POTUS SPEAKS: Finding the Words that Defined the Clinton Presidency.

POTUS SPEAKS: Finding the Words that Defined the Clinton Presidency by Michael Waldman Simon & Schuster, $25.00

Clintonese

Clinton's new language for the presidency

THERE ARE AT LEAST TWO REASONS to approach Michael Waldman's memoir of the Clinton White House with lowered expectations. Waldman wasn't a key policy adviser. He was speechwriter to a president allergic to interesting language. Nor does the Clinton presidency have an especially compelling story arc, despite all the scandal and impeachment Basically, Clinton lost control of Congress after two years, and much of the rest of his presidency has consisted of a long, tedious comeback. His second term has not featured major legislative triumphs or even dramatic failures.

But Waldman has written a rich, honest, funny memoir, one that I think succeeds in its stated goal of accurately capturing the flavor of Clinton's terms, at least a large part (the good part) of that flavor. In part that's because Waldman has no particular axes to grind--he's not a big enough cheese to have a reputation to defend, he wasn't involved in a scandal, wasn't fired, doesn't have scores to settle. He's not even embittered. He came to Clinton's campaign from the Naderite left, and, as he puts it, "I didn't fall in love at first, only to feel betrayed and disillusioned later. Instead, exposed to [Clinton] over many years, I grew steadily more impressed."

Waldman isn't his book's hero; he wanders through Clinton's terms as an amused, self-effacing idealist, plugging unsuccessfully for campaign finance reform, dutifully defending a trade agreement he had previously fought against, ultimately doing his part to help Clinton make the transition to what Waldman claims is a "new kind of presidency," dependent "more than ever before on the bully pulpit," on a steady stream of speeches, events, and executive actions rather than big campaigns for big legislation in the New Deal/Great Society manner.

He seems to have had fun, or maybe he just cut the boring parts. He goes home in a huff one day and Clinton winds up delivering the pre-fact-checked draft of a major NAFTA address, with Presidents Ford, Carter, and Bush in attendance. Clinton's "eyes bulged briefly as he realized something was amiss," then he ad libbed off a text filled with hideous errors, Panicked, Waldman finds then-adviser David Gergen in the crowd, who shrugs and correctly advises "Don't worry about it." Few notice. In 1996, Waldman accompanies Clinton to an environmental event, at which the president dramatically releases a no-longer-endangered bald eagle into the wild.

"I stood at the back of the crowd and watched as Clinton released the magnificent bird, which took wing, soaring off to the left, and was promptly attacked by some osprey. It plummeted into the bay. Fortunately, a Coast Guard boat rescued the eagle and returned it to its comfortable home indoors."

One day Waldman and other mid-level aides are eating lunch at the White House mess, when they notice that Ira Magaziner, author of the failed 1994 health-care plan, is greeting Robert McNamara, seated at the next table. "Our entire table watched transfixed. `OK,' someone finally said. `Captions.'

`You destroyed a Democratic presidency? Hey, that's amazing! I destroyed a Democratic presidency too!' I offered."

Some of Waldman's anecdotes have a Washington Monthly-esque point. He notes Clinton's failure, during the 1992 transition, "to understand the importance of the White House staff," which "wields more power less accountably than nearly any cabinet secretary." Amazingly, Clinton, like Carter, seems to have thought that the Cabinet was where the action was, that he could place himself at the "hub of a wheel with many spokes." Like Carter, he discovered this was a "recipe for chaos," that he needed a strong White House staff to "seize the stage."

Waldman also has a good feel for Washington Make-Believe, as in the story of a White House aide, who, during the NAFTA fight, accurately denies to a reporter that Clinton had promised a congressman a project in a trade for his vote. Soon the congressman is calling the aide on the phone.

"`Did you get a call from the press?' `Yes, don't worry, I denied it.' `What the hell are you trying to do to me?' he sputtered. `My constituents will think I'm a sucker.'"

Waldman knows how to keep his chapters short, his story rolling. He has his heroes and villains, but there's nothing etched in acid, or even surrounded by too many adjectives. Villains include Ann Lewis, a politically-correct bigfoot who screws up the second, liberal half of Clinton's famous utterance "The era of big government is over," when she objects on anti-sexism grounds to the sentence, "But the era of every man for himself must never begin." Howard Paster, Clinton's first legislative director, comes off as a hack Washington lobbyist who helps congressional Democrats block campaign finance reform. Ex-speaker Thomas Foley is a pompous obstructionist on this issue as well. Chief of staff Erskine Bowles wastes time on "an elaborate, business school-style endeavor known as the Pillars project," in which the administration's policies are clustered for marketing purposes into categories ("pillars"). Nader, wittily, urges Waldman, "Remember. Your purpose is not only to serve but to swerve" --left, that is--and then denounces him when he defends NAFTA. Heroes in this and, I suspect, in future accounts are Stakhanovite aides Gene Sperling and Bruce Reed.

What about Dick Morris, the strategist who began secretly advising Clinton after the 1994 debacle? Waldman has an admirably mixed attitude toward Morris, who, after all, was his rival in the contest for influence with POTUS (a zero-sum game for most speechwriters). At one point, Morris horns in and hurriedly rewrites Waldman's State of the Union, faxing in a rough draft with no spacing between paragraphs. "It was, frankly, brilliant. I still learn from it to this day," Waldman says. But he also makes it clear that Morris had become slightly crazed and fallen out of favor even before he was caught sucking a prostitute's toes in 1996.

Clinton himself comes across as, basically, conscientious. His speech lines are often the keepers, and not just because he's boss. He's only close to being in over his head once, when talking with Treasury officials during the global financial near-meltdown of 1998--but he understands international finance well enough to calm the markets even though he was in the middle of an impeachment crisis. (Waldman counterposes the policy machinations with the Monica machinations in a successful bit of novelistic gimmickry. There's a great scene, on the day the story breaks, in which aides who failed to read the morning papers show up at Bowles' business-as-usual meeting and start thumbing through the clips, stopping at The Washington Post.)

At one point, Clinton says he thinks the entitlements problem "got harder to solve the more you talked about it," arguing (in a "countryboy drawl thickening as it often did when he was advancing positions that were more frequently heard in a faculty club than a trailer park"):

"`I do believe it will appreciably increase the chances of doing something on these big Social Security and Medicare issues if we don't get specific. So I don't mind having the elitists dump on me on that, because they don't have a responsibility to get anything done.'"

A key Waldman insight--which seems obvious but isn't often stated--is that Clinton survived not just because of the good economy or any particular legislative results but also because the voters recognized and approved his conscientious leadership style.

Yet this POTUS ultimately didn't get that much done in his second term, save for effectively using the slogan "Save Social Security First" to keep the tax-cutters and spenders away from the budget surplus. This failure came despite Clinton's fretting about his legacy early and often. If anything Clinton comes off as knowing too much history:

"For much of an hour, he traced the country's history and the role of the presidency and the Democratic Party. He had just read a 700-page biography of John Marshall ... Throughout the country's history, Clinton said, one of the parties has been dominant--and it has been the one that stood most strongly for the nation."

It's not clear what relevance such preexisting historical patterns and cycles had for Clinton's attempt to "save government from its own excesses." Nationalist parties had always been dominant? OK. And air power alone had never won a war--until last year. New things happen. Clinton sometimes seems in danger of becoming an example of the anti-aphorism that those who do not ignore history are condemned to think it will be repeated.

What about Clinton's dark side? It's not here. Not that it doesn't exist (though Waldman says "his temper was overrated"). Not that Waldman approves. It's just not here, either because Waldman didn't see it or he left it out out of loyalty or a desire to work for Democrats again. The latter possibility makes the book's treatment of Hillary Rodham Clinton especially intriguing; she's virtually absent, moving through the narrative like an invisible tenth planet whose existence is divined only from her secondary effects (like the 1994 health care debacle that cost Democrats control of Congress for the rest of the century). If Waldman is more scared of reprisals from Hillary than from Bill ... well, then his fears comport with those of other Clinton staffers I've known.

My main beef with POTUS Speaks is with its overall thesis, the idea of a "new kind of presidency" made up of many smaller initiatives and executive actions--an idea Waldman largely credits to my Slate colleague Jacob Weisberg. How much of this is genuine innovation, and how much is Clinton making the best of a bad situation, in which he's lost control of Congress to his enemies (and hence has to try to govern by executive order) and is constantly under investigation (and hence to keep his popularity up--at one point telling his staff he'd love to avoid all the "mind numbing" little events his predecessors avoided, but "FDR did not have someone trying to put him in jail.")?

Take the idea of governing through executive actions. Waldman says, "Welfare reform was already largely in place through waivers granted to the states by the time it was enacted by Congress." This is an exaggeration. While the waivers were important, the early-'90s waiver era doesn't compare with the vast and pervasive change in the welfare system that followed Congress' 1996 reform. Waldman's big example, the "archetype issue for the post-modern presidency," is tobacco. The tobacco industry was initially regulated by the FDA, then sued by state attorneys general. No congressmen needed! But even setting aside qualms about letting ambitious state AGs (or federal cabinet officials) govern by litigation, the full settlement of the tobacco issue, Waldman writes, "required sweeping legislation from Congress, including an increase in the tobacco tax." If I remember right, it didn't pass.

As Waldman notes, Clinton was lucky, in pursuing his "new presidency," in that the big thing he decided to accomplish in his second term--using the surplus to pay down the debt--was what was going to happen anyway if gridlock prevented action. It was the default position. And the system defaulted. In general, gridlock may have been temporarily good for America, in that Clinton was able to resist tax cuts, while Republicans were able to restrain spending. In the future, one suspects, the things that need to be done--establishing some sort of universal health coverage and fixing Social Security in an era of dramatic medical advances--will have to be done the old fashioned, cumbersome, Rooseveltian way, by getting Congress to pass laws and getting the president to sign them.

Still, it's already pretty clear that historians, as well as voters, will soon look back on Clinton's presidency with a good deal of admiration. Waldman's fine book will help them make their case, and let them smile doing it.

MICKY KAUS, author of The End of Equality, writes for kausfiles.com and Slate.