On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency.

Six weeks before the 1992 presidential election, a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll showed that voters believed Bill Clinton would do better than George Bush in dealing with the economy, creating new jobs, addressing health care and education, reducing the federal deficit, and protecting the environment. Voters even thought Clinton would better handle taxes and welfare policy, two areas where Democrats traditionally had been thought weak.

That doesn't mean people thought Bill Clinton was the better person. Quite the opposite: Responses to several questions in the poll showed that voters had a higher opinion of Bush's character than of Clinton's. More than three times as many respondents said they were dissatisfied with Clinton's character than said the same about Bush, and Bush edged out Clinton on a question about which candidate voters trusted more. Bush was a war hero; Clinton had famously (and, for his generation, rather typically) maneuvered his way out of the Vietnam draft. And while there were nasty rumors that both men had had extra-marital affairs, in Bush's case the evidence was pretty thin, whereas in Clinton's case the evidence (including statements by Clinton himself that bordered on outright confession) was fairly compelling.

Thus emerged a dichotomy that has persisted through the first two years of his presidency: People tend to think of Bill Clinton simultaneously as both a somewhat slippery character and an able political leader. This rather complex perception has torqued the national mood swings about Clinton's presidency.

Elizabeth Drew is aware of the problem; her new book notes on the first page that Clinton's "ups and downs were followed closely" and "sometimes exaggerated" by the public. Immediately after his election victory, Clinton could do no wrong; when his job-stimulus package failed to get through a Democratic Congress, he was seen as pathetically weak; when his deficit-reduction plan and the North American Free Trade Agreement passed, his presidency was suddenly a triumph; when Whitewater and Troopergate churned up questions about his past, his presidency was a failure; when the crime bill cleared Congress, his presidency was revived; and after his health care bill went south, many Democrats running for re-election avoided him like the pneumonic plague. I probably missed a cycle or two here.

Of course, every president has his ups and downs. George bush was typecast as the schizoid president, capable on foreign policy and comically indifferent to domestic affairs; his Q ratings bounced up with the Persian Gulf war and down with the emergence of "it's the economy, stupid" as the election-year mantra. Carter and Reagan are more straightforward cases: Their presidencies were long slides into oblivion, more painful in Carter's case because it was quicker (and because Reagan, who lost it with the Iran-contra scandal, didn't seem to notice).

If American society's view of national leaders has become increasingly manic-depressive over time, the fault lies partly with television. Many of the public-affairs shows require journalists and political-consultant types to belch out opinions at a pace that outstrips logic and evidence, sort of the way people do at parties when they've had too much to drink. "Do we try to appear to know more than we do? Yep. I guess that's a little phony, but I can live with it," Fred Barnes recently told The Washington Post about "The McLaughlin Group."

The result breeds a certain caprice with respect to the political scene and especially the president, inevitably the topic most gabbed-about. Print reporters who moonlight on TV usually claim, with varying degrees of self-awareness, that the glibness doesn't infect their written work. But even the most disciplined among us can't divide cleanly into two separate selves.

The Clinton Quandary

With Clinton, a figure who inspires mixed feelings to begin with, this process is intensified. Clinton's most passionate defenders say: Judge the man by his record, not his character. But that's almost impossible to do, not just because people are morbidly curious about his sex life or his investment portfolio, but because his character penetrates his presidency in all sorts of subtle ways. The most resonant anecdote in Drew's book is that Clinton, on telling Senator Bob Kerrey that he'd chosen Al Gore to be his running mate, couldn't help adding, "If it were up to me, it would be you." If it were up to me? Did Clinton really think Kerrey would believe that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee lacked any choice in the matter? Clinton and Kerrey were hardly bosom buddies before this exchange, but one can't help wondering whether the trouble Kerrey has given the president since--his public wavering before finally, grudgingly, supporting him on his first budget, for example, or attacking Clinton's health-care plan--is partly a way of getting back for this Slick-Willie exchange.

The chief virtue of Drew's book lies in savory nuggets like this one. Unfortunately for Drew, Bob Woodward sounded similar themes in his own anecdote-rich The Agenda. The Woodward account presents a more detailed picture of the Clinton White House, but Drew's reporting adds color and texture to the canvas. Judging from the evidence accumulating here and elsewhere, Clinton is a truly annoying boss to work for; he throws fits blaming other people for problems that are often of his own making; he never wants to come to a final decision; he keeps people waiting endlessly; and he thinks nothing of asking Cabinet members to drop by in the middle of the night for a chat.

The scariest parts of Drew's book are those showing Clinton's lack of decisiveness. When 10 western Democratic senators led by Montana's Max Baucus objected to provisions in Clinton's first budget that increased grazing fees and established mining royalties on public lands, Drew writes, Clinton quickly arranged a meeting without notifying Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt (who supported the long-overdue reforms). On hearing the complaints, Clinton said, "We should do something about this." The rapidity with which Clinton dropped the items from the budget alarmed even Baucus. According to Drew, his reaction was: "Uh-oh. This is a problem." Similarly, Oklahoma Senator David Boren found an early legislative meeting with Clinton "disturbing" because House members and senators "were patronizing to the president. They didn't show enough deference." Boren, of course, was soon defying Clinton rather insolently on the subject of the proposed BTU tax, which died as a result.

Drew suggests, intriguingly, that it may have been Clinton's indecisiveness that kept New York Governor Mario Cuomo from joining the Supreme Court. Even though Clinton had said during the campaign that he wanted Cuomo on the Court, when the two spoke by phone about an opening in 1993, Clinton declined to offer the governor the job outright, an omission that offended Cuomo's pride. According to Drew, Cuomo concluded that if Clinton couldn't be forthrightly supportive at the outset, there was little reason to think he would stand by him if the Republicans chose to attack the nomination later on. Drew, like others before her, suggests that Clinton will make up his mind only when forced to, usually by either Hillary Clinton or Al Gore. (Gore comes off especially well in the book as a voice of reason and discipline; according to Drew, Clinton treats him with extraordinary deference.) A third figure who always seems to appear when it's time to get Clinton off the dime is Vernon Jordan, the Urban League president turned corporate lawyer. Interestingly, Drew says Jordan was among those who gave Clinton the final prod to cut loose Lani Guinier, the proposed civil rights chief who favored "supermajorities" as a means of boosting the power of minority legislators.

The good news for most of you readers out there is that Bill Clinton isn't your boss, he's your president. When judged by results, Clinton often comes off tolerably well. That first budget bill may not have reformed management of public lands, but it creditably addressed the deficit problem, and it passed. Mario Cuomo didn't join the Supreme Court, but Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Stephen Breyer, two jurists who command a fair amount of respect, did. As for Lani Guinier: Well, even Ted Kennedy is said to have had his doubts. (According to Drew, it was a Kennedy aide who first alerted the White House to the potential political problem posed by Guinier's writings; the warning was initially brushed off.)

Sometimes, of course, the results don't make Clinton look better. The collapse of Clinton's health care bill is not detailed in this book, but Drew foreshadows its demise by noting that even plenty of people in the administration had their doubts that it would work. (Many admitted they couldn't even understand it.) A key meeting in which the economic team was to present its objections to the health plan failed to air all disagreements fully because, in classic Clinton style, it was thrown open to more than 50 people. The result of this Woodstock-like inclusiveness, an unnamed senior economic official tells Drew, was that many advisors, fearing press leaks about dissent in the administration, felt constrained: "There was no way for the president to know the extent to which people really disagreed."

Then there's the foreign-policy bog. Not surprisingly, Clinton is portrayed as endlessly indecisive about Bosnia, though Drew puts some blame for this on Secretary of State Warren Christopher, who comes across in the book as a pinstriped yes-man. The high-water mark of Clinton's foreign policy appears to have been when the president avoided being kissed by Yasir Arafat at the White House ceremony formalizing a peace agreement between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization; Clinton had been drilled by National Security Advisor Tony Lake on how to grip Arafat's right arm in order to prevent a politically damaging embrace.

Week Coverage

Throughout On The Edge, top administration officials learn about foreign crises by watching CNN. One anecdote in particular is ripe for nomination to the Monthly's Espionage Horror Stories Hall of Fame. After a missile strike on Iraq's intelligence service complex (in retaliation for an alleged plot to car-bomb George Bush during a post-presidential visit to Kuwait), Clinton apparently lacked the means to find out whether the target had been hit. In the end, the information was tracked down with a phone call from David Gergen to Tom Johnson, the president of CNN, who told him a contact in Amman said a relative in Iraq could vouch that the facility had been bombed. Doesn't the federal government employ spies to tell us this sort of thing?

The value of a book like Drew's ought to be that it provides some perspective on the roller-coaster ups and downs of Clinton's presidency thus far. Unfortunately, Drew has written this pretty much the way she used to write her "Letter From Washington" column in The New Yorker (and not at all like her pathbreaking book, Politics and Money), focusing on events that have already received much coverage. For Drew, it's a given that whatever the mainstream press played up is what really mattered, and whatever it ignored didn't. Thus the fight over Clinton's national service plan, which included a dramatic change in the financing of higher education that for the first time may result in long-term, truly collectable student loans that give recipients the freedom to pursue less mercenary post-collegiate careers, receives the same scant attention here that it received while it was winding its way through Congress. (Readers interested in this neglected story, which shows the Clinton administration at both its best and its worst, will have to wait for Steven Waldman's fine account in his forthcoming book, The Bill.)

Closer to home, I was exasperated to see so little attention in Drew's book to matters relating to my beat, the environment; I don't think I saw a single reference to the administration's long and ultimately unsuccessful effort to revise the unpopular Superfund law, surely one of the most significant (and scantily covered) enterprises Clinton undertook this year.

Drew doesn't have much to add in the realm of analysis, either. Rather than provide an organic picture of the Clinton who has emerged in the last two years, she presents a composite based on the press' week-to-week judgments of Clinton's performance. This after she chides the Clinton administration itself for focusing too much on the successes and failures of each week, rather than taking a longer view. Moreover, some fairly petty criticisms of Clinton--for instance, that he doesn't look "presidential" when photographed with his mouth open--don't seem to belong in an ostensibly weighty book. Actually, there's a whiff of snobbery in several of Drew's asides about Clinton: Those brightcolored hues in the redecorated Oval Office and that weakness for meeting show-business people just won't do. (Though the latter prejudice did motivate Drew to share a hilarious anecdote about how Harry Thomason, Clinton's TV-producer friend, tried unsuccessfully to get the inaugural oath rewritten from "preserve, protect, and defend" so that it began with the word "defend," which Thomason thought sounded better. Thomason denies the story.)

"Despite all the difficulties, Clinton had accomplished a great deal," she concludes. "This man, who had been so resilient in the past, personally and politically, was still in a position to be seen as a successful president--albeit one with a rocky tenure in office."

Or not. Well, I guess we'll all find out in a couple of years.