After Bill Clinton ended one of his rare news conferences before leaving to visit the U.S. troops in Bosnia a couple weeks ago, CBS White House correspondent Bill Platte observed with a smile, “He looked presidential.”
The answers Clint on gave to re porters on questions ranging from his wife’s role in Whitewater to the budget fight with the GOP-led Congress was not as impor tant as how he handled those in quiries. Not that those things are insignificant, but it’s how he managed them on national TV and attempted to convey that he’s the voice of reason.
Clinton did it again last Tuesday in his State of the Union address, prompting political pundits and GOP presidential opponents of Senate Majority Leader R obert Dole (R-Kan.), to question whether the 72-year-old Dole is ready for prime time.
Clinton is expected to get a bump in the polls as a result of the sharp and crisp State of the Union speech. It’s hard to tell whether his ability to win the hearts and minds of Americans is owed more to every-party’s strategist Dick Morris, to Chief of Staff and former congressional budget cruncher Leon Panetta or simply to Clinton himself, the pol.
But perceptions can be deceiving. Clinton, the great campaigner, is also Clinton, the greater co-opter. He’s stolen the best from the Pepublican Revolution’s contract and embraced it as his own.
It’s working for the moment. But the transformation of the GOP agenda into a Clinton platform also points out just how much he and his party are devoit of fresh ideas. Clinton politics will likely porve successful enough to win him a second term in the White House. But it will not help him govern.
The Clinton administration was irrelevant in the crafting of telecommunications reform legislation, and its many veto threats were mostly bluster. Further, the two government shutdowns that Clinton says he abhors are as much – perhaps even more – his fault than the Republican’s.
Too bad for hard-working civil servants at the FCC and other federal agencies that he professes to champoin. And too bad for the wireless telecommunications industy, for which delays are as harmful as the higher interest rates that will come if Congress doesn’t raise the debt ceiling next month.
Clinton talks a good game, but hasn’t proved in three years he can lead and tackle America’s biggest problems. The president is a perpetual campaigner. Dole is a lousy campaigner and, as one industry lobbyies points out, has the liability of being experienced and knowing how to get bills through Congress.
But being first in his class doesn’t make the favorite son of Arkansas a first-class president.
