By Kenneth T. Walsh; Gloria Borger; Ted Gest; Steven V. Roberts
Bill Clinton saw the disaster coming. While his advisers assured him that the House was moving inexorably toward passage of a $33 billion anticrime bill last week, the president started having strong doubts as he lobbied legislators one by one. The House members were polite, but the president's persuasive skills were having little or no effect. Even when Clinton used a central political argument -- that passage would be essential to Democratic success in the November elections -- there was little reaction. "No one was budging," says a senior White House adviser. "While everyone around here was saying the bill was going to slip through, the president was getting more and more pessimistic." In the end, Clinton's fears were well founded: The bill went down to defeat on a procedural motion. Most important, he was powerless to keep the disaster from happening.
That, of course, is the problem. Clinton has become so politically weak that even the most popular and important initiatives on his agenda, especially the crime bill and health care reform, now seem to be in jeopardy. He suddenly finds Democrats at war with themselves, Republicans emboldened to defy him without qualm and new doubts being raised about his ability to lead. And the broader question, with the Democrats in control of both the White House and Congress, is whether the president's party can effectively govern the nation.
Democratic congressional leaders and some White House strategists are worried that the voters might conclude that the answer is no. And as many of them see it, the problem isn't hard to find: It sits prominently in the Oval Office. "We're flying without a pilot," says one congressional Democrat. "There's an instrument panel, but we're not sure we know how to use it."
True, there have been successes, such as passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement, a variety of modest social programs such as national service and family leave and substantial cuts in the federal deficit. But despite Clinton's promises to change Washington's political culture, the bickering has continued and the decision-making process, both in the White House and on Capitol Hill, has been extraordinarily messy. Polls show that Americans do not believe either Clinton or his party has had any positive impact on their lives. Not even improvements in the economy have increased voter approval of the president or the Democrats. "Now we're at a break point," says a senior Clinton adviser. "Voters will say, if they can't pass a crime bill in Washington, what can they do?"
Shifting blame. Good question. And Clinton, clearly aware that his presidency is imperiled, is frantically trying both to shift blame and to revive some form of crime legislation as quickly as possible. Noting that crime is the country's No. 1 worry, he declared, "If we can't meet this concern, there is something badly wrong in Washington." The morning after the bill's defeat, Majority Leader Richard Gephardt promised House Democrats that they would try again to pass a measure this week. "You want us to be leaders?" he asked his troops. "We need followers." This time, it is likely that the Democrats, fearing voter retribution, will get the job done, at least in some fashion.
At minimum, Democratic leaders are likely to win approval in separate legislation for some of the original crime bill's most popular provisions, including a $2.4 billion down payment next year on a plan to put 100,000 more law officers on the street and enact other anticrime programs. Less clear are prospects for the original bill's ban on assault weapons, more than $7 billion in new spending on crime prevention -- including a major Violence Against Women Act -- and several dozen new federal death penalties. But it is also possible that enough House members, including several members of the black caucus, will swallow their objections to the death-penalty provisions absent a "racial justice" clause to ensure passage of the original measure.
Yet, in Washington's increasingly vitriolic atmosphere, none of this is guaranteed. The day after the crime bill failed on a 225-to-210 vote, Senate Minority Leader Bob Dole and House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich sent Clinton a letter offering to negotiate a new bill. But the president refused. White House aides explained that the Republicans had tried to embarrass the president by withholding support for the first measure and Clinton would not make any deals with them now. The exchange demonstrated the depth of partisan bitterness.
Yet partisanship alone cannot explain the crime bill's failure. The administration's political miscalculations were remarkably inept. Perhaps most important, the White House and its congressional allies rushed to vote on the bill without an assurance of victory. The reason, according to a lobbyist who favored the bill: White House strategists thought they were losing momentum to the National Rifle Association and needed to move as quickly as possible for a vote to stop the hemorrhage.
There was no doubt that the NRA, stung by the House's earlier adoption of a ban on 19 types of "assault weapons," was lobbying furiously to kill the bill. But the White House miscalculated in relying on the same strategy it had used in other crucial votes during Clinton's presidency: The count would be so close that last-minute appeals would put the bill over the top. "They thought that members would stop posturing and support them with the chips down," said another backer of the bill. Instead, several "sure" votes evaporated, including that of Democrat John Lewis of Georgia. "The real killer was the votes Clinton didn't get from members of the Congressional Black Caucus," another lobbyist reported. And Clinton stalwarts like Indiana's Lee Hamilton deserted him, as well. A big problem was that Clinton was neither feared nor respected enough to win over the eight votes he needed for a victory.
The health care fallout. Clinton's inability to lead and the growing partisan bitterness could easily torpedo health care reform, the top domestic initiative of both the president and Hillary Rodham Clinton. After the setback to the crime bill, House Speaker Tom Foley indefinitely postponed consideration of health care, leaving the Senate to take the lead. Prospects remain unclear, but Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell is having great difficulty mustering support for provisions requiring employers to pay for a substantial portion of their employees' health insurance. Without those "employer mandates," health care is likely to die in the House. And every Democratic strategist knows that if the president loses his health care initiative, he will be in an extremely weak position as he begins the second half of his term.
For his part, Clinton's first reaction after the defeat of the crime bill was to go on the attack -- focusing much of his outrage on the NRA for using a procedural "trick" to kill the measure. And in a strong if indirect attack on fellow Democrats, he berated Congress itself. "Because of organized, intense and highly political pressure, a majority walked away -- away from the police patrolling our streets, away from the children and the senior citizens afraid to walk on those streets," Clintondeclared in front of a phalanx of uniformed officers at the National Association of Police Officers in Minneapolis -- a speech quickly scheduled by his handlers in the wake of the crime-bill defeat.
Outsider image. His more conservative advisers welcomed his new get-tough attitude, arguing that Clinton needed to distance himself from the Washington Establishment and congressional insiders. The problem is that no one can be sure if Clinton will stay the course. He tells some friends that he needs to work with congressional leaders to win approval for legislation but informs others that he still wants the image of a Washington outsider. This split political personality is part of his overall problem: a failure to clarify what he stands for
