The great triangulator.

Dead Center
Clinton-Gore Leadership and the Perils of Moderation
James MacGregor Burns and Georgia J. Sorenson
Scribner, $27.50, 416 pp.

Among political scientists, James MacGregor Burns is hall-of-fame class, a Pulitzer Prize winner (for his study of Roosevelt's leadership) whose writings on American politics have been stretching minds for a half-century and more. Now emeritus at Williams College, he is a senior scholar of the James MacGregor Burns Academy of Leadership at the University of Maryland, where Georgia Sorenson, a policy analyst in the Carter administration, serves as founding director.

That star quality gives them access to high places: back in 1992, Bill Clinton told Burns and Sorenson that he hoped to be a "transformative leader," one of those rare spirits who change the very terms of politics. Like a good many of us, they thought he just might succeed, and Dead Center is their entry in a long list of efforts to explain our disappointment.

Much of the book is a re-examination of the Clinton administration, interpreted as an inevitably unequal triumvirate of the president, Mrs. Clinton, and Vice President Al Gore. The events are largely familiar, as are most of Burns and Sorenson's interpretations, but their retelling is useful, since the public is forgetful to the very border of amnesia. And the authors give the story a certain melancholy force as a tale of lost opportunities and painful memories, the occasional triumph only highlighting the failed promise.

Clinton's defenders may protest that, in fact, the president has presided over what looks to be a transformation of American life-a "New Economy" featuring globalization, the Internet, and e-commerce that is changing us down to the toenails, to say nothing of welfare reform and a balanced budget. But Burns and Sorenson's "transformative leadership" asks for something more, a leader who is or seems to be ahead of events rather than merely reacting to them, able to "shape change," as Clinton said in 1993, "lest it engulf us," someone who vindicates the human capacity for self-government.

This helps explain the fact that Burns and Sorenson, progressive Democrats who wear their sympathies like badges of honor, speak rather kindly of Ronald Reagan, who-his obvious shortcomings aside-gave so many Americans confidence that convictions allied to public power can affect or redirect history. "We have it in our power," Reagan was fond of saying, quoting Tom Paine, "to begin the world over again." Paradoxically, Reagan, like Mrs. Thatcher, reminded us that even markets depend on political will, that they are human artifacts, even if we cannot make them behave as we please. By contrast, Clinton's presidency, far from revitalizing democratic life, is leaving an impression of politics as tawdry, inept, and irrelevant.

Burns and Sorenson recognize that Clinton was not dealt a strong hand: in 1992, the cold war had ended, the recession did not seem severe enough to require heroic measures, and Clinton himself was elected by voters-less than a majority, at that-who chose change hesitantly, with many second thoughts. On balance, however, they conclude that the fault was not in Bill Clinton's stars, but in his disposition to a leadership strategy that is happy to accommodate and cajole, but not to confront or combat. Despite his ambitions, Clinton proved, when tested, to be a "transactional leader," working within the existing political horizon, guided less by convictions than by an instinct for survival.

Harry Truman, that paladin of the moral center, loved the sound and smell of political contest. By contrast, Clinton's tactical "centrism," with its distaste for public conflict, is inherently uncomfortable with partisan debate and with democratic argument generally. As Burns and Sorenson remind us, the administration's health-care strategy assumed that the public could not understand the policy and that politicians would corrupt it, preferring-disastrously as it turned out-to hide its hand. Yet are Clinton's shortcomings explained-as Burns and Sorenson suggest-by a lack of conviction and courage, a failure of moral leadership? Or is a good part of their objection directed against the convictions he has?

Clinton, after all, has defied a considerable majority by opposing a ban on "partial birth" abortions; he offended labor over NAFTA and trade policy generally; and, though his list of accomplishments is thin, he hasn't wavered much in his commitment to racial equality. Clinton's politics, in practice, has reflected a fairly consistent elite liberalism, concerned with the categories of "identity politics" (he fumbled on gays in the military, of course, but his sympathies aren't in doubt), zealous to promote a broadly shared material well- being, but showing only a tepid interest in advancing economic equality or self-governing citizenship.

Hillary Clinton told the authors (mid-1998, before the president's "confession") that the administration's greatest achievement lay in having restored the "legitimacy of democracy" and in "reknitting the social fabric." She might as well have praised her husband for his fidelity: disenchantment with politics has never been higher, and America's rush toward two-tiered inequality has become downright frenzied.

Perhaps Mrs. Clinton would speak differently now. Burns and Sorenson hope so. Regarding Al Gore as too complicit in Clinton's "centrism," they allow themselves to predict that Hillary Rodham Clinton will emerge in her own right as a "militantly progressive" political leader. Maybe she will; running against Rudy Giuliani would turn almost anyone into a street fighter. Still, Mrs. Clinton did mastermind the administration's cabalistic politics of health care, and American progressives would be wise to cultivate a few alternative champions. On the major point, however, Burns and Sorenson have it right: In a time of transformations, America has every need of leaders capable of reviving its faltering democratic faith.

Wilson Carey McWilliams, a frequent contributor, is the author of Beyond the Politics of Disappointment? American Elections 1980E98 (Chatham House), among other books.