Summer '94: the state of politics.

Politically, this is a summer of discontents. Most Americans seem irritated by politics--Congressman Bill Richardson (D-N. Mex.) called the public mood "antsy"--impatient with leaders but too listless to follow. The electorate is not angry, the usual frothing ideologues aside, so much as disappointed in government and at least half-disposed to give up on public life. The hesitant hopefulness that surfaced in 1992 has pretty much vanished, and Americans appear to be looking, often despairingly, to their private defenses.

It isn't just Bill Clinton, although unhappiness with the president is a big part of the story. In California, despite prolonged hard times and sharply contested races between interesting candidates in both parties, turnout in the June primary was the lowest in the state's history-38 percent of registered voters--and the electorate turned down every proposal to issue bonds for public improvement. And from Senator George Mitchell (D-Maine) down, elected officials in droves are returning to private life, finding the satisfactions of a career in democratic politics no longer worth the costs.

For the Democrats, this makes grim news, especially since in an off-year election, running against a president with less than rousing approval ratings, Republicans already could expect to make significant gains. An important part of the Democratic edge in congressional and local elections has derived from the party's greater ability to attract "quality" candidates, and when the allure of politics wanes, Democrats are bound to be losers. It is even more important that lower-income, nonwhite and hence likely Democratic voters are disproportionately staying home. The more that citizens need government, after all, the more apt they are to feel resentful when it falls short, so that it is not entirely paradoxical that in one 1993 survey, 53 percent of Republicans, but only 40 percent of Democrats, were willing to say that government generally is beneficial to the people.

As it stands, Democrats will be lucky to hold their losses to two or three seats in the Senate and twenty in the House, and as every major vote tells us, the president has none to spare. In the gubernatorial races, Mario Cuomo (D-N.Y.) is a good bet for reelection, but Ann Richards (D-Tex.) is at least worried; in California, Kathleen Brown, who once looked like an easy winner, may even trail the Republican incumbent, Pete Wilson, while Senator Diane Feinstein, a Democrat, also once far ahead, faces a real, and very expensive, campaign.

For Bill Clinton and his party, the immediate political problem is the need to reanimate their friends and well-wishers; the president's enemies may even be a help. Clinton probably could have ignored the radio right-wingers, knaves though they are. Those voters who supported--and most of those who might ever support--Clinton and the Democrats almost certainly are disinclined to accept the more lurid versions of Whitewater, l'affaire Jones, and the like, and they are showing some recognition that such matters, at most, are largely irrelevant to Clinton's presidency. In any case, those stories, for the moment, are not commanding TV headlines, and what is off-screen, for the American public, tends to go quickly out of mind.

By contrast, Clinton does need to worry about the wholly relevant and troubling questions about his public character. As a political leader, Bill Clinton sounds a very uncertain saxophone. With alarming consistency, the president stakes out a strong position and then backs off, or backs down, when confronted by opposition or new information. This is most obvious in foreign policy, but it began with the question of gays in the military, the administration's entree, and it has been just as visible in relation to Clinton's high-profile appointments or in policy issues like the BTU tax. In part, this reflects the president's virtues: He learns, is willing to cut his losses, and, in general, ends with a sensible result. But unmistakably, Bill Clinton suffers from his own problem with the "vision thing," a pragmatic focus on the best deal at the expense of moral leadership and civic education. Franklin Roosevelt, that foxy lion, sometimes followed a pattern like Clinton's--for example, in his retreat from the high ground of the Quarantine Speech--but as a rule, FDR kept his compromises off-stage, and he never forgot the political value of a strong line. President Clinton's too-public improvisations, even when agile, have created an impression of moral weakness, making the friendliest voters worry that however skilled at keeping the ship afloat, Clinton has no clear sense of direction.

To be fair, some of the Clinton administration's shortcomings are institutional rather than personal. Our image of the presidency was framed by Roosevelt and his immediate successors, but it does Clinton an injustice to compare him to those presidents past, and--Watergate and the like aside--even Nixon may be too high a mark. We live in the era of a postmodern presidency, in which chief executives are dealt a much weaker hand. Congress is more intractable, fragmented by various "reforms," its leadership weaker, its members less tied to presidential coattails and less susceptible to the appeals of party or patronage. In fact, what passes for good government nowadays makes it harder for a president to grease the legislative wheels with policy favors and campaign support, or even to protect an ally like Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.). To make matters worse, our growing dependence on the international economy means that the government cannot really claim mastery of its own house, and presidents cannot afford to be high-handed, especially now that world politics lacks the old disciplines of the cold war. No one needs to be told, moreover, that the media are more intrusive and adversarial, servants of a baffled and disorganized public whose distrust of authority and disinclination to sacrifice are a near balance to any desire for change. And, as Clinton himself helps to demonstrate, what helps elect a postmodern president--being a credible voice for outsiders--is at odds with the qualities a president needs to govern.

Even so, Clinton's record after eighteen months in office is vastly more impressive than Kennedy's. Very few of his achievements, however, sing in Democratic ears or inspire popular hosannas. Clinton's budget was our first serious encounter with the deficit, and it made a start at spreading the burden more fairly. But while most voters seem to have accepted the necessity for Clinton's measures--there is no real public outcry, even among Republicans, against Clinton's taxes--they do not regard them as a reason for joy. NAFFA, a major legislative victory for the administration, probably offended more Democrats than admired it, and the reform of health care is still only a complicated and confusing possibility (though a crucial one for Clinton, since the overwhelming majority of his supporters, back in 1993, expected him to make progress on that front).

But above all, a Democratic administration is supposed to mean jobs, and the economic recovery, which should be the administration's strong point, has been both carefully moderated--a sensible policy, but not a popular one--and uneven. "Winner-take-all economics," as Robert Frank and Phillip Cook call it, still looks like the rule. It was clear a year ago that only a fraction of laid-off workers were getting their old jobs back (14 percent, as against 44 percent in the last four recessions), and new layoffs and plant closings are stimulating a pervasive anxiety about work and the future, against which Robert Reich's emphasis on "counseling and retraining" sounds pretty feeble. Clinton doesn't deserve all, or even much, of the blame: Ronald Reagan's profligacy took away much of our autonomy in policy, and more of the president's freedom to maneuver. The United States has to satisfy its creditors; the international bond market calls most of the tunes; there never seems to be any money for public programs.

Yet Democratic constituencies, facing need and fear, are not inclined to be understanding. A considerable number of Clinton's critics on the liberal-left worry that the president is too inclined to defer to orthodox economics, and too willing to make economic "growth," whatever the social cost, the standard of public policy. This November, Clinton and the Democrats had better have an answer to such charges, and not in words alone.

Still, the president and his party have some major assets. Bill Clinton has neutralized much of the old conservative advantage on social issues, one reason why the Right hates him so luxuriantly. Democrats have been taking a tough stance toward crime, even if a lot of it has been posturing, and the president has made welfare reform a respectable, even mandatory, part of any Democratic platform. Of course, abortion and gun control are intensely controversial, and the president's compromises on gay rights have irritated the Left without conciliating the Right; but on all these issues opinion probably leans to the Democratic side. And while it generates rumblings in the Black Caucus and on the street, the administration so far has kept race off the political center stage.

These aspects of Clinton's New Democracy have stopped or reversed Republican gains in the two-party balance: younger voters are tilting away from what had been Republican leanings and, recently, voters have been rating Democrats equal to Republicans in their ability to deal with crime and the deficit, and superior in relation to health care, welfare reform, and--despite everything--unemployment. They may resent Clinton's stumblings and vacillations in foreign policy, but they admire the fact that the country is at peace and regard Democrats as a better bet to preserve it. The shadow in this sunshine, for the Democrats, is that voters see Republicans, the recent recession to the contrary, as more likely to produce economic prosperity. And that may tip the scales decisively in 1994.

Anyone who occupies the White House, however, holds a good many trumps, and Clinton shows signs of trying to address doubts about his leadership. His choice of Leon Panetta as chief of staff is more than reassuring, and it has the side benefit of elevating Alice Rivlin, that nonpareil, to first place in the Office of Management and Budget. There may even be stirrings in foreign policy. At the Naples economic summit, for example, the president refused to panic over the decline in the value of the dollar, trusting in the "fundamentals" of the U.S. recovery, a defiance of currency traders that even the New York Times, not always admiring, called "gutsy."

But it would really be a political masterstroke if Clinton found a new Secretary of State. Warren Christopher has his moments--as he did last year, when he told the World Conference on Human Rights that we "cannot let cultural relativism become the last refuge of repression" at the expense of universal standards--but at bottom, he is only another lawyerly negotiator, not the strong political voice the president needs. Were he replaced by someone like Walter Mondale or Colin Powell, it would set bells ringing, here and abroad.

Above all, the president needs to do something that is visibly strong, that shows him to have courage and conviction as well as cunning, as his rebuke to Sister Souljah did in 1992. A showy success in foreign policy would help, but the president is too decent to go looking for a Grenada. He may get his chance on health care: his vow to veto any bill that lacks universal, irrevocable coverage was too unambiguous to be explained away, and if Congress flinches, it will be up to Clinton to stand the fire.

In any case, Democrats are always at their worst when talking to each other. Every element of the crazy-quilt Democratic coalition has reason to be annoyed with the Clinton administration, and none has shown much reluctance to say so. But the closer they get to Republicans, the more Democrats are inspired to a simulacrum of civility. So far in 1994, mainstream Republicans virtually have no policies, at least none that they feel comfortable advocating in public. Senator Bob Dole's (R-Kans.) cleaving to the line of pure opposition will not be sufficient in an election, since citizens expect to hear something like answers, and reliance on the market, the Republican lodestar, plays very uncertainly with working- and middle-class voters, who suspect that the costs of that policy fall hardest on them.

In fact, the absence of an articulated alternative from mainstream Republicans has strengthened the only-too-verbal legions of the Right, religious and otherwise, whose intraparty victories have been very much in the media, much to the Democrats' delight. Senator Charles Robb (D-Va.) would be a dead duck against anyone but Oliver North (although that race will turn on which of the two independent candidates. Douglas Wilder or Marshall Coleman, eventually proves to have more supporters who can't bear to waste their votes). With wonderful irony, Congressman Vic Fazio (D-Calif.) called the Religious Right a "godsend" to the Democrats, and perhaps it is, since nothing is more likely to move the party's faithful and drive moderates into its arms.

Democrats have reason to feel queasy, but--Republican follies aside--they know that whatever his weaknesses in governing, President Clinton is no slouch at campaigning. It is a long time until November, and the Cleveland Indians, barring a baseball strike, are real contenders in their division: strange and wonderful things may yet happen in 1994.