By Kenneth T. Walsh; Matthew Cooper; Jerelyn Eddings; Paul Glastris; Jim Impoco; Missy Daniel
President Clinton's peace mission to the Middle East last week did not impress Bob Tetreault. The Framingham, Mass., electronics technician says nothing can change the fact that Clinton is weak, liberal and untrustworthy. "His budget spends more than it takes in," says Tetreault, 38, a political independent who supported George Bush in 1992. "Health care reform would have bankrupted the country, and the military is at half strength." More important, adds Tetreault, "You can't trust anything the fellow says. He's got a reputation as a liar."
Other presidents have attracted plenty of antipathy. The gangly Abraham Lincoln was compared to an ape, Americans mocked Herbert Hoover's promise that prosperity was just around the corner, and a famous New Yorker cartoon showed a group of fur- draped swells heading for a Trans-Lux theater to hiss Franklin Roosevelt. The Vietnam War cost Lyndon Johnson his presidency and his reputation; Watergate sent Richard Nixon to his helicopter in disgrace.
New index. But Bill Clinton's America is the world's lone superpower; it is at peace, and its economy, if not thriving, is at least growing. Even so, a new U.S. News poll shows that while Clinton's approval rating has rebounded a bit to 48 percent, he still has a serious problem. An unprecedented index of voter attitudes toward him was derived from five questions in the poll: favorability, job approval, performance on the economy and on foreign affairs and whether he should be re-elected. It reveals that fully 20 percent of the nation's voters fall into the category "Clinton haters," 25 percent dislike him and 17 percent have mixed feelings. Clinton can count only 14 percent of the electorate as "Clinton lovers" and 24 percent more as "likers."
The news is not all bad for the White House. Congress is also held in low esteem, and no potential Republican candidate for president, such as Sen. Bob Dole, inspires much enthusiasm. And 52 percent of voters now say they approve of Clinton's handling of foreign affairs -- previously a big liability.
But voters don't care much about foreign policy, and they still fault Clinton's handling of domestic issues. Only 44 percent approve of his management of the economy; only 39 percent say he has helped reduce crime and illegal drug use -- two raging concerns. And no policy success is likely to change the minds of the Clinton haters. "Clinton has carried a permanent negative with him throughout his term in office," says Democratic pollster Celinda Lake, who conducted the survey with Republican Ed Goeas. "That [negative] group has had an intensity and verbalization few presidents have seen."
Some of the anger at Clinton is ideological, fueled by the perception that he is a big-spending liberal. What's new is that much of it is intensely personal, fueled by the belief that the president is a libertine and a liar. House Republican leader-in- waiting Newt Gingrich of Georgia has dubbed Clinton Democrats "the enemy ofnormal Americans," citing Clinton appointees Roberta Achtenberg of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, who is a lesbian, and Surgeon General Joycelyn Elders, who has advocated widespread sex education. The most virulent Clinton haters charge that Hillary Rodham Clinton holds the real power and blackmails her husband.
Ironically, says historian Doris Kearns Goodwin, Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt, rarely criticized as being out of the cultural mainstream, led a more libertine life in the White House than do the Clintons. FDR had an affair with Eleanor's social secretary, Lucy Mercer, and Mrs. Roosevelt had a deeply emotional relationship with journalist Lorena Hickok. But the ethos of the age protected the Roosevelts, says Goodwin, just as it lat-er protected John Kennedy, whose sexual adventures never made the newspapers. Today even unprovable assertions -- such as those leveled by Paula Corbin Jones in her sexual harassment suit against the president -- become major news.
The network. The attacks on Clinton also are amplified by an organized, technologically well-armed network of conservatives and Clinton haters who range from Arkansas businessman Cliff Jackson and televangelist Pat Robertson to talk-show host Rush Limbaugh. "Limbaugh is the spokesman for those of us who feel Clinton was suspicious to begin with and is becoming more so as scandals arise to show the defects in his character," says Ed Barber, the owner of Red's Seafood Restaurant in West Coxsackie, N.Y. The circulation of Slick Times, a publication that ridicules the Clintons, has grown from 12,000 to 125,000 in the past two years. "It was clearly a class-bound hatred for Roosevelt," says Goodwin. "With Clinton it's widespread and more coordinated."
But in some respects the president is his own worst enemy. His reputation as a waffler who tried marijuana but "didn't inhale," a dissembler who avoided the draft and a womanizer has made it easy to demonize him. Jack Woodyard, 71, who owns an industrial supply shop in Pittsburg, Calif., about an hour from San Francisco, voted Democratic all his life -- until Clinton ran for president. "It was a trust thing with me," says Woodyard. "I just felt he was lying about the draft and about the pot smoking." Drew Porter, an insurance broker in Montgomery, Ala., sums up the feelings of many Clinton detractors: "Bad rumors don't tend to follow good people."
Colleen Casey, a 34-year-old San Francisco lawyer and Republican, is disappointed that Clinton does not act more presidential. "He doesn't respect the office of the presidency and if he doesn't respect it, then how are world leaders expected to do so?" she asks. "He has to stop eating at McDonald's and telling interviewers what kind of underpants he's got on. I want a president I can respect." Adds Evan Davis, a bartender in Akron, Ohio: "I don't think anyone in the world respects us because of him."
"The visceral opposition to Bill Clinton is free-floating, not moored in ideology," says political scientist Stephen Hess of the Brookings Institution. "People who dislike him may actually agree with him on issues if they bothered to listen to him. It has to do with lifestyle issues, with the vibes he gives off."
Even good-natured comics such as Jay Leno, the host of NBC's "Tonight Show," find Clinton an irresistible target. Over the years, Leno told U.S. News, political humor has grown cruder as the population has grown more cynical, and Clinton bears the resulting burden of ridicule. "You have someone who is young, attractive and has sex appeal," Leno says. "Anytime it involves money or sex, there's great comedy there."
Joking matters. Leno argues that Clinton jokes would not work unless Americans had serious doubts about their leader. "You don't change anybody's mind with comedy," Leno says. "You just reinforce what they already believe." Leno often combines two themes sure to produce laughs: jokes about Clinton's undignified appearance and his image as untrustworthy. On his October 18 show, Leno said: "Yesterday, while Bill Clinton was shaking hands ... one of the kids said, `Boy, you have a big nose.' ... That kid thinks it's big now -- wait until he starts campaigning for re-election."
Clinton's propensity to overpromise and his eagerness to please have made matters worse. What most bothers 18 percent of the voters in the U.S. News poll is that he has not accomplished very much. Meanwhile, his readiness to compromise has eroded his image as a leader and branded him a typical politician. "I think Clinton might have been a good president if he didn't try to please everyone all the time," says Stuart Hennessey, 30, of Akron. "He's changed his policy on Haiti so many times. He punched Bush so many times on his stand on China, then he took human rights out of the trade agreement, which I thought was disgusting. He told homosexuals he'd put them in the military and then he didn't."
