Chapter 1 : Part 2

The Natural: The Misunderstood Presidency of Bill Clinton
by Joe Klein

(Page 2 of 2)

Happily, Clinton seemed to be able to float above the barrage - he was the world's biggest, fattest target, but somehow managed to keep himself impervious to assault. As a public performer, he was mesmerizing, maddening, transcendent. He dominated a brutal political landscape so completely as to make my ideological quibbles appear foolish; and his more serious political opponents were continually frustrated by his buoyancy and appalled by his effulgent appetites - perhaps I should put "appalled" in quotation marks, given the hypocrisy of their dismay (especially when it came to adultery, which, during the Clinton years, proved a pastime that merrily transcended partisan boundaries). To judge from Clinton's consistently high approval ratings in the polls, the public was more tolerant - and, perhaps, secretly enjoyed - these unruly passions.

I'd first met Bill Clinton at a meeting of the Democratic Leadership Council in Philadelphia, in 1989. We were introduced by Al From, the president of the DLC, who hooked a thumb in Clinton's direction and said, "This guy delivers our message better than any other politician."

The Democratic Leadership Council had been formed in 1985, as a moderate, mostly Southern response to the leftward rush - and attendant electoral failures - of the Democratic Party since the 1960s. There was a fair amount of skepticism among mainstream (read: liberal) Democrats about the DLC, whose early meetings were notable mostly for the number of corporate lobbyists in attendance. The group was derided as the "Southern White Boys," or, in Jesse Jackson's phrase, "Democrats for the Leisure Class." The inference was that these were Democrats who were uncomfortable with the politically inconvenient, but profoundly moral, decision their party had made to embrace the civil rights and antiwar movements in the 1960s, a time when the Republicans had successfully - and not very subtly - launched a "Southern strategy" designed to cultivate the region's white majority. (As a result, the Democrats had lost the South in every presidential election since 1964 - except for Jimmy Carter's 1976 victory - and, with the advent of Ronald Reagan, they had begun to lose the white, blue-collar vote in the rest of the country as well.)

By the mid-1980s, the Democrats seemed permanently boggled. The moderates in the party were held hostage by a cornucopia of special interest groups (feminists, minorities, environmentalists, trade unionists) who seemed more concerned with the purity of their causes than with winning elections. There was an intellectual sclerosis as well. The most vocal activists on the left tended to blame "society" - which really meant the free market system - for the rapidly rising crime rate and for a relatively new, stubbornly persistent form of intergenerational poverty, which was marked by out-of-wedlock births and welfare dependency. Indeed, many liberal Democrats refused to acknowledge - or worse, dismissed as "racist" - the tidal wave of sociological research that proved, as Daniel Patrick Moynihan had first observed in 1965, that the disintegration of the two-parent family in poor African-American neighborhoods was having vast social consequences: that children born to single mothers were far more likely to drop out of school, to use drugs, to commit crimes, and to become single parents themselves than were children born into households where a father and mother were both present. Anyone who suggested that poor people might have a better chance to succeed if they behaved more responsibly was said to be "blaming the victim." At its worst, this witless, reflexive, and utterly condescending tendency held the poor to a lower standard of morality than the rest of society and expanded the definition of "victimhood" to include most criminals.

The Democrats also suffered from a near-absolute belief in the immorality of almost every sort of American military activity abroad in the post-Vietnam era, from the placing of Pershing missiles in Europe to various (in fairness, almost always dubious and very often criminal) crusades against indigenous villains in Latin America to the prosecution of the Gulf War. And finally, at a time when government had lost credibility and was beset by enormous budget deficits, the Democrats were, proudly, the party of government. The largest, most powerful factions in the party were the public employees unions, particularly the teachers unions (who had come to represent the single largest bloc of delegates at the quadrennial Democratic Party nominating convention). "We're the party of teachers," a frustrated Al From said at the end of the futile Dukakis campaign for the presidency in 1988, "when we should be the party of education."

And so, there came to be a yearning among many Democrats, even non-Southerners, for a less precious party. Traditional liberalism seemed stale, elitist, and, in many of its social and foreign policy nostrums, just plain wrong. The conservatives, who had built vast think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and the American Enterprise Institute, were quicker, fresher, and more confident in debate; often, they seemed more interested in new ideas than the Democrats did (the Heritage Foundation, for example, had developed an ideologically counterintuitive proposal for universal health insurance - a voucher plan funded by a progressive tax on wealthier Americans) Al From was jealous. He believed that the only way to reinvigorate the Democratic Party was to reinvent liberalism; he was very much in the market for new ideas and new leaders. He longed for a Heritage-style operation and, in 1989, the Democratic Leadership Council launched a small think tank called the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI). This turned out to be From's second most important initiative that year: The first was to recruit Bill Clinton to become the chairman of the DLC.

In April 1989, From went to Little Rock and offered Clinton the job. There followed a halting, anguished mating ritual of the sort that has now become Bill Clinton's signature in both life and politics. The governor seemed to love the idea, but . . . he didn't quite accept the post. Months passed and From grew impatient. He saw Clinton again in the autumn and then again at the National Governors Conference in February 1990. There was still no firm commitment. "What's going on?" From fumed. "You said you were going to do it. Well, are you or aren't you?"

"I've got a big decision to make," Clinton told him. "I've got to decide whether I'm going to run for governor again. If I don't do it, I'm going to have to figure out some way to make $100,000 a year to support my family."

"I said to him, 'You stupid son-of-a-bitch, I'll pay you $100,000 right now to be chairman of the DLC,' " From later recalled, with a laugh. "That's why I never believed he was money-corrupt during the Whitewater business - the guy had no sense of his own worth."

In time, Clinton chose to do both: He ran for reelection as governor and became chairman of the DLC (without pay). But one sensed a reluctance on Clinton's part to identify himself so closely with one wing of the Democratic Party; his ties to the liberals were older, and just as deep - he'd run Texas for George McGovern's presidential campaign in 1972 and he included old friends like the liberal political scientist, Robert Reich, then of Harvard, and Marion Wright Edelman of the Children's Defense Fund, among his closest advisors. McGovern himself went so far, early in the 1992 campaign, as to describe the Clinton's New Democratic project as a liberal "Trojan horse."

Copyright © 2002 by Joe Klein.

About the Author

Joe Klein, a journalist for nearly three decades, is currently Washington correspondent for The New Yorker. In addition to Primary Colors, his previous books include Payback: Five Marines After Vietnam and Woody Guthrie: A Life.