Clinton Chances May Rest on Leadership Issue

Sen. Bob Dole travels to campaign stops these days aboard a sleek jet called Leader’s Ship, a name hardly chosen by accident.

In the election campaign now taking shape, Republicans intend to pound relentlessly at what they see as the contrast between Dole’s record of leadership and that of President Clinton. “It is the core issue of the campaign, even more than the obvious ideological ones,” said William Kristol, a GOP strategist.

But the White House is conceding nothing, ready to join the battle over a leadership record that has gone through regular redesign and retrofitting over the 38 months of Clinton’s term. Presidential aides hope to convince the public that signs of improvement at the White House should erase the memory of early blunders and wobbles, and that recent displays of deftness deserve to be classified as true leadership, not just simple partisan skill.

There’s plenty of room for debate. Clinton’s record is so varied that adversaries can acknowledge that the president is standing taller even while allies concede that the final proof of his strong helmsmanship is not yet in.

Sen. John B. Breaux, for example, a Louisiana Democrat and frequent Clinton ally, cites proofs of Clinton’s “strong leadership”--then adds that “I think he would agree that people still reserve their judgment of his first term.”

The complex contours of Clinton’s leadership were evident at the State of the Union address in January, a moment when he seemed to hold a grip on the nation’s direction as at few other times. He was routing the GOP assault on the federal budget, blunting its other priorities and guiding the nation in two risky and so-far successful peacekeeping missions.

He was in control, yet questions about his leadership were all too clear, for the speech was studded with touchstones of the GOP faith: Smaller government. Self-reliance. Family values.

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“He was winning the battle but only after allowing the other side to set the terms of the war,” said Michael Beschloss, a presidential historian.

The list of Clinton’s most glowing successes isn’t long: Clinton’s own aides and a consensus of outside analysts cite trade policy, Bosnia and Haiti. But among scholars, even tough critics allow that there have been some extenuating circumstances: Clinton came to the job when presidential power was in ebb (if only temporarily) because of the declining importance of foreign policy. He had a weak 43% mandate in his first half-term and faced a GOP-controlled Congress in his second.

Moreover, Clinton may have suffered from a certain lack of bad luck--an absence of the kind of crises that would allow him to prove his mettle.

“Good times are bad times for the exercise of presidential leadership,” said Ross K. Baker, a political scientist at Rutgers University.

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Clinton did get a break in the way the GOP revolution of 1994 allowed him to focus his strength against a clear objective--putting him in the kind of counterpunching situation where he has always done best. And the increased personal prominence of the GOP leadership--Dole, House Speaker Newt Gingrich of Georgia, House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas--helped by placing him in comparison with real people rather than pastel memories of a resolute Ronald Reagan, a charming John F. Kennedy and a persuasive Lyndon B. Johnson.

Presidents demonstrate leadership, according to one widely used definition, when they persuade a neutral or hostile public to take a risky course, then guide it to a conclusion: Franklin D. Roosevelt and World War II’s lend-lease. Ronald Reagan and the 1981 economic plan. George Bush and the Persian Gulf War.

But presidential undertakings are rarely such pure examples of skill and courage. Rather, they come in hugely varying proportions of those ingredients, as a look at Clinton’s record will show.

Trade: By general consensus, Clinton best demonstrated leadership skill by his successful advocacy of free trade. Candidate Clinton first rolled out his position at a potentially hostile forum: a Flint, Mich., union hall in 1992. He hedged slightly during the 1992 campaign, then successfully campaigned for the North American Free Trade Agreement and the revisions of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in the next two years, despite bitter dissent from union supporters and Democratic congressional leaders.

His advocacy did not generate a quick political payoff. Trade has won Clinton bouquets from the so-called opinion elite but has never yielded substantial political backing from its most immediate beneficiary: big business. At the same time, Clinton’s trade stance has continued to cause strains within his party.

Bosnia and Haiti: By sending U.S. troops on peacekeeping missions that so far have been at least limited successes, Clinton in 1995 moved these foreign policy issues from the “lose” to the “win” column, at least in political terms. The moves came after he endured two years of criticism for inept and indecisive policies.

To some extent, Clinton had little choice but to risk the peacekeeping deployments. Failing to do so in Bosnia risked rending the Western military alliance and undermining U.S. leadership; ignoring Haiti’s latest meltdown threatened to unleash a politically dangerous wave of immigration and the anger of black supporters. Yet Clinton did leap, and few would quarrel that his government showed skill in execution.

The administration would just as soon voters forget an earlier episode: the Somalia peacekeeping mission. There Clinton and his top aides appeared indecisive about the scope of a mission in which U.S. troops suffered a costly ambush that deepened Americans’ fears about adventures abroad.

Economic plan of 1993: In fighting for the five-year economic package, Clinton jettisoned his initial $30-billion package of “stimulus” spending and enraged Democratic allies in the House by asking them to cast politically risky votes for an energy tax, then discarding the measure in the Senate. Those leadership failures set a tone for relations with Capitol Hill that plagued Clinton until recently.

On the other side of the ledger, the plan began moving the country toward a lower federal budget deficit--something that had broad political support, at least in theory. After rising during the Bush years, the deficit has now come down from nearly $300 billion when Clinton took office to less than $150 billion. Clinton, in the face of unified opposition from the GOP, was willing to risk considerable political capital with the unpopular issue of raising taxes.

Budget battle of 1996: Clinton here found the vehicle of his own political rebirth. He risked public fury by allowing two government shutdowns. He gambled, correctly, that the public anger would focus on the Republican Congress, not on him. By not knuckling under to pressure to make a deal, Clinton showed the GOP leadership that they may have taken their claims about his vacillating character too much to heart.

Once again, Clinton’s actions demonstrated political control, but did they show leadership?

Clinton’s resolve came late in the game, after he shifted for months toward the GOP position. Clinton’s tactical position, defending the big-ticket automatic spending programs, was far easier to prosecute than the GOP’s frontal assault on them. And the White House ended up not with fundamental reform of entitlement programs but with a budget-balancing proposal that his 1992 primary foe, former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas, derides as “front-loaded with joy, back-loaded with pain to be inflicted when he’s gone.”

“This was leadership in a very narrow sense,” Beschloss said.

Health care: The signature effort of the Clinton administration looks in hindsight to have been a case of courage outstripping judgment.

The health care crusade saw the White House take on some of the most powerful interest groups, which unfortunately for Clinton came to include many average Americans who feared its effects on their private insurance. Some analysts believe that the bungling of the issue may ultimately delay a restructuring. And pollsters say it is one of the few Clinton policy efforts that many Americans remember.

Gays in the military: Clinton’s effort to ease the treatment of gay men and lesbians by the armed services gained little for homosexuals in the ranks and few points for him with his gay supporters in civilian life.

“This was guts, yes, but leadership isn’t just blindly looking for conflict,” said Charles O. Jones, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin.

Political reform: In the grand reckoning, Clinton must also be held to account for battles he chose not to fight. Privately, some officials in the administration still lament that Clinton followed the advice of top congressional Democrats to hold back on campaign finance and lobby reform, in hopes of holding Democrats on their side in other fights.

Judgments about presidential leadership hinge on style as well as accomplishment. Even detractors acknowledge that Clinton has shown progress in managing his office and curtailing his much-noted habits of publicly vacillating, thinking aloud in front of cameras and delaying decisions.

Still, Clinton struggles with his demons. Last October, Clinton began confessing to crowds that he regretted raising taxes of the rich, and he acknowledged to writer Ben Wattenberg his dissatisfaction with his welfare plan. “It was repositioning,” sighed one administration official, “but it was so clumsily done.”

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Personnel decisions occasionally jam the machinery. These days he is agonizing over the choice of a campaign manager. Dick Morris, Clinton’s outside political guru, wants to install a figure of like mind, rather than leading candidate Kevin Thurm, who is a top official at the Department of Health and Human Services and an ally of Deputy Chief of Staff Harold M. Ickes.

What does all this add up to?

As the general campaign begins, polls indicate that the public so far has a fairly hazy idea of what Clinton’s specific accomplishments might be. At the same time, a Gallup poll released this month showed 48% of the public consider him a “strong leader,” up from 40% two years ago.

But Kristol, the Republican strategist, says Clinton’s job approval rating from just over half of the public suggests that on leadership he is now just ever so slightly over the line of acceptability.

“If people look at him on TV in October and think it would be depressing to have him for president, he’s in trouble. If they see him as not even great but OK, and protecting us from an extreme Congress, then he’s reelected.”