The System: The American Way of Politics at the Breaking Point.

WHY do conservatives hate Bill Clinton? He is, says George Will, the least consequential President since Calvin Coolidge. He's arguably the most conservative Democratic presidential candidate since John Davis. And he has given conservatives something George Bush never could have: a Republican Congress. Yet the Right has hardly been appreciative.

This isn't the puzzle Richard Reeves seeks to solve in Running in Place -- it's hard to figure out what exactly he is after -- but he offers some insights. They are, to be sure, easy to miss amid all the predictable analysis and pedestrian prose Reeves has packed into this slim volume. Also distracting is his habit of repeating the same anecdotes, like an annoying uncle. Still, Reeves makes an important point that is absent from the other books under review: "Bill and Hillary Clinton . . . symbolize the 1960s to many Americans; they symbolize civil rights and feminism, sexual tolerance and abortion."

Reeves is onto something here -- the Clintons do indeed personify everything conservatives hate about the Sixties -- but he doesn't quite get it. The hostility to Clinton is visceral and cultural, not ideological and programmatic. Many conservatives who aren't pro-life feel it; and so do liberals of a certain age -- including Reeves himself, it appears. Ellen Willis made Reeves's point earlier and better in the Village Voice: "The Clintons are inescapably Sixties figures. Their history, their body language, their visceral response to social issues carries the imprint of sex, drugs, rock and roll, Vietnam protest, and feminism -- a cultural taint no amount of pandering to big business, religion, and family values can wipe out."

And then there is the psychosexual element of anti-Clintonism. The Clintons, in public perception, have reversed gender roles: he's soft and yielding, while she's steely and determined. (Indeed, Bill Clinton's persona has almost certainly accelerated the feminization of the Democratic Party.) It is because of this gestalt that traits capable of inspiring pity rather than anger --like the President's widely rumored sexual incontinence -- have instead elicited such fierce reactions. For the same reason, Clinton's media-assisted, 43 per cent victory is taken as fundamentally illegitimate. That this notion is preposterous in the light of American political history is irrelevant. Nobody was ever morally offended that Jimmy Carter was President; the same can't be said of Clinton.

Conservatives see in the Clintons the vices into which Sixties values have curdled: the suspect certitudes, the hypocrisy, the conviction of moral superiority, the irresponsibility, the cheap sentimentality. And beneath it all, the reflexive mendacity. At a Houston fund-raiser last October, President Clinton said he had raised taxes too much and cut spending too little in 1993 --because, he implied, congressional Democrats had made him. In fact, Democrats like Nebraska Sen. Bob Kerrey had pleaded for more spending cuts, not tax increases, and were outraged by Clinton's self-serving historical revisionism.

Paul Greenberg, editorial-page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, chronicles many such instances in No Surprises: Two Decades of Clinton Watching. He writes, "Bill Clinton would have made a great editor; he never tires of changing words about." A particularly egregious case was Clinton's dissembling about his position on the Gulf War. At the time, Gov. Clinton said he "agree[d] with the arguments of the people in the minority" who voted against authorizing the war; after it was won, he referred to himself as an early war supporter. When Greenberg challenged him, Clinton "fixed me with his sincere look and explained that, no, he had sided with the majority." Most commentators let Clinton's deceptions pass lightly during the 1992 campaign. Not Greenberg. In a "non-endorsement" of his state's native son, he wrote that it was "not the duplicitousness in his politics that concerns so much as the polished ease, the almost habitual, casual, articulate way he bobs and weaves. He has mastered the art of equivocation. There is something almost inhuman in his smoother responses that sends a shiver up the spine."

This passage is typical of Greenberg, both in its sturdy elegance and in its concern for character. (Public character, that is: Greenberg minds his own business when it comes to the Clintons' "after-hours life.") He's a fair judge, praising Clinton extravagantly whenever he gets a chance: on Haiti, NAFTA, education. He is also a stern one: his editorials make Clinton pay and pay for old sins of demagoguery.

Greenberg's character sketch is drawn with deft, sharp strokes: e.g., his description of Clinton's "brazenness under pressure" and his observation that "Bill Clinton was networking before 'network' was a verb." Bob Woodward's The Choice isn't in the same league, but his treatment of Clinton is equally damning. In one telling anecdote, Woodward relates a long session Sen. Chris Dodd (D., Conn.) had with Clinton in 1981, six months after Clinton had lost his re-election bid and become the youngest ex-governor in American history: "Clinton was then obsessed with talking about his loss. As Clinton barreled on blaming others for his defeat, Dodd . . . decided to stay on to hear Clinton utter the words, 'I screwed this up,' or, 'I f -- ed this up,' or some version of self-blame. Dodd had stayed past 3 A.M. with Clinton and never heard the words or anything approximating them."

Woodward is largely content to string such anecdotes together without context or analysis. Most of the book is given over to accounts of tactical shadow-boxing by Clinton and Bob Dole, although a few brief and embarrassingly superficial excursions into public policy have been randomly inserted. And not even first-rate reporting can rescue a sentence like, "If tension could be bottled, [Dole] would have kept a bottling plant busy all night."

Despite these limitations, Woodward puts some finishing touches on the picture of the Clintons that emerges from Greenberg's and Reeves's books. The First Couple are petulant, self-absorbed, and evasive of responsibility. Their lack of self-awareness is comic. (Clinton "believed he was unusually decisive for a President," writes Woodward.) Yet they are convinced of their own moral and intellectual superiority. And in this trait above all, the Clintons are emblematic of post-Sixties liberalism.

ASENSE of one's own moral superiority is, of course, a species of hubris. Some of that hubris comes through in The Choice, e.g., when Clinton says, "I would have much preferred being President during World War II." (Now there's a challenge worthy of his talents.) But the Clintons' hubris is best captured in The System, Haynes Johnson and David Broder's memo-by-memo account of the Administration's stillborn health-care initiative in 1993 and 1994.

That isn't the authors' intention. Their thesis is that Clintoncare was an enlightened combination of the free market and government regulation, defeated by partisan ambition and an interest-group disinformation campaign.

It's the kind of book that's designed to be force-fed to hapless political-science students, not to be voluntarily picked up. (It doesn't help that the authors attempt to invest their story with drama by writing at every opportunity that "it was a fateful moment" or that so-and-so's "words would prove to be devastatingly prophetic.") Johnson and Broder don't explain the Clinton plan in any detail -- an incredible oversight, given the tome's size --but they convey its central premise clearly enough: there is no social problem, no matter how complex, that can't be solved by applying the intellects of the Clintons and their friends.

Consider: to devise their plan, Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ira Magaziner had to believe that they knew, inter alia, the proportion of GDP that should be spent on health care; the proper racial and ethnic balance of the medical profession; and the correct ratio of general practitioners to specialists. The market was merely another mechanism they could manipulate in order to achieve their policy goals. Moreover, they originally wanted to include the health plan in the 1993 budget "reconciliation" bill, so that what Johnson and Broder describe as "the largest domestic reform attempt in sixty years" could pass after a radically truncated debate.

If there's a silver lining to the Clintons' character flaws, it's that they've undermined the Administration's political effectiveness. Conservatives may find it hard to understand Woodward's insistence in The Choice that the Clintons despise the permanent elite inside the Beltway, but there's no reason to doubt him. They feel mistreated by the D.C. establishment, particularly reporters. Because of their Nixonian hatred of the press, they haven't bothered to flatter it. This hostility is almost entirely unjustified. As Tim Graham meticulously documents in Pattern of Deception, the press has tilted substantially toward Clinton since before the 1992 primaries. Even the Gennifer Flowers scandal was, he points out, a "one-week story reporters regretted all year long." Every time Clinton's political fortunes as President have sagged, the press has furrowed its collective brow in puzzlement at his failure to get credit for his many alleged accomplishments.

The Clintons' style may also have damaged the Administration's cohesion. In Madhouse, Jeffrey Birnbaum tells the story of six senior White House aides who took office with high hopes but left after months of fatigue and frustration. Birnbaum's analytical modesty, however, prevents him from fruitfully exploring the question of how much the madhouse atmosphere is specific to this Administration. I suspect that any White House would be sufficiently supercharged to witness hysterical scenes like this one: "But as Clinton commenced [his speech], Begala noted a choppiness that had not been evident during rehearsals. . . . 'The TelePrompTer's down!' someone shouted. Clinton was reading his speech -- intermittently -- from the copy he held in his hand. And Begala became as frightened as he had ever been." He wasn't the only one: "Stephanopoulos said the crisis was like a 'near-death experience,' with 'all the blood draining from my body."' (On second thought maybe it's just as well this Administration hasn't had to fight a world war.)

FOR all his faults, though, Clinton brings ample strengths to his office. His intelligence and mental agility have never been disputed. Nor have his purely political skills: he's his own best campaign manager and spin controller. And, pace Greenberg, Clinton has shown that he can learn on the job. His foreign policy may not be wise, but it's no longer vacillating. According to Woodward, Clinton is less volatile now than in his first two years as President; he doesn't throw as many tantrums. The Clinton whom Chris Dodd encountered in 1981 was not the same one who told Broder and Johnson, "I made a blunder [on health care]. I set the Congress up for failure." The self-criticism may be merely tactical, but it suggests that he has grown up at least a little. Clinton's latest comeback isn't just the result of Republican missteps; it required remarkable political discipline. (Compare Newt Gingrich, who sounds as if he's spent half a year feeling sorry for himself.)

Oddly, none of these books really focuses on how Clinton revived his political fortunes. Woodward takes a stab at it: he mentions the role of savvy demagoguery on spending and the budget, as well as Clinton's belated discovery that the public doesn't want a President to think out loud. In addition, he notes, Clinton has presented himself as a "figure of healing and national reconciliation." Clinton understands the symbolic and dramatic aspects of politics better than most Republicans do. He has perfected the eulogy as a literary genre. His rhetoric at other times may not be eloquent, but it is finely attuned to public sentiment. And he has the enormous gift of making listeners, even Greenberg, give him the benefit of the doubt. When he says that his Administration is working so hard to balance the budget and deal with crime, the public gives him credit for it.

One reason Clinton's strengths have gone unappreciated is that liberals feel disappointed by him. Even for liberals who generally approve of his policies, like Richard Reeves, he doesn't quite measure up, basically because of his character and generation. And then there are the ideological complaints from points leftward. Vicious attacks on Clinton are by no means confined to the Right; Nation columnist Alexander Cockburn has referred to him as "President McMuffin," and Roger Morris's new Partners in Power is a left-wing diatribe against the First Couple.

Are leftists right to be so hard on the President? Greenberg seems to think so: "The charge that Bill Clinton is a closet liberal does him too much credit. It implies that somewhere he has an identifiable political philosophy. . . . Open his political closet and there's nothing there. Or rather, it's crammed full of political identities for every occasion." By 1994, Greenberg was able to write that "Bill Clinton is doing to liberalism what Richard Nixon did to conservatism: reduce it to an empty adjunct of his own political viability."

On this point I must respectfully disagree. There are indeed themes in Clinton's career. As governor, he soaked the poor and scattered tax exemptions on business interests; increased the government's use of what is charitably called "creative finance"; created public - private partnerships with little public accountability; weakened conflict-of-interest and sunshine laws; and strengthened his own control of law enforcement. He was thus able to construct a political coalition including not only labor and the welfare establishment but also bankers, bond counsels, developers, and owners of heavy-construction companies. Every interest group was invited to the table, except for taxpayers and consumers. Sound a bit like the Clintons' health-care plan?

If Bill Clinton has no ideology, he has shown a consistent disposition toward rule by experts. His commitment isn't philosophical, it's sociological. He is a defender of the New Class and its prerogatives. And his lack of character and conviction translates into liberalism in practice; it's in the interest of any power-hungry politician to increase the public's dependence on government. It's no coincidence that the Presidents who most expanded the welfare state -- FDR, LBJ, Nixon -- shared many of Clinton's political character traits. And leftist complaints notwithstanding, Clinton has done the best he could to maintain and expand government under unfavorable circumstances.

I must regretfully concur with Greenberg, though, when he suggests that Bill Clinton may be the President America deserves. "For when this President is at his most re-electable," he writes, "he is only reflecting our own desires, our own increasingly tenuous values." The spirit of the age "seems a remarkably spiritless spirit: full of sentimentality without emotion, leadership without direction, idealism without sacrifice, policy without decisions, great ambition without clear purpose, unending talk without much meaning or action." The most depressing thing about President Clinton is that he perfectly embodies the cultural moment.