The Senate welfare bill, which Clinton has warmly endorsed, is, says Sen. Pat Moynihan, “an obscene act of social regression.” Charging that the administration has suppressed a study showing that more than a million children would fall into poverty as a result of the bill (which is marginally less severe than the House bill), Moynihan says with icy fury, “Just how many infants we will put to the sword is not yet clear. There is dickering to do . . . Those involved will take this disgrace to their graves. The children alone are innocent.” Columnist Murray Kempton once wrote that the absence of honest passion is the distinguishing feature of professional wrestling and American politics. Not anymore.
As Washington braces for the climactic battle over the budget, passions range from exhilaration, tinged with anxiety, on the Republican side, to rage among Democrats. Their reserves of rage are almost depleted because they are directed at both Republican measures and Clinton’s character. Today’s bipartisan consensus is that Clinton is neither bad nor dangerous, just silly, Plainly put almost no one thinks he believes a word he says. Or, more precisely, he believes everything he says at the moment he emphatically says it, and continues to believe it at full throttle right up to the moment he repudiates it. He has the weird sincerity of the intellectual sociopath, convinced that when he speaks, truth is an option but convenience is an imperative.
As of Saturday, Clinton aides said he was “rethinking” his support for the Senate welfare bill. Of course. By now few know, or much care, what he means when he says Republicans must change their budget priorities before he can deal with them. They propose to balance the budget in 7 years, as opposed to the 5 years he proposed in 1992 or the 10 years, and then 9 years, and then 7 years he has called feasible. Republicans want to cut taxes and he says he does, too, but differently. They favor a $500-per-child tax credit; he used to favor an $800 credit. They favor cutting the capital gains tax; so, suddenly, does he, but differently, details to follow, someday. They favor limiting the growth of Medicare; so does he, but not as much. This man with a political menu featuring principles du jour says his promised veto of the Republican budget will be a matter of principle.
Does this garrulous man have any idea how much he has debased the currency of presidential rhetoric? He has done so partly in the way a currency usually is debased: simply by producing too much of it. De Gaulle said Bismarck was a great man because he knew when to stop. One reason Clinton cannot be even adequate is that he cannot keep quiet.
Carol Gelderman, professor at the University of New Orleans, writing in The Wilson Quarterly, says most recent presidents “have been loquacious to a fault.” Clinton has broken the record for wretched excess. Gelderman writes that Gerald Ford, whom no one ever called Periclean, delivered a speech on average every six hours during the election year of 1976 (including such things as press conference announcements as well as formal speeches). Jimmy Carter stepped up the pace, addressing his countrymen often enough to add 9,873 single-spaced pages to the Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States. Ronald Reagan, who understood that rationing something increases its value, spoke less frequently han Carter but still increased the bulk of presidential papers by an additional 13,000 pages over two terms. Clinton, in his first year as president, spoke publicly three times as often as Reagan did in his first year.
Even before Clinton’s recent run of half-baked strategies and quarter-baked thoughts, he had become an object of ridicule even among semi-friends. Six months ago The New Republic ran this parody of his penchant for musing aloud:
“The Republicans call for legal reform. I totally oppose this. Well, maybe ’totally’ is strong and I guess I went overboard on ‘oppose,’ but may I make a tiny suggestion” I don’t just want legal reform, I want middle-class legal reform. In particular, I want to restrict how many lawsuits can be brought against one guy who gets up every day to do the hard work of change and then can’t finish his third plate of waffles before some gold-digging bimbo brings charges of sexual harassment against him even though it was obvious to any trooper in the room that she wanted it as much as he did."
Sen. Paul Wellstone, an exuberantly liberal Minnesota Democrat, says the coming budget battle will be “a really existential moment” for Clinton. Actually, every moment is an existential moment for Clinton, who is passionate about whatever he is passionate about at the moment. The Book of Genesis saw him coming: “Unstable as water, thou shalt not excel.” For Clinton, excelling is out of the question, but survival is not. His hope, and that of congressional Democrats, is that Republicans will come a cropper next year because this year they are not heeding polls that show rising anxiety about budget cuts. Whether or not that comes to pass, and regardless of what one thinks about what the Republicans are doing, it is bracing to have the dominant force in Washington faulted for insufficient reverence for the most recent poll results.
Republicans at the end of their year of living dangerously ar not hearing many cheers, but they can take comfort from the axiom that applause usually is the echo of a platitude. Clinton can take comfort from the axiom that success is relative: it is making something of the mess one has made of things. But before he can regain a modicum of respect he must stop seeming to be a miser of accuracy–someone who so treasures the truth that he expends it sparingly.
