insiders is that heis a moderate because he ran the centrist Democratic Leadership Council; she's a liberal who chaired the Children's Defense Fund. The president says this is nonsense. "It's just not accurate to portray her as somebody who is out there on the left wing of this administration," Clinton told U.S. News. Intimates agree that both are pragmatists. Bill Clinton is to the left of many of his DLC allies; his heart, for instance, is not in cutting the deficit, although political pressures have forced him to do so. Similarly, friends of Mrs. Clinton say that she was always a voice for pragmatism within the Children's Defense Fund.
When it comes to health reform, Mrs. Clinton has stood her ground against congressional liberals who want a Canadian-style single- payer system. "It won't work your way," she recently told a leading advocate of a single-payer plan. White House insiders say that she is ready to compromise on virtually all the elements of the Clinton health care plan that critics find too left leaning -- even on abortion funding. Still, partisan Republicans like Sen. Trent Lott figure she is a more hard-line ideologue than the president: "There's a feeling [on health care] that if it's Bill, we can cut a deal. If it's Hillary, we're not so sure."
Political positions aside, the Clintons do have indisputably different temperaments. "I would call him less focused and disciplined. She is very task oriented," says longtime aide Betsey Wright. The president's appetite for mastering all kinds of policy issues is legendary. Mrs. Clinton, on the other hand, has a short list of objectives -- health care reform, diversity in personnel appointments, children's issues -- that she wants done. When they deal with others, their approaches can sow confusion. The president, for example, thinks abstract arguments can convert his enemies, while the first lady is not above making blunt demands for support. And she goes ballistic about leaks. Last spring, she gathered aides from around the White House to warn them about discussing why the health plan had been delayed. White House officials say that Mrs. Clinton, far more than her husband, takes a quid pro quo approach to negotiation: "She won't give something up unless she gets something in return," says a senior adviser. The American people seem to understand this difference. Asked in the U.S. News poll which of the two is tougher, 55 percent said she was; only 25 percent named the president.
Mrs. Clinton rewards her friends and freezes out enemies. Last year, she asked aides to make sure the administration's allies in Congress were invited to private White House movie screenings and dinners on Friday nights. By contrast, according to one insider, the president had to be told repeatedly that he could not sweet- talk his way out of differences he had last year with conservative Sens. David Boren and Richard Shelby on budget issues. "He doesn't really acknowledge when somebody needs to be put in the enemy camp," the source says.
Sometimes the first lady's staff can go too far. When Rep. Dan Rostenkowski, the boss of the budget in the House, made a speech last year saying that the Clinton health plan would have to be trimmed, his staff got an earful from Mrs. Clinton's aides. One Rostenkowski staffer describes Mrs. Clinton's minions as "paranoids."
The Clintons' differences extend to personal habits, too. His meetings are dominated by aides "talking off the top of their heads"; hers are devoted to "solutions and proposals." It was her bias for crisp decisiveness that prompted one recent row with the staff. She was furious, one source reports, that top White House officials had not come up with a strategy for dealing with the first couple's growing problems with Whitewater. Eventually, both Clintons agreed to the appointment of an independent counsel, and last week, Attorney General Janet Reno appointed Robert Fiske, a former federal prosecutor, to the task.
What does she run? Definitely health care -- and on that issue, she weighs in on even the most minor details. When the National Health Care Campaign, the subsidiary of the Democratic National Committee that is promoting the White House's plan, produced a promotional videocassette, Mrs. Clinton dissected three versions of it before choosing the final one. She went line by line through the paperback book version of the health plan before signing off on it. And it was her idea -- spontaneously, aides say -- to go on the attack last November against the insurance industry. She got particularly steamed sitting in a car outside the hall wher
