A frightening thought, given the cast of characters. But optimism is nice in a presidency. And anyway, it’s fall. Bill Clinton’s pattern, in this highly seasonal presidency, has been to rally in autumn. Last year’s version – passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), passage of the Brady bill, the Memphis speech on race relations – gave hope that the president had finally figured out the job. “People liked the fact that NAFTA passed, even though they disagreed with the specifics,” said Stan Greenberg, Clinton’s pollster. “They liked the bipartisan-ship, the feeling that progress was being made.” Somehow the lesson failed to penetrate the White House. The health-care strategy was fiercely – witlessly – partisan, and ultimately disastrous.
So, now: bipartisanship – but a season late, one suspects. With an electoral thrashing imminent for the Democrats, there’s no percentage in cooperation, even for the high-minded sort of Republicans Clinton hopes to recruit. Anyway, bipartisanship to what end? In the president’s mind, the goal remains the same: to add more govern-ment. This has been a fundamental miscalculation of the Clinton administration, a failure of vision – the idea that activism in the 1990s is essentially a reprise of the activism of the 1930s and 1960s: the perfec-tion of the welfare state, the further aggrandizement of the federal government. The president has looked to the past for activist models, rather than creating a new one of his own. The passage of the crime bill may prove to be the last gasp of the old order: a federalization, largely symbolic, of functions best left to localities.
If there’s new ground to be broken in the 1990s, it may have more to do with subtraction than addition. Activism in this scared, skeptical time is about “cleaning out the barn,” as the Mad Perot used to say, clearing away layers of regulation and bureaucracy. It’s about how government works. The president, one senses, understands this – but doesn’t like it much. He sent the vice president off to “reinvent government” and this week they’ll celebrate the first anniversary of that effort – which has been a surprising and substantive success – and then he’ll forget about it again, no doubt devoting all his attention to replacing right-wing thugs in Haiti with left-wing thugs, and the futile effort to pass a “bipartisan” health bill that means anything.
Success, if Clinton is to find any, lies elsewhere. It will come from improving the things government does now, or eliminating them. An example: Labor Secretary Bob Reich spent a year – admirably – going around the country, asking unemployed workers what they wanted from the U.S. Employment Service. The answer was: something other than the Employment Service. They laughed about the Employment Service. When the subject was raised in focus groups, someone would – inevitably, perfectly – imitate the mating call of the American bureaucrat, “Next!” And everyone would hoot. So Reich came up with a plan to allow private employment agencies to compete – tentatively, in a few states – against government agencies. A great idea, quickly trashed. It was killed in congressional committee by organized labor (which represents public employees). A “Clinton” re-employment bill still exists: it would pump more money into a failed bureaucracy. Real activism would require the president to fight the unions and give unemployed workers a service they might find useful. Will he do it? He hasn’t so far.
Similar opportunities abound throughout the federal plantation – and a much larger opportunity as well: restoration of faith in government, and perhaps even in Bill Clinton. The conventional argument against such a strategy is that fierce battles would be fought, great gobs of political capital would be spent and no one would care (except the special interests involved, who would make every battle Armageddon). But then, the television magazine and evening news shows are filled with bureaucratic tidbits and outrages – chicken-feces stories, literally; the public appetite for this stuff is apparently limitless. There might also be a substantial appetite for a president who hacked away at practical problems – rationalizing Medicaid, cleaning up (or closing down) veterans hospitals, finding out what all those folks are doing at the Department of Agriculture, and on and on.
Leadership is about more than good management, of course; but for this president, management may be the place to begin rebuilding trust. It isn’t a very sexy project – there’d be none of the heavy breathing that has attended other Clinton initiatives – but these aren’t sexy times. The public has come to mistrust grand schemes and lofty rhetoric. Lines like “the toughest attack on crime in history” clank dreadfully; they diminish credibility. Gimmicks like a middle-class tax cut – floated again last week – only seem desperate. An emphasis on the nuts and bolts of governance might, however, impose a certain discipline (on Republicans as well, who’d finally have to put up or shut up). It would be serious, sober – eloquent in its modesty. It might force the president to find a more competent team, to speak more plainly, to appear less callow. Maybe even presidential.
