According to the University of Michigan's consumer sentiment index, confidence in the economy hit another record high in July, exceeding the previous record set in the go-go days of 1965. How Bill Clinton takes advantage of this--and plays the politics of prosperity--may be the defining move in his effort to leave a favorable presidential legacy.
"If people are pretty satisfied and reasonably confident, it's the time to talk to them about what additional steps need to be taken, beyond conventional ideas," said political scientist Everett Carll Ladd, president of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut (Storrs). "It's a tremendous opportunity for anyone to try to say, `Look, this system is performing well in many regards, but it's got certain problems and needs, and here's how they should be addressed.' " In early August, White House chief of staff Erskine B. Bowles kicked off that process by requesting memos from the Domestic Policy Council, the National Economic Council, the National Security Council and the Office of Science and Technology Policy. They were asked not only about what remained on their plates for the fall, but also what they were planning for 1998 and beyond. Bowles and Sylvia Mathews, the White House deputy chief of staff, will review the memos before forwarding them to President Clinton, probably in early September.
"He and Sylvia really worked on people to get them to summarize what they'd done and what they planned to do," said one policy council senior staff member. "They were willing to look at everything."
Despite Clinton's intellectual curiosity and his concern about his legacy, some Democrats wonder how motivated the President is to tackle difficult domestic problems. "He seems to have talked himself into a situation [where] he already believes he's presided over a historic Administration," said one Democratic pollster. "If he really does think that, it would reduce the incentive to try something big at this point in his presidency."
After listening to the President talk about his new budget over the last couple of weeks, it's easy to understand why he might believe that. Despite the common criticism--that instead of making tough choices on spending and taxes, White House and GOP negotiators simply took advantage of a vibrant economy to produce a balanced budget by the year 2002--Clinton makes it sound as if the agreement belongs in the fiscal hall of fame.
At the Aug. 5 signing ceremony for the Balanced Budget Act of 1997, the President told a Rose Garden audience that the fiscal plan was "a true milestone for our nation." A few days earlier, in a Saturday morning radio address, he called the budget deal a "historic agreement that will benefit generations of Americans." And just before he went to Martha's Vineyard on vacation, the President was still touting the deal as a major breakthrough: In his Aug. 16 radio address to the nation, Clinton praised "the historic higher-education opportunities in our new balanced budget."
Clinton's advisers insist that he is primed for making even greater strides before he leaves office. "The President is very committed to passing long-term Social Security reform in his second term," said NEC director Gene B. Sperling. "But he also knows that a critical element of that will be finding a public and legislative process that could allow such reforms to come to fruition."
But there's plenty of reason to doubt that Clinton will be so venturesome. For starters, he'll undoubtedly be keeping an eye on presidential politics when tackling entitlement reforms. A truly `historic' effort to restructure these programs could provoke a liberal backlash in the year-2000 Democratic primaries and caucuses for his handpicked successor, Vice President Al Gore.
Moreover, Clinton has prospered politically by being a counter-puncher to the GOP Congress, not an aggressive leader. "It's more likely that the President will attempt what he has done in the past, which is to thwart challenges, and when opportunities are offered, to maximize them in short-term ways," said the University of Connecticut's Ladd.
"Clinton's been getting high marks by not screwing up and [by] treading very carefully," said University of Rochester political scientist Richard F. Fenno Jr. But he added: "Leadership has to do with both seizing opportunities and sensing opportunities."
In fact, presidential leadership is often measured by how a chief executive confronts a situation that people clearly perceive as a major threat, such as the way Franklin D. Roosevelt dealt with the Great Depression and Harry S Truman helped shape post-World War II Europe. But Clinton isn't facing a riveting crisis. Neither was Theodore Roosevelt when he built the Panama Canal, pushed his Square Deal program and created the Forest Service--undertaking the last two initiatives in his second term. (Teddy Roosevelt, the President that Clinton is said to use as a model, came to the White House during a time his contemporaries called the "age of confidence.")
The challenge for Clinton, as it was for Roosevelt, will be to make history, not wait for it to come to him.
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