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With the apparent failure of the Clinton administration -- a condition which became poignantly manifest in the message sent by the American electorate last November 8 -- attention once again is focused on gridlock between the president and Congress. Exit polls indicated clearly that the strength of voters' swing toward the Republicans derived significantly from the depth of their repudiation of the president. Yet if this were a football game, we would only be in the third quarter, and it remains to be seen whether the Republicans will succumb to the dysfunctions of gridlock. If they do, a significant proportion of the electorate, feeling that the options served up by the Democrats and Republicans fall short, will once again prove susceptible to a Perot-like candidate.
In 1992, Bill Clinton stanched the hemorrhaging of traditional Democrats from their party. Many voters remained so unhappy about the state of American politics, however, that they supported neither the Democrats nor the Republicans. This presented Clinton with a dilemma. He could shore up his Democratic Party base by pursuing policies which would restore the confidence of traditional Democrats. Or he could advance the centrist policies of the New Democrats -- those whose economic-circumstance personae had burst out of more modest britches of their social origins.
One could have hoped that Clinton would have aptly bridged the two approaches of reassuring labor and visible minorities with measured legislative initiatives while easing the party toward the center. Instead, he lunged from one extreme to the other. After months of ponderous groupthink, his administration presented a health-care reform proposal which would have made 19th-century utopians look like steely realists. To Clinton, bipartisanship amounted to rechristening Republican policies as "Democratic." He humiliated labor with a confrontation over the North American Free Trade Agreement -- a retreaded Bush initiative which failed even to attract a majority of Democratic votes in the House of Representatives. NAFTA, with the collapse of the peso and the consequences for the dollar, has developed into a major fiasco. Clinton's crime bill included the draconian provision that those receiving a third conviction for a violent felony will be locked away for life. The provision was stiffly resisted by the Congressional Black Caucus for being palpably racist.
Clinton has deeply alienated the core constituencies of the Democratic Party. November's election results also suggest that he has proven an abysmal failure at attracting the center into the party. He faces a horrific two years. Even if he continues to talk nonstop with little effort to censor his words or reflect upon their consequences, he will surely soon come to the realization that nobody is listening. Why should they?
The dire circumstances currently facing the administration might prompt many observers to ask what Clinton could have done differently -- especially in setting his priorities and organizing his administration. Clinton's White House was neither completely amorphous nor entirely porous when he assumed office. Further, the administration has made several efforts, some of which have achieved good results, at improving the structure and operation of the White House.
We must then entertain three other possibilities: (a) Bill Clinton pathologically lacks an ability to connect with organizational structure, (b) the degree of gridlock has reached the point where any incumbent -- independent of personal style and the organization of his White House -- would encounter frustrations of the kind currently being experienced by the president or, (c) that the administration has succumbed to a combination of these afflictions. A closer look suggests the last of the three.
To be sure, the 1992 presidential race proved to be the gridlock campaign. It was the first election in this century in which the very capacity of the system to perform became a core issue. Now continued frustrations with spasmodic governance in Washington have led to a debacle for the Democrats -- the first Republican-dominated Congress since 1947-49. If you liked gridlock when the Republicans controlled the presidency and the Democrats controlled the Congress, you will love it now that it is the other way around.
During the 1992 campaign, there were those who faulted the Democratic Congress for the gridlock. George Bush pushed this interpretation. If voters would only elect a Republican Congress, all of their problems would go away. There were other people who said that George Bush had caused the gridlock and that if the election produced a Democratic president, finally the nation could address its ills. Actually, the 1992 results produced a 43 percent plurality to support this view -- a victory for the Democrats which Clinton construed as a mandate.
More significantly, a fairly substantial segment of the population -- 19 percent who voted for Ross Perot -- abandoned hope in either the Republicans or Democrats. This mood swing proved almost unique to the 1992 election. The degree to which people had become concerned about general paralysis within the system gave an unprecedented profile to the dysfunctions of divided government.
Obviously, many Americans had become greatly concerned with the constant struggle between the president and Congress. Their anxieties focused on the incapacity of the system, when dominated by the two conventional parties, to handle many of the key problems that America faces today. From the fears about gridlock there emerged what a good many observers viewed as a fanciful and dangerous idea. Many voters began to see the way around gridlock as going directly to the people -- through the type of electronic "town-hall" democracy which Ross Perot utilized so effectively.
We might ask, "Why not go to electronic voter-participation in specific decisions?" For at least a decade, presidency scholars have written about a post-modern presidency -- one that is less reliant upon links to institutional power bases among interest groups and Congress. And, incumbents increasingly went "public" with direct appeals to voters -- going over the heads of traditional loci of power. The Perot approach flew in the face of a constitutional heritage which for over 200 years had deliberately eschewed majoritarianism and populism.
At the outset of his administration, Clinton made numerous mistakes. Before the inauguration, he identified several areas in which the administration would act quickly to break the deadlock surrounding resolution of some of America's greatest ills. This ignited a first-100-days syndrome -- the last thing any president would want in the current condition of the U.S. political system. Immediately following the inauguration, the administration lost valuable time by tripping and stumbling out of the gate. It began to look as if it would not make it through the first 100 hours much less get its ambitious program on track in the first 100 days.
The worst move came as pundits prepared their evaluations of progress at the administration's 100-day mark. Clinton and his closest advisers tried to pin their lack of progress on gridlock between themselves and Congress, making Democrats their targets as much as Republicans. This telegraphed the message that not even a Democratic president and Congress can overcome gridlock -- music to Republican and Perot supporters across the land.
In his more focused moments, Bill Clinton had struck observers as a president potentially like FDR. Certainly, scenes of Clinton mounting his Marine helicopter with a biography of FDR in hand would support the view that he harbored such hopes. In fact, however, Clinton operated much more as a "let's deal" president, one who recognized that no matter what the ills calling out for treatment, the politics of the time could only sustain incremental change at the margins. This is a viable form of leadership and indeed might be the most appropriate to this particular age even if it clearly doesn't measure up to an FDR image.
There are at least two problems in evaluating how suited Bill Clinton is to a "let's deal" mode of leadership. The first of these relates to the art of the possible in the age of constricting views of what the government should do. When asked during the campaign what his favorite scripture passage was, Clinton cited Galatians 6:9: ''Let us not grow weary while doing good for in due season we shall reap, but do not lose heart.'' When he lost his first re-election bid in Arkansas, Clinton recognized, insofar as "doing good" meant pursuing a liberal agenda, that discretion was the better part of valor. Some profiles of his past indeed suggest that the exigencies of Arkansas politics gave him an exceptionally high tolerance for compromise -- and even moral and ethical ambiguity -- while professing to pursue noble objectives.
Yet, it can be believed, that Clinton wants to change the circumstances of the average American for the good. He has found, therefore, that slimming down government or embracing economic policies which cater to the bond markets is extremely frustrating.
The other difficulty that presents itself in Bill Clinton's pursuing a "let's deal" style relates to the complexity of governance in our age. Even if the president chooses to base leadership on his bargaining ability, he must negotiate from the basis of well-developed principles. Presidency scholar Paul Quirk of the University of Illinois has called upon the notion of "flexible rigidity" in negotiations to underscore the need for presidents, especially under the current political circumstances, to maintain flexibility about means and rigidity about goals. While this objective may seem to be quintessential Clinton, analysis suggests that the president has never defined his goals sufficiently to enshrine his rigidities. Nor has he known when to be flexible.
Quirk, in his analysis of George Bush, observed that Bush displayed a tendency to get the principles of negotiation turned around -- betraying a flexibility about goals and rigidity about means. Clinton, however, seems to have rigidity about nothing. In the case of NAFTA, he embraced a Republican proposal which stood as an anathema to much of his party's core constituency, as even his pollster Stanley Greenberg recognized. Clinton then proceeded to cut deals for its passage which would impinge hugely on the utility of NAFTA to serve as a vehicle for free trade.
Similarly, some observers have noted that Clinton's effort to co-opt insurance companies by pushing "managed competition" in health-care reform rather than a single-payer system created such needless complexity that the status quo in the health-care sector eventually became more acceptable than the Clinton alternative. The president ultimately lost the support even of congressional reformers when he began in July 1994 to suggest that he would be flexible about universal coverage and employer mandates to pay insurance premiums.
In May of Clinton's first year, one aide voiced the fear that Clinton "is getting defined by his compromises, not his principles." Even his later successes seemed to result more from expediency than from principle. He has yet to get himself off this slippery slope.
Clinton did not view himself as placing great emphasis on foreign policy and, to some degree, this might fit well the pragmatic politics of a "let's deal" approach. It has become an old saw of American politics that the electorate does not choose presidents on the basis of foreign-policy issues. However, poor performance in this area can have important effects. For instance, Republicans candidates for the 1996 nomination without great foreign-policy experience will find it easier to present themselves as presidential material with Clinton the opponent.
The president has also displayed an especially unimaginative approach toward staffing his national-security team. Warren Christopher, the secretary of state; Anthony Lake, assistant to the president for national security; Samuel Berger, Lake's deputy; James Woolsey, the recent CIA director and Madelaine Albright, the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., all had served in the Carter administration. They struck numerous observers as retreads. When one considers that fully 12 years had passed since the end of the Carter administration, Clinton could have used a bit more imagination in his choices. Certainly, national security constitutes one area where the administration has displayed an exceptional lack of inspiration. It deferred to Bush precedents in handling Bosnia and Somalia. Warren Christopher, the cautious insider, found himself marginalized in virtually every issue he tried to tackle. A few weeks into the administration, officials characterized Clinton's personal involvement in foreign policy as pedestrian. One observed, "He is there to do things when asked. But that is the extent of it."
As a candidate, Clinton proclaimed time and again that he would appoint a cabinet which looked like America. On the foreign-policy side, the aspiration proved to be a pious hope. On the domestic side, the administration indeed paid a great deal of attention to diversity. However, its pledges proved difficult to observe. The president went through a number of agonizing decisions; his first efforts to appoint a woman as attorney general was especially painful. Indeed, the abortive nominations (not all of them at the cabinet level) inflicted severe damage on the president. By stressing diversity to the degree that he did, Clinton introduced a stronger representational imperative to cabinet-making than has ever prevailed in the U.S.
Clinton's efforts exposed two pitfalls in his style of cabinet-making. First, presidents who give the choice cabinet slots to white, male members of the Washington establishment and the lesser positions to minorities and/or women will encounter allegations of tokenism. Second, while minorities and women fulfill representational criteria, they may encounter difficulty in obtaining confirmation. Events since the November 1944 defeat suggest that Clinton still must pay a very high political price for his emphasis on diversity.
In the middle part of this century, critical assessments of the presidential system in the U.S. focused on the separation of powers. Observers saw the need for greater unity between the executive and the legislative branches of government. Frustrations with the system originated largely from the left -- those for advancement of the welfare state. The late 1960s and early 1970s saw a cooling of interest in greater harmony between presidents and Congress.
The Carter administration functioned so ineffectively that observers fretted over the presidency becoming too weak. However, Reagan turned things around dramatically. He brought a strong electoral mandate to office. The Republicans controlled the Senate and a taxpayer revolt turned many congressional Democrats into fiscal conservatives. A theory emerged in this period that the presidency had turned a corner.
The current malaise in U.S. presidential leadership relates much more to the legacy of Reaganite excesses than to the separation of powers. Indeed, an adequately functioning system of checks and balances against the most extravagant Reagan policies might well have mitigated the current crisis.
Two conditions have greatly circumscribed presidential leadership under current circumstances. These are the fiscal deficit, which produces ceaseless pressures to reduce spending without raising taxes, and the sour public mood over the accessibility of the American dream.
The rise of electronically-oriented populist political campaigning has also greatly deinstitutionalized presidential power bases. The ease with which Ross Perot assumed the role of spoiler in 1992 suggests two things: First, segments of the public have become deeply disaffected. Second, the fact that control of electronic media depends on ready cash gives carte blanche to those with populist tendencies who have immense personal wealth or can tap unlimited financial resources.
We can understand why Bill Clinton resorted to "let's deal" leadership approaches. But, it serves up centrist, least-common-denominator solutions to post-Reagan problems and it is difficult for any president to successfully implement a "let's deal" style.
Quite clearly, the nation has not turned the corner in coping with gridlock. More worrying, the specter of noninstitutional, electronically based leadership looms ever larger, especially with the ascendancy of Newt Gingrich in the wake of the 1994 congressional elections. A vicious circle suggests itself. Presidents and Congress will blame one another for failures in leadership. Increasingly, the public will blame gridlock for the resulting paralysis. Efforts will be made to short-circuit traditional relationships between voters and their elected representatives with direct appeals which will further undermine public perceptions of the legitimacy of presidential and congressional leadership. And the respective legitimacy deficits will exacerbate gridlock.
Today's electorate has given the Republicans a try at overcoming gridlock. Whether they will give the party time to get a Republican president on board is another matter. Most analysts did not see the House of Representatives swinging to the Republicans until 1996 or 1998. But this angry electorate seems increasingly to view voting as an opportunity to register displeasure. If the Republicans prove incapable of bringing greater coherence to American politics in the next two years, watch for the re-emergence of Ross Perot or a similarly demagogic candidate. As for the future of the Democratic Party in the U.S., if Bill Clinton fails to pull this one out of the fire, his electoral failure could lead eventually to its destruction.
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