Government Executive - Authors - Burt Solomon

When Lincoln's State of the Union Leaked

Burt Solomon, The Atlantic — Tue, 20 Jan 2015 12:00:00 -0500

In this age of political posturing, the White House tries to scoop itself on the State of the Union message by pre-publicizing it in dribs and drabs. But in Lincoln’s day, leaking this affair of state was treated as a scandal—one that might have meant a world of hurt for Honest Abe just as his 11-year-old son died and the Civil War started to turn the Union's way.

Hours before Lincoln sent his first State of the Union message to Congress on December 3, 1861—in those days, the message was delivered in writing—an anti-Lincoln newspaper, the New York Herald, published a few excerpts. No big deal, right? Wrong. Lincoln scrambled to cover up the apparent source of the leak—his wife—and to save his administration from a public humiliation.

The House Judiciary Committee pursued the leaker, or leakers, with a vengeance. It already had reason to suspect their identities before its investigation began in February 1862. The correspondent for the Herald’s archrival New York Tribune had fingered, as a go-between, a flatterer and social climber named Henry Wikoff, who was getting “news from the White House … from women … members of the president’s family.”

The Chevalier Wikoff, as he liked to be known, for some obscure past service to the Spanish crown, had hobnobbed with royalty all over Europe. Now in Washington, he served as a secret correspondent for the Herald (he was friends with the newspaper’s founder and editor, James Gordon Bennett) and had exploited Mary Lincoln’s social insecurities to insinuate himself into her affections.

The involvement of Mrs. Lincoln may help explain the vigor of the committee’s pursuit. John Hickman, the severe-looking chairman, was an eloquently anti-slavery Republican from Pennsylvania who presumably shared many northerners’ scorn for the president’s wife. Besides having a brother, three half-brothers, and three brothers-in-law in the Confederate army, Mrs. Lincoln was assailed for lavishly redecorating the Executive Mansion while Union soldiers needed blankets. Earlier in February, the press had pilloried the First Lady (to whom that term was first applied, by the correspondent for The Times of London) for putting on an “ostentatious” and “most unseemly” White House ball.

Chairman

Hickman also had reason to attack theNew York Herald, which had knocked him in 1860 as “only a fighter with his tongue.” The committee subpoenaed Wikoff, who confessed his own role in informing the Herald of the main points of the president’s address. But he refused to reveal how he had learned of them. For this, he was held in contempt of Congress and jailed.

Wikoff was confined in a rat- and roach-infested storeroom in the Capitol’s subbasement, attended by a Newfoundland named Jack. For a dandy who showed (a biographer wrote) a “slightly hysterical reaction to any situation,” one night was enough.

He had help in getting out. Daniel Sickles, another of the capital’s peacocks, went to the White House on his behalf. As a congressman, Sickles had shot and killed his wife’s lover on a Washington street (and won acquittal on the unprecedented grounds of temporary insanity). Now a brigadier general known for his political skills, he visited Wikoff’s unfortunate quarters the next morning, passing himself off as the prisoner’s counsel.

Their conversation prompted Wikoff to send a note to Chairman Hickman that he was ready to talk. The sergeant-at-arms brought the witness back before the committee, where he dumbfounded the members when he named his source for the leak: none other than the White House gardener, John Watt. Watt confessed the following day, telling the committee the unlikely story that he had seen the message in the president’s library, memorized passages, and recited them to Wikoff.

But why would the gardener admit guilt for something he hadn’t done? Well, he was in a legal tangle of his own. The month before, another House committee had accused him of secessionist sympathies. Worse, he was engaged in blackmail. As an expert at padding invoices, he had taught the skill to Mrs. Lincoln, whose social and decorative ambitions exceeded Congress’s purse. Now he was demanding $20,000 in exchange for three of Mrs. Lincoln’s incriminating letters. Accepting blame for leaking the president’s message, Watt lost his White House job but landed a $1,500 per year sinecure at the Patent Office.

If doubts remained about the source of the leak, the Herald’s regular Washington correspondent seemed to settle them a few days later. S.P. Hanscom had wired the original dispatch to New York after Wikoff told him of the annual message’s contents. Testifying under protest, he told the committee Wikoff had assured him “that he got it from Mrs. Lincoln; otherwise I should not have sent it … I readily believed what he told me, because I knew that he was frequently up at the White House.”

The committee heard from another witness as well: President Lincoln. He reportedly testified in person, and in secret, that nobody outside his Cabinet had seen the message in advance—meaning, not his wife.

The next week, the Judiciary Committee members voted not to publish testimony about the role of “any member of the President’s family.” With only a single dissent—the chairman’s—the committee spared the first family any further disgrace. Despite the dangers they posed, the leaked excerpts proved no more memorable than the rest of the speech. Lincoln's first State of the Union message sank into the historical obscurity that is such addresses' customary fate.

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Analysis: Americans Need to Re-embrace Sacrifice

Burt Solomon, National Journal — Thu, 06 Dec 2012 17:00:00 -0500

The most impassioned debate in the nation’s capital last summer wasn’t over the role of government or the fragile economy or even the ill-tempered presidential campaign. At issue: Should Stephen Strasburg continue to pitch? The Washington Nationals’ phenom had undergone surgery in 2011, and general manager Mike Rizzo vowed to protect the 24-year-old ace’s elbow by limiting his season to 160 innings. As the eight-year-old franchise contended for its first pennant, radio talk shows erupted when Strasburg was benched. The Nats made the playoffs—yippee!—but were eliminated all too soon.

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“A developmental decision,” in Rizzo’s baseballspeak. But it was grander—and rarer—than that. Rizzo was willing to sacrifice the short-term goal of guzzling October champagne—which, as it happened, he did—to improve his pitcher’s odds of a long, productive career and the ball club’s chances for future championships. He was doing something increasingly un-American: thinking long-term.

Soon we’ll see whether a still-President Obama and a still-Republican-run House will sacrifice cherished goals and risk their political comfort in hopes of shoring up the U.S. economy for decades to come. One thing is clear: Whatever steps are necessary to restore the economy to greatness will require money and pain. Navigating the fiscal cliff, restraining the federal debt, controlling the spiraling costs of medical care and entitlement programs, restoring a crumbling infrastructure—none of this will be easy or cheap.

Americans used to be good at hard tasks. The Puritanism that animated the culture of early America prepared the Founders to risk their lives and sacred honor on a new nation’s success. The self-abnegation and bravery required to settle the Western frontier shaped (at considerable cost to Native Americans and buffalo) a nation’s self-image. The ethos of Horatio Alger and the self-made man still propels Americans’ ambitions. Hardy members of the Greatest Generation survived the Great Depression and fought the last good war—but not, it is useful to remember, because they wanted to. They had no damn choice.

It’s human nature, after all, to prefer prosperity and ease over sacrifice and back-breaking labor. But, as any parent knows, restraining human nature is a precondition for civilization.

So, what happened to Americans’ willingness to sacrifice? The reasons are financial, cultural—and endemic. Assumed prosperity and self-indulgence turned the Greatest Generation’s idealistic children into me-generation materialists. Driven by corporate raiders and stockholders flexing their muscles, Wall Street began to stress quarterly earnings over long-term strength. The Reagan administration offered supply-side economics as an elixir that could turn lower taxes into higher federal revenue. In state after state, voters cut their property taxes and damaged public schools. Decades of inflation and easy credit taught consumers that borrowing for your heart’s desires will cost you less to repay. It’s tougher to sacrifice when your income is stagnant or worse; average Americans have less to give.

The problem isn’t Washington. It’s us. No longer are we willing to pay full freight for the things we know we need. Voters who demand something for nothing will expel any politician who preaches otherwise, and politicians who fear for their jobs—that is, all of them—will comply. Americans used to pay for their wars, but President George W. Bush, nervous about public support for invading Iraq, waved a credit card instead. We elect (and reelect) the cowardly leaders we deserve.

It’s important not to overstate things. Parents still sacrifice for their children. Americans donated nearly $300 billion to charity in 2011, more than 10 times as much (adjusted for inflation) as 40 years ago. Political philosopher Michael Sandel has described the all-volunteer military—the 0.45 percent of Americans on active duty—as the nation’s “last repository of civic idealism and sacrifice for the sake of the common good.”

There are reasons for optimism about the fiscal cliff and the nation’s To Do list—in Obama’s desire to be a historic president, in Republicans’ need to avoid a demographics-driven minority status, in a legislative dynamic that assures that taxpayers will suffer if nothing is done. If Americans can summon a spirit of sacrifice and start acting again like adults, our leaders will lead.

Image via Orhan Cam/Shutterstock.com

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Inauguration will set tone for Bush presidency

Burt Solomon — Fri, 19 Jan 2001 00:00:00 -0500

Inaugural Omens

On a spring day in 1789, the first George W.--George Washington--passed up a carriage and chose to travel on foot from the dock in New York, then the capital, as he arrived for his inauguration. The point: to show that he was not a king. For anyone who can decipher the political tea leaves--and the trick is knowing which are the right tea leaves--the nation's 53 inaugurations have often presaged how an Administration turns out. James Monroe, toward the end of his first inaugural address, mentioned the South American countries that were then struggling for independence from Europe, and thus offered the first glimmer of what became known as the Monroe Doctrine. The riot inside the White House among Andrew Jackson's drunken supporters on his first day in office drove him out through a window and set a tone for the Democrat's democratic tenure. Grover Cleveland, a business-minded Democrat, breakfasted at the Willard Hotel on the morning of his second inaugural, in 1893, with 100 businessmen from New York, his home state. Months later, when he found himself presiding over the worst economic depression the nation had yet seen, he nevertheless kept to his gold-standard conservatism. A shrewd President or President-elect can manipulate the symbols of an inauguration to salve some of his political wounds and to get off to a vigorous start. It was vigor--or, as he pronounced it, vigah--that John F. Kennedy meant to project when he forswore an overcoat at noontime on a bitterly cold day in 1961. After winning the election with the narrowest of margins in the popular vote, Kennedy invoked what Fred I. Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton University, described as "broad national symbols," in the patriotic, Cold War rhetoric of his acclaimed inaugural address and in his choice of cultural icons such as black contralto Marian Anderson singing the National Anthem and Robert Frost reciting a poem. It worked, in that Kennedy raised his public approval rating past 70 percent, but at a cost. His harsh words upset the Soviets, according to Greenstein, and led to diplomatic setbacks early in his presidency. Clinton set out to portray himself as another, more soulful JFK. After he had worshipped at a predominantly black church in Washington in the morning, Clinton had black author Maya Angelou read a poem at the inaugural ceremony. Jimmy Carter, too, showed himself as a racially conciliatory Southerner; he stationed the Rev. Martin Luther King Sr., a fellow Georgian, on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, where his famous son had given the "I Have a Dream" speech in 1963. Carter also used his first day in office to bring an end to the socially divisive Vietnam War era by issuing a pardon for draft dodgers. He couldn't have imagined that, precisely four years later, he would give up his office to Ronald Reagan just as American hostages, whose capture in Iran had ruined Carter's presidency, were being released--dramatizing how little influence any President exerts over his own political fate. It is nothing new for Inauguration Day to recall--or foretell--political disaster, as Glenn Kittler wrote in Hail to the Chief! The Inauguration Days of Our Presidents. Because William Henry Harrison felt a need during his 1840 campaign to portray himself as more rugged than he really was, he rode a magnificent white charger to the Capitol on a frigid, wet day and spurned an overcoat, gloves, and a hat as he delivered the longest inaugural address ever; he died of pneumonia within a month. The 1889 inauguration of his grandson, Benjamin Harrison, marked the first overt intrusion of commerce into the event. Each guest at the inaugural ball (held in the Pension Building, the site of a planned Bush inaugural ball) was given a rose that smelled even sweeter than a natural rose, with a tag on the stem that identified the perfume manufacturer. The new President went on to conduct a corrupt Administration. Both of Abraham Lincoln's inaugurations were redolent of the danger that would ultimately take his life. In 1861, as the Union was crumbling, none of the political notables was willing to take the first step onto the Capitol podium, despite the policemen who had mixed in with the crowd, until Sen. Stephen Douglas, D-Ill.-Lincoln's political archrival--led the way. As Lincoln crossed the Capitol Rotunda on the way to his second swearing-in, a young man broke through the ranks of police and nearly reached the wartime President; the authorities held the perpetrator until they were satisfied that he wasn't insane, and then they released the actor named John Wilkes Booth. It was also at Lincoln's second inaugural that his new Vice President, Andrew Johnson, arrived drunk. Johnson's reputation never recovered, and he began a political descent that led to his impeachment as President in 1868. Inauguration Day brought bad omens in the 20th century, too. In 1929, Herbert Hoover wanted the Bible used in the swearing-in to be opened to the Sermon on the Mount, but because of some last-minute confusion over logistics, the pages were turned at random, and his fingers touched a verse from Proverbs: "Where there is no vision, the people perish." (The stock market crashed within eight months, and four years later, on the afternoon before Inauguration Day, a venomous confrontation erupted between the unseated Hoover and his successor, Franklin D. Roosevelt.) In 1973, demonstrators flung fruit and stones at President Nixon's car during his second inaugural parade, 19 months before he was driven from office because of the Watergate scandal. Even as unintended imagery takes hold, an inaugural's meticulously crafted symbolism may well fall flat. Clinton's call for sacrifice never went beyond words. His predecessor, the first President Bush, went to considerable lengths on his Inauguration Day, in 1989, to show that he was a regular guy. He refused an overcoat, wore a business suit (a contrast to Reagan's cutaway), and walked part of the way to the White House. He invited country singers Loretta Lynn and Randy Travis to perform at his inaugural gala, and he opened the White House to the public--the first such event in 80 years--the day after he assumed office. These symbols, however, turned out to say little about the presidency that followed, which ended after a single term because of Bush's apparent lack of interest in the public's economic travails. What Bush Needs

The 41st President's eldest son is planning a White House open house of his own. He might also want to repeat, even word for word, his father's unheeded plea to end the bickering in Washington. That isn't all that the new President Bush might want to try on his Inauguration Day. He has quite a lot to get done. More than anything, said Greenstein, Bush must show "gravitas and magnanimity." For the latter, he is expected to reach out to bitter Democrats and to say something flattering about the valor of Al Gore, his defeated opponent, who, as the departing Vice President, plans to be seated on the Capitol podium. For a boyish and inexperienced new President, gravitas may be harder to show. A compelling inaugural address, from this tongue-tied scion of an inarticulate family, would help. "To me, he needs to show that he can't wait to get to the job," said Tate, who suggested that he might want to "go to work the first day and sign something," or call a Cabinet meeting, or reopen Pennsylvania Avenue in front of the White House to traffic. Any symbolic venture that Bush might want to try will have to compete with political theater beyond his control. Suppose that the planned protests over the contested election outcome in Florida catch fire, literally or figuratively, or that something unplanned or unforeseen suddenly looks like an augury. After Bush was inaugurated as the new governor of Texas, in 1995, the Houston Chronicle marveled at the unprecedented amount of sequins and minks "assembled at a country-and-western soiree." Given the pitfalls, Bush's most powerful symbolism might prove to be no symbolism at all. For one thing, despite the elder Bush's self-conscious efforts in 1989--or in part because of them--an absence of artifice would jibe with his family's carefully bred instincts for how to behave. "The Bushes don't grandstand," Curt Smith said. Less-is-more may be the easiest course for the 43rd President. But politically, it may also be the wisest course. That is Vic Gold's considered judgment. The former speechwriter and biographer for the elder Bush suggested that the new President should make an effort "not to strain too hard" to embody a political image, because his appeal rests on his "naturalness, the genuineness" of how he comes across. Any obvious effort at public relations, Gold said, might look transparent. "I'm PR'd out," he sighed, and he didn't think he was alone: "I really think that the public is gimmicked out." Besides, no matter how the inauguration turns out, a presidency can recover--or collapse. For Rutherford B. Hayes, a sagging economy revived and his conciliatory attitude prevailed. By the end of his term, he was considered a successful president, though not enough so to prompt him to rethink his promise to forgo a second term.

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Next President may not face gridlock

Richard E. Cohen and Burt Solomon — Tue, 14 Nov 2000 00:00:00 -0500

"The swing voters didn't swing--they split," said Gary Langer, an analyst for ABC News.

Is this precise bisection something scary? Probably not. "The country is evenly divided over things that aren't that important," says Mark S. Mellman, a Democratic pollster who has been close to the Gore campaign. He contrasts prescription drugs and tax cuts--leading issues in this still-to-be-concluded presidential campaign--with slavery and civil rights.

The even-steven split of the electorate may be evidence that, nationwide, the two major parties have at last achieved something like parity. A. James Reichley, a Washington expert on political parties, says that Democrats still slightly out-register Republicans, but that in voting behavior, each party "claims just about half of the electorate." Or maybe it is merely a measure of how little was really at stake in this election, at a blessedly boring time of peace and prosperity; or of how unappealing the respective candidates were to voters of the other political persuasion, after a long campaign that often was about nothing larger than itself.

This was fine with the public, which hasn't been demanding that very much be done. And why should it? "These are the best of times," says Richard P. Nathan, the director of the Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government in Albany, N.Y., and so "it is best to not rock the boat.... This is not a time for hot-button, hotly debated changes." Before the election, an important Republican lawmaker said privately: "Most Americans don't want us to produce a lot."

The longer and nastier the battle over the White House becomes, of course, the greater the chances that these ever-lower expectations will be met. The bitter feelings that are sure to remain (stirring the emotional embers from impeachment) can only make it harder for Washington to get anything done during the next two to four years, no matter who is in the White House. A mandate, after all, is in the eye of the beholder, and on election night, even Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, R-Miss., acknowledged on CNN that Bush, if elected, "may not have a sweeping mandate" from such an ambivalent electorate. Neither would-be President is likely to cast into lawmakers' hearts the fear of an angry electorate, which is probably the deepest and truest source of power behind an honest-to-God electoral mandate.

A Ray of Hope

Be prepared, however, to be surprised: The next President may well get considerably more accomplished than the quickly coalescing wisdom in Washington suggests. Bush's chances would seem to be stronger than Gore's. "In a perverse sort of way," political scientist Earl Black of Rice University surmised the day after the election, "Bush has a real opportunity here to succeed, even though the nation itself is sharply divided."

It won't be easy--especially with Congress so evenly divided. "It obviously is going to be difficult on the part of anybody to put together majorities," says Howard G. Paster, who was President Clinton's top lobbyist on Capitol Hill from 1993-95.

And no matter how the current saga ends, it will only get harder to end the bickering in Washington, something Bush said again and again on the stump that he wishes to do. He would need to appeal to at least a cluster of congressional Democrats if he is to have any hope of cobbling together a governing majority, while keeping the loyalties of his purported friends. One of the psychological thrillers in a Bush presidency would be whether Rep. Tom DeLay of Texas, on behalf of other hard-charging Republican conservatives, would heed calls for a bipartisan tone or fulfill the role that Rep. Newt Gingrich of Georgia played for Bush's dad-a determined obstacle to a fellow Republican in the White House.

The noises from Capitol Hill in the wake of the election certainly sounded conciliatory enough. Senate Minority Leader Thomas A. Daschle, D-S.D., said, "We should ... work in a bipartisan way." Amid talk that a President-elect Bush would invite conservative Democrats in the House to Austin, Texas, one of their leaders, Rep. Charles W. Stenholm, D-Texas, said in an interview: "With the new administration, you're going to see a change in the atmosphere."

James A. Thurber of American University, an expert in executive-congressional relations, guessed that maybe 10 to 15 House Democrats might respond to a bipartisan call, roughly half of the 25 to 30 that Bush would probably need to get much of anything done.

But there is reason to think that Bush might find some success. "If we reach out at the beginning of the process, the opportunity is there to build a bipartisan consensus," Rep. John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, who is close to the Bush campaign, said in an interview the day after the election. "Substantial numbers of Democrats will be willing to work with us. At least one-fourth of House Democrats really want to accomplish something for their constituency, if they are dealt with fairly by us." James Cicconi, a veteran of past Republican White Houses who has helped the younger Bush's campaign, suggests that "both parties will be compelled by politics, and by people's expectations, to come together."

The political environment, in many respects, would be favorable. Bush would be one up on his father in facing a Congress run by Republicans, not by Democrats. That would enable like-minded (or, at least, like-partied) politicians to run the congressional committees and to control the schedule and procedures for action on the floor-an awesome power, especially in the more rule-bound House.

Money Always Helps

Bush could also benefit from a fiscal environment far more buoyant than his dad ever had. Even if the expiring 106th Congress indulges in an orgy of appropriations--as it did before the election, even though some of these might be undone during the coming lame-duck session, which now appears likely to extend into December--the 43rd President and the 107th Congress would still have plenty to spend. According to Robert D. Reischauer, the president of the Urban Institute and a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, the CBO's latest preliminary (though unreleased) estimates show that the projected budget surplus will show "at least as much money and probably more, conceivably a good deal more," than Congress had figured on before.

In the flashiest item on his campaign agenda--a gigantic, across-the-board tax cut--Bush might find some solace. To pass a tax cut, says Cicconi, Bush would have to work with congressional Democrats and "be prepared to address a lot of their concerns." This suggests a smaller tax cut, with less of a focus on estate taxes, than candidate Bush proposed. But Reischauer, for one, suspects that the Democrats would be hard-pressed to fend off a politically appealing tax cut without an offer of their own.

Bush, if elected, could also accomplish something on health care and education. Democrats and Republicans alike are eager to start subsidizing prescription drugs for the elderly, a subsidy that Bush has tied in with a larger fling at reforming the Medicare program. Both parties may want to do something concrete on that--and also on a patients' bill of rights--before they face voters in 2002. Republican strategists are also banking on an education package that includes, for starters, a program to let parents in underachieving schools use governmental resources to send their children to private (and maybe parochial) schools. This program might give Bush, mindful of the support in many inner cities for an alternative to failing public schools, an opportunity to reach out to members of the Black Caucus.

Unless he concludes that his campaign proposal to let younger workers invest some of their contributions in private investment accounts costs him a clear victory in Florida, Bush might also try his hand at restructuring the politically volatile Social Security program. "Exit polls showed that Social Security reform was a reason for voters to support him," said Rep. Rob Portman, R-Ohio, who is close to Bush's policy advisers. But the program's finances are safe for another 10 to 12 years, and the political and technical complexities may demand prudence from Bush; he might set up a blue-ribbon commission to craft a bipartisan approach and to build up public support.

Combined, these accomplishments would be nothing like a New Deal or a Reagan-like sharp turn in the nation's direction. Under no circumstances should people expect a policy-flourishing first 100 days. But the country, not facing an economic depression or double-digit interest rates, does not want one. Voters' expectations are low--and probably falling daily. Their ideals won't be hard to meet or exceed.

The caveat for Bush is that personal charm may have its limits. In an inaugural address, Bush could easily repeat--without even having to rekeyboard--the sentiments that his father, the 41st President, uttered in his 1989 inaugural address: The American people "didn't send us here to bicker" but rather "to rise above the merely partisan." Well, that was a dozen years ago, and nobody listened then-or has since. So could a second President Bush, younger and less experienced, pull it off? There's every reason to be skeptical.

"Just because George Bush wants comity and sings 'Kumbaya,' " says Thurber, "it's not going to work politically." For one thing, unabashedly assertive interest groups--labor unions, businesses, and the elderly--will still want what they want, and will press lawmakers to resist what the White House wants.

The Gore Outlook

Low expectations would work in Gore's favor as well, if he should wind up in the White House. Not a lot else would. Republican congressional leaders pretty much detest him (especially, by one account, since his Nov. 4 characterization of the presidential race as a matter of good vs. evil). Nor does Gore, who is something of a loner, share the natural schmoozing skills of his political mentor President Clinton. In getting along with Congress, Gore "should aspire to be as good as Clinton," says a well-placed aide to a Democratic liberal on Capitol Hill, "but I doubt he would make it." An aide to a Democratic conservative describes Gore as aloof and distant, and less sensitive to lawmakers' political needs than Clinton has been.

A Gore administration may be little different from Clinton's, except there would be more tension between the White House and congressional Republicans. Unlike Clinton, who ordinarily does what his pollsters tell him, "Al Gore actually believes some of the things he's saying," and he would try to put his "strident liberal ideology" into practice, says an aide to a conservative House Republican. But he isn't as skilled in communicating as Clinton is, the aide added. Gore's political opponents would probably "fare much better in a public clash with Al Gore than we did in public clashes with Bill Clinton."

As a creature of Washington, though, and of Congress in particular, Gore may have a better intuitive feel than Clinton does about the political turf. He served eight years in each chamber and occasionally indulged in bipartisanship, as he did on defense and telecommunications matters in the Senate. Gore might be able to pick up support from a smattering of moderate Republicans and pass a few things, such as prescription drug subsidies, a patients' bill of rights, some investment in education, and maybe some of the targeted tax cuts he proposed during the campaign. Rep. Michael N. Castle, R-Del., said in an interview that Gore "does not have many personal relations" with members of Congress. But, he added, "I don't think Republican moderates are going to turn our backs on anyone."

But other Republicans are dubious, pointing out that the election and the contested result would leave Gore in such a weakened position that bipartisanship may be elusive. "Al Gore has shown that he has a harder edge than Bill Clinton and that he is willing to win at all costs," said a senior House GOP aide. "The greater ideal of American democracy is secondary to him." Although it's possible that Gore could win House passage for parts of his agenda, the Republican aide added, "some in the Senate would say, `screw you,' and teach him about the filibuster."

Congressional Democrats have barely begun to focus on how a Gore administration would function in the wake of the bruising election aftermath, but some contend that he must follow Clinton's path. "We have to govern from the center out, as Clinton demonstrated, and Gore can do that," said a House Democratic leadership aide. Gore ought to work first on his priorities--campaign finance reform and patients' rights laws--because, in each case, the measures have bipartisan support and the public wants action, the aide added. During the past two years, Clinton and Congress pressed each other on those issues, but neither side showed much willingness to reach common ground. And complicating Gore's task is his indebtedness to the groups who voted for him in large numbers--African-Americans and union members. These groups may take a harder line than Gore on many issues and hurt his chances for compromise.

If Gore is politically supple enough, though, he could possibly turn his disregard for fellow Democrats' opinions into a legislative plus, by pursuing a truly bipartisan approach on issues such as tax cuts and entitlement reform and trying to strike deals with mainstream Republicans, much as Clinton did on welfare reform and in balancing the federal budget. Bipartisanship isn't something Gore talked about during his campaign--he preferred a populist, confrontational tone.

But during White House strategy sessions in the soon-to-end administration, Gore showed himself more willing than Clinton to buck pressure from elsewhere in the Democratic Party. "He would be temperamentally suited to take the risk down the middle," says Patrick J. Griffin, who served as Clinton's top congressional lobbyist during 1995-96, "but whether the Republicans would be receptive and/or see it in their self-interest--that's the question." The alternative, however, may be gridlock.

But if either man succeeds, he may well have Clinton to thank. As an activist President in a relatively unhistoric era, Clinton talked loudly and carried a small stick. He filled the stage but, in the vast scale of history, didn't do a hell of a lot. It was enough, though, to earn him two terms in office and, everything considered, a decent measure of success.

Staff correspondent David Baumann and National Journal News Service correspondent David Hess contributed to this report.

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DOT assembles family of crash test dummies

Burt Solomon — Tue, 11 Apr 2000 00:00:00 -0400

The next generation of crash test dummies is coming of age. Within weeks, officials say, the Department of Transportation and the Office of Management and Budget will sign off on a new regime of crash testing that will bring diversity of size to the sacrificial dummies.

Until now, all crash dummies have resembled 50th-percentile men, weighing 165 to 170 pounds and standing, or rather sitting, at 5 feet 10 inches tall. But that was part of the reason so many children and smallish women died after being struck by deployed air bags a few years ago, when the crash cushions first came into common use. The spate of highly publicized deaths prompted the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to develop a set of smaller crash dummies.

The new high-tech dummies, already in automakers' hands, embody a 5th-percentile woman-weighing 102 pounds and standing 5 feet 1 or 2 inches-as well as a 6-year-old child, a 3-year-old, and a 1-year-old. They, along with the old man, will have to "survive" automakers' crash tests, once the new regulations go into effect.

The new dummies aren't cheap. Rolf H. Eppinger, a NHTSA researcher, says they cost $60,000 to $80,000 apiece, counting their sophisticated instrumentation. It hasn't been easy to stuff so many sensors into smaller dummies. But they'll earn their keep, if their painstakingly measured agonies save human lives.

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Republicans seek Social Security statement changes

Burt Solomon — Mon, 10 Jan 2000 00:00:00 -0500

Why not use the federal government to do itself in?

The Social Security Administration has begun to send annual statements to all Americans over 25, just before their birthdays, to report on the payroll taxes they've paid and the retirement benefits they can expect. The Heritage Foundation, however, with some allies in Congress, wants to go one better.

The think tank's idea is to make the agency enclose some subversive stuff, including an admission that the money set aside for Social Security is a claim on the Treasury rather than assets in hand. Heritage also wants included a short history of the declining rates of return on what Americans pay into the massive, government-run retirement fund. "Truth-in-packaging," says David John, a senior policy analyst at Heritage.

Sen. Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Rep. John E. Sununu of New Hampshire, both Republicans, have been drafting legislation to that effect, which they plan to introduce as soon as Congress returns to work.

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Government is the enemy no more

Burt Solomon — Mon, 18 Oct 1999 00:00:00 -0400

This wasn't the Gary Bauer of political lore. Maybe it was because he was speaking to a roomful of secular, skeptical journalists at the National Press Club in Washington, as well as a nationwide television audience via C-SPAN.

The Republican presidential candidate, the favorite son of many religious conservatives, invoked the name of God just twice-and of "Reagan" four times. This was a worldly, witty Bauer, a self-styled populist who railed against "Wall Street's stock speculators" and "Washington's well-heeled lobbyists," and who dared to denigrate corporations as just another special interest.

The point of his appearance was to propose a 16 percent flat tax, financed by eliminating the existing tax deductions for the depreciation of industrial plants and machinery. But it wasn't, in Bauer's parlance, simply a flat tax. No, it was "a family-friendly flat tax," one "that puts our people first"-a tax, that is, with a purpose, of helping some people at others' expense. Bauer "is a conservative social engineer," grouses Edward H. Crane, the founder and president of the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank. "He has no principled objection to federal action to get people to do things that he thinks should be done."

Bauer claims the ideological mantle of Ronald Reagan, whom he served as the top White House domestic policy adviser in 1987-88. But, in a fundamental way, he doesn't deserve it. Reagan regarded government as a necessary evil, something to be removed from Americans' collective backs. He believed in undoing the New Deal apparatus of governmental subsidies and regulation, to restore America to the small-town, halcyon past found in his most evocative movies.

That's not Bauer. In all sorts of ways, he wants to wield the power of the federal government to make the world a better place. And he isn't alone in this. Nearly all of his rivals for the presidency in next year's election feel the same. As the candidates argue over education or Social Security or helping the poor, "everyone in that debate acknowledges a role for government in forcing some redistribution of resources," says Jeffrey A. Eisenach, once an ideas man for former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., and now the president of the Progress & Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank. "The debate is over method."

It's no surprise to see Democrats who aspire to the White House natter on about ambitious new federal programs, such as the recent proposals to assure that every child has health insurance (Bill Bradley) and a year of pre-kindergarten education (Al Gore). A certain faith in government also comes naturally to the Reform Party, which aims to change Washington's political culture so that the federal government works more in the voters' true interests than it has of late.

Seeing the GOP's would-be Presidents gush about using government to solve society's ills, however, is more of a shock. The GOP's Governors, who are constantly under pressure to deliver quotidian services to querulous voters, have been talking like that for a while.

But now this tendency toward-shall we whisper the word?-activism has spread to the national party as well. Except possibly for Steve Forbes, the Republican presidential hopefuls allude to Washington as not only part of the problem, but as part of the solution. They don't favor an expansive government, and frequently give lip service to just the opposite, but they want a government that's strong and effective, capable of playing a vital-and salutary-role in people's lives.

They're looking for "a governing conservatism," Eisenach says, one that's suited to a post-New Deal era, that "has a role in creating institutions that structure the market." Candidates might propose delivering services by means of market-based mechanisms, such as vouchers or privatized accounts, but they would still anoint winners and losers by funneling the taxpayers' beneficences through Washington.

Compared with 1980, when Reagan was elected President, or with 1994, when the GOP seized control of Congress, the course of the 2000 presidential campaign shows a clear moderation in the Republican Party, says James P. Pinkerton, who was a domestic policy adviser to Reagan and then to President Bush. On an ideological spectrum, "where Ed Crane is a 1 and Pol Pot is a 10," Pinkerton puts Reagan and the House's Class of '94 at three or three and one-half, and the current crop of Republican candidates at four and one-half.

This is no small shift, given that the Democrats start at about five and one-half. The Conservatism of Yore

He was rarely subtle, and he didn't intend to be. When he spoke on nationwide television in 1964 on behalf of doomed Republican presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, actor Ronald Reagan declared that "a government can't control the economy without controlling people." In accepting the GOP presidential nomination in 1980, he warned that "government is never more dangerous than when our desire to have it help us blinds us to its great power to harm us." In his first inaugural address, he was blunt: "Government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem."

In the White House, Reagan was probably as willing to compromise as most Presidents are. But other than his flamboyant act of firing the nation's air traffic controllers rather than letting them go out on strike, it is hard to think of occasions when Reagan exploited the domestic powers of the federal government in a heavy-handed way. To the contrary, he tried to scale back. First, he persuaded Congress to cut and flatten federal income taxes; later he championed a tax reform plan (partly inspired, ironically, by Bradley) that stripped away most of the preferences for one thing or another that Washington (and its lobbyists) had engraved in the nation's tax code over the decades. Quite consistently, though with varying degrees of success, Reagan tried to end programs, cut budgets, deregulate commerce, abolish Cabinet departments, and bequeath federal functions to the states.

Reagan saw the federal government as "a great blundering dinosaur, which got in the way of people," recounts Stuart Butler, the vice president for domestic policy at the Heritage Foundation, which was influential in helping chart the Reagan Administration's course. Shrinking the government was a good thing on its own, in Reagan's view, for it would unleash the nation's entrepreneurial spirit.

This anti-government zeitgeist survived President Bush's kinder, gentler tenure-which included enactment (and his signing) of the Americans with Disabilities Act and a strengthened Clean Air Act. It resurfaced in 1994, with the election of ardent Republican conservatives of a traditional bent, who were devoted to chopping federal spending, eliminating agencies, and balancing the budget.

Unfortunately for these cocky Republicans, they overreached. They tried to curb federal subsidies for school lunches and, in the course of a budget dispute with Clinton, succeeded in shutting down the government-actions the public disliked.

The Republicans misinterpreted the 1994 election as a victory for conservative ideology, contends David Winston, senior vice president at Fabrizio, McLaughlin and Associates, a Republican polling firm in Alexandria, Va., whereas it was really a protest by the voters against ideology-specifically, against the liberalism embodied in Clinton's failed, labyrinthine proposal to overhaul the nation's health care system. "They didn't elect those folks to be ideological," Winston says. "They elected them to get things done. . . . People want to see results."

In another way as well, the GOP's smashing successes may have served only to assure a turnaround, or least a lull, in the party's historic hostility to government. For the jolt prompted Clinton, a political chameleon, whose secret of political survival has been his belief in almost everything, to bid an artful surrender. Adopting the political balancing act that became known as triangulation, Clinton threw in with congressional Republicans to balance the budget, revamp the nation's reviled welfare system, and in other ways narrow the distinctions between the competing parties.

The result is that Clinton has done for Reagan what President Dwight D. Eisenhower did for Franklin D. Roosevelt. As the first Republican in the White House since Herbert Hoover, Eisenhower effectively ratified the New Deal, with its momentous expansion in federal authority, by not trying to reverse it. Likewise, Clinton has pretty much accepted-on the Democratic Party's behalf-Reagan's vision of a smaller government by merely tinkering with it instead of trying to undo it.

In other words, the era of big-or, at least, bigger-government is over, as Clinton has said. That debate's over, and Reagan won. "The notion of a grandiloquent government has been pretty much eliminated," Pinkerton notes.

This leaves a vastly different issue on the table: now what? That's a question that sets off backs and forths about the sorts of things that government should do. On nearly every political stump, there has been a lot of talk about redefining a role for government-one that's restrained but unashamed-that is capable of accomplishing what the public wants.

A Generosity Toward Government

What the public wants, and how it wants to get it, are often closely related questions, with answers that won't stand still. "People inherently don't trust the government," nor are they inclined to see it grow, Edward T. Schafer of North Dakota, the incoming chairman of the Republican Governors Association, said in an interview. But at the same time, he noted, "people are compassionate," and they'll support the government if they think their money is well-spent. And possibly never more so than now. With the budget now balanced, the government more efficient, and the economy still going strong, Schafer surmised, "they're not looking for a bogeyman or evil out there."

In this age of poll-driven politics, it is no surprise that politicians' embrace of an activist role for government has seemed to sit well, by and large, with the electorate. Some dramatic evidence arrived last month in a CBS News poll, which found that Americans only narrowly prefer a smaller government that offers fewer services to a bigger government that does more (by 46 percent to 43 percent, which is within the survey's margin of error). Just three years ago, respondents were decisive (61 percent to 30 percent) in declaring that smaller was better.

Other polls have found comparable, if less stunning, shifts in public sentiment. For instance, surveys conducted by Penn Schoen & Berland Associates for the centrist Democratic Leadership Council found that the proportion of people who agreed that the best government is one that governs least dropped by five percentage points, to 56 percent, from 1996-98. The public has little affection for government in the abstract, though it likes the individual programs that Big Brother provides, and voters seem to be offering less resistance than before to having Washington lend a hand.

Why the shift in public mood? In a word: prosperity. It was hard times, after all, that provoked the widespread tax revolts of the 1970s and 1980s among citizens who resented paying for the government benefits they saw others receiving. Now that incomes are rising, inflation is low, and the economy shows no signs of slowing down, people who are faring well "can be more generous," says Karlyn Keene Bowman, an expert on public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research. Which suggests that if and when the economy sours, so will the political magnanimity.

Robert M. Teeter, however, isn't so sure. "These things don't change every two years or four years," the Republican pollster says, but in grander historical cycles of 10 or 20 years. The failure of President Lyndon Johnson's Great Society to cure poverty in the 1960s helped lead to the demise of a faith in big government to solve all problems that the New Deal had inspired three decades before. But minimalism didn't work, either. Now, Teeter says, the public wants to see the government start working more effectively and less bureaucratically, as businesses and most other institutions have done in recent years.

"What is the proper role of the national government is a 200-year-old debate," Teeter says-and it's taking yet another turn.

Even conservatives who are aghast at any additional comfort with government acknowledge a change in the public mood. "People want government to be active but also to be smart," says Heritage's Butler, "as opposed to the small-government approach" of Reagan's time. The consequence, he adds, is an approach to governing that envisions federal intervention to "help particular people in particular circumstances"-to pay for college, say, or afford health insurance. In Republican circles, he adds, this has caused "a pretty major shift, at least in the way the [policy] discussion takes place."

Almost Like Democrats

In the huge ballroom of the Washington Hilton, the hotel where Reagan was shot, Gov. George W. Bush of Texas was doing his damnedest the other day to be all things to all Republicans. The GOP's presidential front-runner sketched his views on the proper role of government for members of the Christian Coalition, including the ones clad in Bauer T-shirts. He boasted of the bill he had signed in Texas requiring parents to be told before their teen-age daughters undergo abortions, and he described his vaguely ambitious plans to achieve "prosperity with a purpose."

"Government should do a few things," Bush declared, "and do them well."

Well, let us count those items of activism, as per his suggestions. Before the throng of religious conservatives, Bush lauded "some of the highest and compassionate goals of government," such as helping the poor, the disabled, the elderly, and the dying. In his State of the State address to Texas legislators last January, he asked them to cut the sales tax on diapers, over-the-counter medicines, and Internet connections; to institute a tax credit for research and development; to reduce emissions from old factories; to restore worn courthouses; and to come up with additional dollars to help schoolchildren to read, employ more teachers, build new schools, hire 380 new caseworkers for the state's child protection agency, provide "transition benefits" for people moving from welfare to work, augment child care subsidies for the poor, and open "second chance" homes for unwed teen-age mothers. "A rising tide lifts many boats-but not all," Bush asserted in an Indianapolis speech in July, as he proposed "a different role for government . . . a responsibility to help people," and denounced a "destructive mind-set: the idea that if government would only get out of our way, all our problems would be solved. . . . The American government is not the enemy of the American people."

Last week, he took to blasting the Republicans in Congress for an insufficient enthusiasm for addressing social problems. What Bush has proposed on education, for instance, "sounds a lot like [the] DLC," former Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich observed recently on CNBC. Reich, a liberal, isn't alone in harboring such thoughts. His political opposite, Cato's Crane, described Bush as "the original social engineer. . . . I've never heard `W' say, `Eliminate a program, or cut one."' In an op-ed piece, Crane portrayed Bush as downright "Clintonesque," in that the two middle-of-the-roaders share a "casual . . . assumption that virtually any problem confronting the American people is an excuse for action by the federal government."

Indeed, in Crane's view, just about all of the Republican presidential candidates ought to be classified as New Democrats. Consider, for example, Sen. John McCain of Arizona, a man obsessed with government. The health of the federal government is at the core of his political concerns-how to fix it, restore its dignity, free it from money's grasp, so that once again it can work as it should. "On my honor, I swear to you that from my first day in office to the last breath I draw, I will do everything in my power to make you proud of your government," he proclaimed in formally announcing his candidacy last month. "Once we win our government back, there is no limit to what we can accomplish."

McCain went so far last spring as to urge graduates of Johns Hopkins University to "consider very seriously entering government." How un-Reaganlike! "We Republicans have to acknowledge that there is a role for the federal government," McCain told the commencement crowd.

Two others running for the presidency, Elizabeth H. Dole and Pat Buchanan, are prone to calling for smaller government, but they happened to have spent many years at the federal trough. Dole served two stints in the Cabinet and two in the White House, not to mention her 24-year marriage to a Senator's Senator. Buchanan, a native of Washington, D.C., who worked for three Presidents, offers a political agenda that centers on having the federal government keep imports and immigrants out. Similarly, fourth-term Sen. Orrin G. Hatch of Utah has become known less for his native conservatism than for his disconcertingly pragmatic alliances with Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass. "In general, Sen. Hatch is not opposed to using government to do good things for people," a campaign spokesman said.

And then there's Bauer. He would brandish the power of government to make the citizenry morally straighter, by outlawing abortion, prosecuting pornographers, and opposing "special rights on the basis of sexual preference." That's besides fiddling with the tax code for social ends. "It is quite possible to use tax policy in ways not terribly easy to distinguish from spending," says Bruce Bartlett, who worked for Bauer in Reagan's White House and is now a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis, a libertarian think tank. He finds Bauer's tax plan "ludicrous," because it sticks it to employers while supposedly putting "families first, last, and everything."

Bauer comes by his activism honestly. As a boy, he had a confrontation with his often-drunken father (much like Clinton had with his stepfather), and he joined in a campaign by ministers and owners of businesses to clean up his gambling-ridden, mob-controlled hometown of Newport, Ky. "In this country, you can do a whole lot of things, but where I grew up, the things people were being allowed to do resulted in their own personal lives being a mess," Bauer said in a profile in The Des Moines (Iowa) Register last month. The newspaper reported that "it was Newport where Bauer discovered that government mattered."

"He's a religious populist," says Kellyanne Fitzpatrick, a Republican pollster who had Bauer as a client last year. "The size of government is not an issue to populists."

Just one of the surviving Republican candidates can make a straight-faced claim of being hostile-or indifferent-to the federal government: Forbes. The magazine-publisher-turned-awkward-politician is the only one who has never spent any appreciable time in Washington and who, to Bartlett and others, comes the closest to Reagan in disdaining government as an instrument of good. Even so, Bartlett adds, "I'm not sure how minimalist even Forbes is. . . . Chart his position on abortion." After losing as a purist economic conservative in 1996, Forbes has curried favor from religious conservatives by bringing social issues-notably, opposition to abortion-to the forefront.

In this regard, of course, Forbes might be counted as nothing more than the most familiar of American archetypes: a pragmatist. Since the earliest days of the frontier, Americans have believed in being practical most of all. Pragmatism is considered the only native political philosophy, and it has captured not only Forbes, but also his rivals and the voters as well. Americans, after all, tend to want what they want, and they don't care all that much about how they get it.

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Innovator at Veterans Affairs pays the price

Burt Solomon — Tue, 20 Jul 1999 00:00:00 -0400

Now we know, yet again, the price of innovation. At the Veterans Affairs Department, with its stodgy bureaucratic traditions and hyper-attentive constituencies, the Innovator in Chief has quit. Done in by the political forces he had stirred up, Kenneth W. Kizer, the head of the agency's mammoth medical system, has asked the White House to withdraw his nomination for a second four-year term.

Kizer's hand-picked deputy, Thomas L. Garthwaite, has been named as the acting undersecretary for health and will doubtless remain so until 2001, the tail end of an administration being a rotten time to fill senior posts. The Veterans Health Administration "has changed more rapidly and more dramatically than any health care system in the country, if not the world, in a shorter period of time," Kizer, 48, said in an interview before his surprise June 29 announcement. Even without him, the restructuring that he led-consolidating under-used hospitals, decentralizing decision-making, and encouraging innovation-is expected to continue.

That includes an intriguing, very 21st-century idea that VA officials plan to test by the end of 1999, and possibly sooner: to set up Web pages for individual patients, so that the patients can store all their medical information electronically in a single place. There they could keep track of their diagnostic test results, EKGs, lab work, X-rays, pathology slides, and other relevant records. Robert M. Kolodner, an associate chief information officer at the Veterans Health Administration who oversees the project, said "a real system" might be up and running in as little as three years-or as many as 20.

The idea is simple but still unformed. Kolodner has two principles in mind: that individuals should "own" their own data, so that they control how the information is used and (probably more important) isn't used; and that the Internet service should help veterans chart their health care "to the degree they desire." But the precise form such an electronic system might take-likely to be "so complex that there's no way we could design it right," Kolodner says-will evolve as people start to use it.

Currently, an individual's health care record "never really all comes together," says Garthwaite. Rather, it's made up of "illegible doctors' handwriting," hospital records, and pharmacy prescriptions. But, he says, "a few years from now, if we do this right," a network of electronic medical records could bring dramatic changes. Experts have explored the important changes in health care financing, Garthwaite points out, but "the infomatics piece will [be] more unsettling-and helpful."

The possibilities are exciting. Keeping a patient's medical records together in an easily portable form would make it simpler to seek a second opinion, even at a distance. Patients of the future might hire a company that, for a presumably modest monthly fee, would maintain individuals' Web sites, offer suggestions for preventive care, and routinely search medical literature on the World Wide Web to learn of advances in treatment for whatever ails them.

Or a researcher conducting a study of, say, the effects of Prozac on Asian-American women of a given age could use the network of Web sites to collect a statistically credible sample, in a fashion that preserves the privacy of the participants. State-of-the-art security measures-including moving the storage "vault" off-line, beyond hackers' reach-can be developed to assure the sanctity of patients' confidential information, advocates say, while providing a "break-glass" arrangement so that a hospital's emergency room can gain access if it must. "What we're conceiving of now," Kolodner says, "is just the beginning."

The idea of individual patients' Web pages fits in nicely with other changes that Kizer ushered in at the VA. All of these changes are the product of what Kizer described as "a very patient-centered approach" to medical care, one in which patients are "really going to be in control of the process much more than in the latter part of the 20th century, [when] the physician and the establishment-i.e., the hospital-is the one in complete control."

For instance, Kizer has directed VA hospitals to start monitoring pain as a fifth vital sign and to design treatment programs for dying patients that, he says, "may not necessarily be all the high-tech stuff, what the doctor might want to do, but what the patient wants." He has also moved to improve medical safety by insisting that pharmaceutical manufacturers apply bar codes to drugs so that patients aren't inadvertently given the wrong medicine.

The proposed Web sites might also be considered the ultimate in decentralization. Kizer has overseen the reorganization of the VA's sprawling medical system-the largest in the noncommunist world-into 22 regional networks, each boasting considerable control over its own operations. Policy decisions used to be made by three to five people at the agency's headquarters in Washington. Now, "probably close to 40 people" take part, including the 22 regional directors and numerous program officials, an insider said-"a profound change for this organization."

Indeed, it has been. And it was Kizer's doing, more than anyone's. Board-certified in five specialities, he is a self-confident, assertive, even visionary physician who had spent six years at the helm of California's Department of Health Services. A registered Republican, he nevertheless finished first in the formal competition among aspirants for the VA post, which is regarded as less partisan than most administration positions.

There is little question that the VA, which became a Cabinet department under the Bush administration more than 10 years ago, needed shaking up. The agency was "extremely hierarchical, [used] centralized decision-making, lots of rigid policies and procedures-all of the things that you would want if you wanted to discourage innovation," Kizer recounts. When he arrived in Washington in fall 1994, "innovation was not cherished or valued," he says. "It's exceedingly difficult in government, frankly, to be innovative, because when you innovate you make mistakes, and government has a very low threshold for mistakes"-especially at an agency presiding over issues of life and death.

The agency's restructuring, including Kizer's use of performance contracts to ensure that VA field offices do what they had promised, wasn't easy to accomplish. Nor was a rougher sort of restructuring-a budget-driven effort to reduce the VA's bloated facilities to fit a declining need. With the population of veterans on the decline-the U.S. military force has shrunk from more than 2.1 million troops in 1989 to 1.4 million today-and with medical bean-counters distraught at the cost of hospitalizations, the VA has pruned its acute-care hospital beds by more than half while keeping its medical budget from rising faster than inflation. The idea was to wring inefficiencies out of the system while using the savings to offer medical services to veterans who haven't received them before. In practice, though, the department's new formulas for spending on VA hospitals-based partly on each region's population of veterans-have prompted reductions in spending in certain states.

That has been the case in the Northeast, more than anywhere, because of the many veterans who have fled the cold winters for Southern climes. In Massachusetts, where the VA has already merged two Boston-area hospitals and is trying to do the same with a third, the state's congressional delegation has complained to the VA about a "serious budget strain." So when Kizer's four-year term expired, Sen. John F. Kerry, D-Mass., a Vietnam veteran, put a legislative hold on the White House's renomination. Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV, D-W.Va., also raised an objection, officials say, along with Republican Sens. Susan Collins of Maine, Ben Nighthorse Campbell of Colorado and Larry Craig of Idaho. Some, though not all, of the politically potent veterans' groups also squawked, especially the Paralyzed Veterans of America, who were upset about closings of VA centers devoted to spinal cord injuries.

It's no wonder, really. It stands to reason that efficiencies will prove politically unpopular. (Hence the federal government's resort to a nonpolitical commission to close unneeded military bases.) Besides, Kolodner laments, "when you make changes, even positive changes, you make enemies."

Indeed, Kizer's political problems went beyond Capitol Hill to the White House, where officials were annoyed by how much Kizer wanted to spend on long-term care and on providing medical care to low-priority veterans. He was also accused of "dissing the Administration," as an official put it, by making policy suggestions in testimony before Congress that the White House hadn't approved.

It was Kizer's command-and-control style-so useful in accomplishing his policy ambitions-that helped bring his downfall. His policy might have been one of decentralization, but he instituted it in a top-down fashion. A government agency, after all, has certain advantages in producing innovation that the private sector can't match: It can do what it thinks is right, even if the stockholders wouldn't agree. That's especially an advantage in the health care market as it has irrationally evolved: The customers move so frequently from one plan to another that they discourage insurance plans from offering the kind of preventive medicine that yields savings in the long run but is expensive in the short run. Something that makes economic sense for health care as a whole doesn't necessarily, given the dynamics of competition, make sense for any one company.

But individual companies may be ready for the VA's notion of patient Web sites-Kaiser Permanente and a few computer companies have expressed interest, and the VA has opened discussions with some of them. But in other instances, the agency's ability to command and control a vast government-run health network-socialized medicine, as it were-means that some of its innovations and appealing directives may be hard to replicate where capitalism reigns.

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Thinking Small

Burt Solomon — Mon, 26 Jan 1998 00:00:00 -0500

Once upon a time, President Clinton was a man of big policy ideas. In his first address to a joint session of Congress, shortly after taking office five years ago, he "challenged" Americans to join him "on a great national journey." And they did, for a spell. They accompanied him on a two-year trudge through the perils of revamping health care, imposing fiscal discipline and letting gays and lesbians serve openly in the military. The result: The voters delivered Congress into Republican hands.

So Clinton, ever the political chameleon, won a second term in the White House by accepting the Republicans' big ideas (on reforming welfare and balancing the budget) and offering a slew of small ideas meant to help voters in their everyday lives. Clinton has proved more adaptable, presidential historian Michael R. Beschloss said, than anyone could have guessed.

Now, with the end of his presidency increasingly in sight, Clinton is making another stab, in his State of the Union address on Jan. 27, at putting forth proposals of at least medium size--notably, to extend Medicare to some people as young as 55, to double the federal subsidies for child care and to spend more on civil rights enforcement. Those, plus offering health insurance to as many as five million children (which was part of the balanced budget law last summer), "add up to a very big idea--a restoration of progressive government," said Mark Penn, the White House's pollster.

But this is hardly the New Deal or the Great Society. These proposals, Administration officials estimated, would bring health insurance to 300,000 of the near-elderly, subsidize day care for one million more children and boost a child care tax credit for three million families by an average of $6.88 a week. James Carville, an outside adviser to Clinton, acknowledged that--in magnitude--these initiatives are "certainly not the same as Medicare," which President Johnson pushed to enactment in 1965, or the Interstate Highway System, which President Eisenhower got through Congress in 1956.

"Bill Clinton has not articulated any large visions," said University of North Carolina historian William E. Leuchtenburg, an authority on Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Not that the public is in the mood for any. Dramatic departures or sweeping solutions are about the last thing the public wants, specialists in public opinion say. Consider recent political history. First Clinton got stymied. Then so did Newt Gingrich, the big-thinking Georgia Republican who became House Speaker in 1995. Gingrich's grand hopes of radically reducing the intrusive role of government in people's lives got nowhere, once his popularity tumbled.

"What once was seen as Clinton's overreaching came to be seen as Republicans' overreaching," Columbia University professor Alan Brinkley, an expert in American history, said. "There's no great initiative, no great enthusiasm, behind large goals in public life."

This isn't new. For a decade or more, maybe since late in President Reagan's tenure, the country has been in an era of small ideas. Some big policy proposals exist, with no shortage of eager hucksters. Only, nobody's buying. The public isn't interested. "Different times have a different marginal propensity to consume big ideas," noted James P. Pinkerton, who was a domestic policy adviser to President Bush and has seen only limited success in peddling his "New Paradigm" for a market-based activism. "Times are good," he explained, and so "the market for big ideas is naturally smaller."

No Stomach for Change

Back in 1993, as Clinton's advisers were fashioning a health care proposal, Carville declared that he didn't care what it looked like "as long as it's big," a participant in some of the early meetings remembered. To a President hell-bent on greatness, bigger was better.

But not to the public. The breathtaking sweep and complexity of Clinton's plan gave its critics plenty of ammunition and perhaps preordained its defeat. In hindsight, the participant said, if the White House had announced a modestly scaled plan to let Americans take their health insurance from job to job and to assure them coverage despite "preexisting" medical conditions--things most voters worried about--Clinton "would have been nominated for sainthood."

"When people don't have big problems, they're not necessarily looking for big solutions," said Democratic pollster Mark S. Mellman, whose surveys showed that 85 per cent of Americans were happy with their medical coverage.

The culprit, that is, has been the absence of crisis. Frustrated policy entrepreneurs have taken to blaming peace and prosperity. By and large, the public seems pretty satisfied--and more so all the time. Forty-seven per cent of Americans described themselves as highly contented and precious few of them bother to follow news from Washington, according to an opinion poll the Pew Research Center for The People & The Press issued last month. Robert M. Teeter, a Republican pollster, found only 12 per cent of Americans very dissatisfied with their financial circumstances. "I've never seen a poll where [people are] so satisfied," he said.

Yet the times aren't nearly good enough to kindle the sort of bigheartedness and sense of high purpose that during the 1960s gave rise to the Great Society's ambitious, expensive assault on society's ills. Even amid the current peace and prosperity, Americans who need two incomes per household and still can't save much aren't prone to feeling fat and sassy. "Life is now a zero-sum game," Beschloss said. "The public is against anything with a downside."

In the '60s, times felt flush; lately, Washington has been strapped for money to spend on the public good. "If you're poor, you don't think big, and the country has been feeling poor," Brookings Institution economist Henry J. Aaron said. William A. Galston, a former domestic policy adviser to Clinton, traces "the defining decision of '96"--a year dominated by a small-issue election campaign--to Clinton's 1995 willingness to follow the Republicans in balancing the budget. That shifted the political battle to one of priorities, and left Clinton touting small ideas--school uniforms, V-chips and the like--that he deemed significant to voters' lives.

Something else has happened since the big-government heyday of the 1960s: The public's trust in government and other big institutions has plummeted. The ability of government to get things done has been "oversold by politicians" who've misapplied the successes achieved in World War II, said Joseph S. Nye Jr., the dean of Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government and the co-editor of a recent book, Why People Don't Trust Government. Reduced trust in government has produced "a diminished willingness to seek big ideas in government," Nye said in an interview. "When politicians say, `Let's solve all health care,' [they're] swimming upstream."

After the failed War on Poverty, the failed Vietnam war, the Watergate scandal, the failed welfare system, the lagging educational system, the $600 Pentagon toilet seats and the fall of Communism, big has gone bad in the public's mind. Americans have been "disappointed with big ideas," Pew Research Center director Andrew Kohut concluded. "People have given up on change."

A Change of Heart About Big Government

What has happened, in a way, is that one humongous idea has triumphed so profoundly that it has suffocated all rivals. From the Progressive Era through the '60s, the prevailing assumption in the United States--and in most of the world--was that a bigger government was a better one. The past quarter-century, though, has witnessed an unflinching about-face. Taxes got cut, federal revenue was shared, industries were deregulated, the Berlin Wall fell, the Cold War stopped, the era of big government ended, the market triumphed.

Just about everyone agrees on the basics. On economic policy, for instance, Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin, a Democrat, "is not much different" from Republicans Gingrich and Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, said Robert Kuttner, co-editor of The American Prospect, a liberal journal. "There isn't an awful lot to argue about, by historical standards," said Everett Carll Ladd, the executive director of the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research at the University of Connecticut (Storrs).

On the left, traditionally the home of ambitious solutions, big ideas are notable these days for their absence. There's some policy work under way, on how to create jobs using public-private partnerships and how to reverse the rising inequality of wealth. But well-framed, big-picture ideas are nowhere in sight. In a widely publicized speech at the Kennedy School last month, House Minority Leader Richard A. Gephardt, D-Mo.--liberals' likely standard-bearer in the next presidential campaign--attacked "our leaders [who] seem enamored with small ideas that nibble around the edges of big problems," but he offered no big ideas of his own.

"There's much more intellectual energy on the right than the left," Brookings's Aaron noted.

The Right has some big ideas. All of them are keyed to using markets instead of government for public ends--issuing vouchers for education, establishing medical savings accounts (MSAs) to finance health care, privatizing Social Security. So-called New Democrats have proposed their own versions of market-based policies, such as pollution permits that companies may trade. Movements are also under way to supplant the welfare state with private charity (driven by tax credits) and to flatten the income tax or abolish it altogether.

But even these ideas, in sync with the zeitgeist, are flagging. In the spring of 1995, after pushing most of the GOP's Contract With America through Congress, Gingrich made a strategic decision, a confidant said--to push all-out for a balanced budget instead of trying to dismantle the workings of government--because he feared that the rest of his party wouldn't go along. School choice has made occasional inroads, but Jennifer Grossman, the director of educational policy at the libertarian Cato Institute, said it has largely been thwarted by the influential teachers' unions and the apparent lack of a crisis. Bill Gradison, the president of the Health Insurance Association of America, surmised that MSAs haven't taken off because "people are risk-averse" when it comes to health care.

The national debate over policy has been dominated by "small ideas because no one has been successful in creating a framework for big ideas," said Jeffrey A. Eisenach, the president of the Progress and Freedom Foundation, a conservative think tank. He cited the "continuing failure by both political parties to create any kind of philosophical context that would support a big idea."

Land of Incrementalism

James Madison would surely be delighted. The checks and balances that he designed for the fledgling Republic were meant to discourage big changes in policy unless the need was overwhelming.

Don't cast aspersions, though, on small ideas, counseled Richard P. Nathan, who was a domestic policy adviser to President Nixon and is now the director of the Rockefeller Institute of Government. "America is the land of incrementalism," he pointed out. "It takes a crisis to [produce] big change."

Indeed, that's what many policy and political experts say it will take--an economic dive or an international calamity--before big ideas come back into vogue. Or it may just take time. Kennedy School professor Elaine C. Kamarck, until recently a policy adviser to Vice President Al Gore, said she's convinced that--within a decade or so--the government will follow the private sector in replacing the big bureaucracies that arose in the industrial era with the supple market mechanisms suited to the Information Age.

The public doesn't necessarily need a crisis, however, to make it endorse big change, Progressive Policy Institute president Will Marshall maintained. His evidence: the 1912 election. The Republican incumbent, William Howard Taft, finished third, behind two Progressives--Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic winner, and former President Theodore Roosevelt of the Bull Moose Party. The outcome marked the start of the Progressive Era, as Washington moved to regulate a transformed economy dominated by industrial trusts.

The 1912 election, however, was a culmination of 20 years of "steadily growing reform ideas" that had coalesced into a "coherent, well-articulated challenge to laissez-faire and Social Darwinism," Columbia professor Brinkley said--far beyond anything that's going on today. The current lack of sophistication of policy thinking "is more comparable to 1898 than 1912," the historian added, predicting a transforming election "maybe in 2012."

Poor, legacy-lusting Clinton. If he arrived in Washington harboring hopes of winding up on Mount Rushmore, he had the bad luck to be elected at the wrong time. Yet he keeps revealing a wish to govern in a grander way than the citizenry seems to want.

Clinton allies say they're hopeful he can speed up the cycle of history by proving to the public--such as by balancing the budget and "reinventing" government--that Washington can once again be trusted. But in the meantime, Clinton may have to curb--or disguise--his policy ambitions.

Probably wisely. Big ideas take time. Welfare reform was debated for more than a decade before it happened. Starting to lay the groundwork for addressing big problems--rescuing entitlement programs, for instance--may be as much as any President can accomplish in a few years. Given the constraints of the political age, Clinton may have to rest content with being essentially a steward--albeit one of an activist bent--guiding a nation through a formidable transition.

And what's wrong with that? Historians, after all, have been giving higher and higher marks to Eisenhower, a capable though prosaic leader in an era that suited him. There's nothing shameful in being a President who's right for the times.

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Appointments: Plodding Pace

National Journal and Burt Solomon — Mon, 31 Mar 1997 00:00:00 -0500

It was your basic Washington pseudo-event.

On a patch of the Capitol lawn, nine members of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus took turns at a movable rostrum and complained to a thin arc of reporters and political supporters on March 20 that the Clinton Administration is dissing Hispanics in filling its ranks for a second term.

"We find ourselves with an Administration that is looking less and less like America instead of more and more like America," Rep. Robert Menendez, D-N.J., proclaimed, throwing President Clinton's own words back at him.

Rep. Xavier Becerra, D-Calif., the caucus chairman, said that he couldn't explain why the President and his headhunters, who've so consistently pushed for diversity, might be falling short. "Either there's a belief that there's not enough qualified Latinos," he charged, "or they're ignoring us."

"The commitment is still there," responded White House personnel director Bob J. Nash, the point man for a recruitment effort that isn't moving fast enough to please a broad variety of claimant groups.

Nash volunteered that Louis Caldera, a California assemblyman, has been chosen as the chief operating officer at the Corporation for National Service and that four other Hispanics are currently being cleared for posts that require Senate confirmation. He predicted that the proportions of such jobs held by ethnic minorities (6 per cent for Hispanics, 12 per cent for blacks and 3 per cent for Asian-Americans, by the latest count) will grow as appointments now in the works are approved.

But diversity takes time. Nash has met with the Hispanic Caucus and also with representatives of, among others, African-Americans, Asian-Americans, Arab-Americans, gays, the disabled and veterans. He says it can take longer to find qualified candidates from untraditional sources. Choosing them often involves a minuet between the White House and the agency involved. If a Cabinet officer suggests, say, a white woman for a job, the White House may counter by asking department officials to "look at a Hispanic male, a lesbian and a black woman [whose] resumes look good," an official in a Cabinet agency said. "These are political appointees. There are politics involved."

The quest for diversity is just one of the reasons that Clinton's second Administration has been slow to take shape. "I see [the transition] moving lethargically," a senior White House official said. The accusations of Democratic fund-raising improprieties have intensified the vetting of appointees and made it likelier that a Republican-run Congress will get in the way.

More than a quarter of the full-time Administration posts that need Senate confirmation are currently empty. These vacancies, usually filled on an acting basis, are spread unevenly around the executive branch. The Education Department and the Pentagon, for instance, are almost at full strength. At the other extreme is the Labor Department, the only Cabinet department whose chosen leader, Secretary-designate Alexis M. Herman, still awaits Senate action, with nine vacancies among its 19 top jobs. "The department needs somebody," a Labor official said. "There's definitely the feeling of a real void."

The Commerce Department, a focal point of the fund-raising scandal, is missing 10 of its 29 senior officials, with several more expected to leave by month's end. The Interior Department has no one confirmed to oversee surface mining, Indian affairs, fish and wildlife, national parks or the management of federal lands. The State Department has lost or is losing four of its five undersecretaries and at least seven of its 20 assistant secretaries. Fifteen ambassadorships are vacant, including those to Russia, Japan, Germany, France, Canada and South Korea.

How much this matters varies. "Legally speaking, until you're confirmed by the Senate, you're not allowed to make any managerial decisions," Geri D. Palast, assistant secretary of Labor for congressional and intergovernmental affairs, noted. An absence of leadership at Labor has delayed the implementation of a welfare-to-work program that will spend $3 billion over five years.

Part of the problem in filling the vacancies, ironically, is that there aren't enough of them. "There's not as much turnover in the departments as the White House anticipated," a political appointee at Commerce said, telling of friends who left the Administration to join Clinton's reelection campaign hoping "to return to grandiose jobs" but now find themselves unemployed. Democrats who didn't work in the campaign but want Administration jobs have been told to forget it.

Still, that leaves "tons and tons of people who still want to join the Administration" and can line up support from Members of Congress, governors, mayors, trade associations, ethnic organizations "and probably the Lippo Group," an appointee in another decimated department said. "I could see how that could be a formula for a sort of paralysis."

The White House and Cabinet officers probably see eye to eye more now than they did when Clinton was hiring his first Administration. The new Transportation Secretary, Rodney E. Slater, worked for Clinton in Arkansas for years, and Herman served on his White House staff. "The differences of opinion are less dramatic," a senior White House official said.

But Clinton and his policy makers have a government to run as well as an Administration to hire. And the head-hunting staff is considerably smaller than it was four years ago. Clinton's personnel operation totaled 220 people during his 1992-93 transition and 170 once he took office. Nash currently has a staff of 54; 30 of them are borrowed from agencies, but only until May 30.

Another reason for the plodding pace of appointments is the additional scrutiny inspired by the fund-raising scandal. "The bar is higher than 10 years ago, even than a year ago--even six weeks ago," a White House strategist said. Nash said that he might interview a candidate for 90 minutes instead of the usual 30 and phone 10 of the listed references instead of five. The FBI and Internal Revenue Service, he figured, might take two weeks longer than the customary 60-81 days to finish their investigations. "It's rougher, absolutely," Nash said of the vetting process.

Consider Stanley O. Roth's plight. The National Security Council's (NSC's) former expert on Asia has been chosen--though not yet nominated--as the assistant secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific policy. His NSC duties included intercepting the sorts of Asian-American wheeler-dealers who've shared coffee with Clinton and caused him political havoc. This has surely given Roth's vetters fits.

Then there's no reason to think that the Republicans who control the Senate will move promptly on Clinton's nominations. They haven't so far. Just days before Anthony Lake withdrew as Clinton's nominee to run the CIA, Senate Intelligence Committee chairman Richard C. Shelby, R-Ala., reportedly was telling associates that he'd string Lake along until he pulled out. "The reason he could," a Democratic Hill aide said, "is that nobody's afraid of Clinton anymore."

Of 328 full-time posts still in need of Senate-confirmed occupants, Clinton has made nominations for 68--most of them renominations carried over from last year--and screening is under way for 90 others. A new burst of nominations will be announced, Nash said, once Congress returns from its Easter recess.

As vacancies get filled, however, others are sure to occur. Plenty of Administration officials are planning to leave over the next six to eight months.

A senior White House official foresees "cascading" vacancies, as senior sub-Cabinet posts are awarded to outsiders and disappointed inside candidates depart.

The rolling transition from Clinton's first Administration to his second Administration will take until July or August to complete, Nash predicted. "It's a rolling transition," another White House official quipped, that "will roll the entire year."

That wouldn't leave many more months before the midterm elections, which is when history suggests that a President's second term starts to unravel.

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White House Notebook

National Journal and Burt Solomon — Mon, 02 Dec 1996 00:00:00 -0500

For nearly four years now, the White House has been rife with factions and rivalries. Dick Morris versus Harold M. Ickes. The New Democrats versus the traditional liberals. The Arkansans versus the veterans of the "war room." All the inherent contradictions in President Clinton, that is, have been in battle -- often with bloodletting -- against one another.

Clinton has used his policy advisers as "surrogates," an Administration official explained, by assigning them to issues in a way that reflects his views. For instance, deputy domestic policy adviser Bruce Reed, a New Democrat, has embodied the President's conservative impulses on welfare reform and crime, while deputy economic adviser Gene B. Sperling, who was an aide to former New York Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, has done Clinton's liberalish bidding on economic matters. Each has been deferential on the other's turf.

Neither adviser is going anywhere -- except maybe higher -- as Clinton prepares for four more years. But the White House staff, as it's being refashioned by incoming chief of staff Erskine B. Bowles, may look quite a bit different. It seems likely to feature fewer rivalries, strong personalities or back channels to a President who thrives on them. The apparent goal is a better, blander White House.

Ideologically, it stands to become more suited to a political environment in which the Republicans have kept control of Congress. Three top-flight advisers of a liberal bent -- chief of staff Leon E. Panetta, deputy chief of staff Ickes and senior adviser for policy and strategy George R. Stephanopoulos -- are on their way out.

This isn't a clean sweep. Sperling and Hillary Rodham Clinton are staying, and some reinforcements may be on the way. Former staff secretary John D. Podesta, expected to be named as a deputy chief of staff, "would balance Erskine out," a White House adviser said. Bowles, a North Carolina businessman, is consid-ered a southern moderate in his politics.

Still, the likely result -- a net loss of liberals -- has consequences for policy. When policy is kicked around in the White House, an Administration official said, "there are times" that the outcome will change if no one's at the table to make the case for, say, "the smallest possible cut" in programs for the poor. Panetta, for one, has passionately defended federal spending on food stamps and also feels strongly about medicaid, the health care program for the poor and disabled that's bound to be part of future budget debates. Ickes is in close touch with Democratic constituency groups. Stephanopoulos has kept Clinton informed of the Democratic mood on Capitol Hill.

Bowles seems to have more in mind than a centrist White House. Known as a disciplined manager, he also wants a White House that operates in a more orderly way. Aides say he's thinking, for one thing, of bolstering the Domestic Policy Council (DPC), which hasn't been used much as a vehicle for important policy discussions. He's considering "not so much a change in structure," a senior official said, as bringing in "someone really, really strong" to run it. The council has been headed by Carol H. Rasco, Clinton's top domestic policy adviser, who has traveled widely and isn't seen as having wielded much influence on policy.

There has been talk inside the White House of possibly replacing her with someone of Cabinet stature, such as Environmental Protection Agency chief Carol Browner or Education Secretary Richard W. Riley. Reed is considered likelier. Or Rasco may stay. She said in an interview that she won't be able to decide whether she'd like to stay until it becomes clear what the post might entail. "You've got to look at a job in terms of, `Is it a place you can best utilize your skills?' " she said. If she wants to remain and Bowles wants her gone, the President will face a quandary: whether to show loyalty to an Arkansan who has long been close to both Clintons or to accept the organizational imperatives of his new chief of staff.

The idea, aides say, is to bring the DPC into bureaucratic parity with the National Economic Council, which has served as a high-powered mechanism for coordinating the Administration's economic policy. Director Laura D'Andrea Tyson plans to leave, and deputy national security adviser Samuel R. (Sandy) Berger is thought to have the inside track as her successor.

Or Berger could become the national security adviser if Anthony Lake moves on. (Deputy secretary of State Strobe Talbott and U.S. representative to the United Nations Madeleine K. Albright are also said to be in the running.) Berger, popular inside the White House, is said to have been the main alternative to Bowles when Clinton and a handful of advisers deliberated for hours on Nov. 7 to select a new chief of staff.

"From my knowledge of Erskine," Rasco said, "I find him to be a person always looking to have things work most efficiently." Aides say he wants to make them accountable for doing what they're supposed to do. He isn't a fan of the sort of freewheeling entrepreneurship that has often characterized Clinton's White House -- "like a hallway of independent contractors," as a policy maker said. It's not uncommon for jobs to be tenuously connected to the organization chart or to entail duties that the titles don't describe.

How Bowles will fare in tidying things up remains to be seen. The structure of the White House, after all, arises from the instinctive, amorphous style of the man who occupies the Oval Office.

At least two of the switch-hitting advisers plan to depart -- Stephanopoulos and Rahm Emanuel, the assistant to Clinton for special projects, who has worked on issues ranging from welfare reform to relations with Israel. Emanuel may spend six months or so at the government's Overseas Private Investment Corp. before returning to his hometown of Chicago.

But others may stay. Presidential counselor Thomas F. (Mack) McLarty III, whose assignments have included the Olympics and Latin American relations, is trying to decide whether to return to Arkansas soon to run for the Senate if Dale Bumpers, a fourth-term Democrat, retires in 1998. Deputy White House counsel Bruce R. Lindsey's title hardly reflects his role as a troubleshooter on Whitewater and as a personal confidant to Clinton. "I don't sense Bruce Lindsey ever leaving," a well- connected Arkansan said.

The parade of announced departures is thought to have ended. Senior aides expected to stay include Marcia L. Hale, the director of intergovernmental relations; press secretary Michael D. McCurry; environmental adviser Kathleen A. McGinty; White House counsel John M. (Jack) Quinn; and John L. Hilley, the chief congressional lobbyist, unless ex-Sen. George J. Mitchell, his former boss, becomes Clinton's Secretary of State. Communications director Donald Baer, political director Douglas Sosnik and director of public liaison Alexis M. Herman may stay if they wish, officials said.

Bowles is also assembling his own coterie of aides. Podesta and Sylvia Mathews, who has been Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin's chief of staff, are expected to join deputy White House chief of staff Evelyn S. Lieberman. Insiders say to keep an eye on Victoria L. Radd, a veteran of Clinton's campaigns who has been an associate White House counsel and deputy communications director. She ran the issues team for Bowles as he prepared Clinton for this fall's presidential debates and is said to sit in on all of the meetings to plan a second term.

But other roles have gone begging, at least so far. Neither Bowles nor anyone currently on Clinton's staff seems suited to conduct the sort of high-level negotiations with Congress that Panetta, a former Member, handled or to represent the White House in televised interviews.

But, a White House aide said, "Erskine knows what he doesn't know." For Clinton's sake, he'd better.

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Sweeping Clean

Associated Press and Burt Solomon — Sat, 16 Nov 1996 00:00:00 -0500

his time, he got the order right. President Clinton first picked a White House chief of staff. Only then did he set to work on reshaping his Cabinet.

He tried it the other way during the transition to his first term in the White House, and that approach caused him no end of grief. ``He really believed he could make Cabinet government work,'' Democratic insider Tony Coelho, an occasional adviser to the White House, said in an interview. ``Well, it didn't work.'' The White House staff, organized almost as an afterthought, caused a succession of screwups that got the Clinton Administration off to a deplorable start.

Erskine B. Bowles, who'll replace Leon E. Panetta as chief of staff, bears some resemblance to Clinton. He has a soft southern accent and--as the President pointed out in introducing Bowles at a Nov. 8 news conference--plays golf and hearts. There are crucial differences, though. Bowles is known as a disciplined manager, who makes sure that decisions get made and don't get unmade. The North Carolina investment banker offered ``organization, structure and focus'' as his bywords.

Those are nouns that have rarely been applied either to Clinton's White House or to his Cabinet. Secretary by Secretary, Clinton's Cabinet hasn't been bad. ``One by one, they're all competent,'' said Bert A. Rockman, a presidential scholar at the University of Pittsburgh, who judged them higher in quality than their counterparts in most other Administrations.

But in the aggregate, they've been something of a bust. They've gone off in all directions and inspired an uncomfortable amount of prosecutorial attention while leaving few footprints in policy. Now that the leaders of six or more of the 14 Cabinet departments are rushing (or being pushed) toward the exits, Clinton has a chance--in theory, at least--to set things right.

It's customary for at least half of the Cabinet to leave when a second term begins. The replacements settled on by the President--speculated upon in the following pages--will shed some light on the course that Clinton has in mind for the next four years. They're expected to be mainly centrists, now that Congress will remain in Republican hands. Diversity by gender and race, the touchstone of Clinton's first Cabinet, is likely to fade in importance though not disappear. ``We have proved that you could have diversity as well as excellence,'' Clinton said at a postelection news conference. But this time, he added, ``I would extend that diversity to Republicans as well.''

It probably wouldn't hurt. Clinton's Cabinet hasn't matched the quality of, say, the one it replaced. President Bush's included some stars. Had the Nov. 5 election turned out differently, two of them would be entering the White House next Jan. 20, as the Vice President and the President's wife. Another one ran for President this year and two others almost did. Only two members of Clinton's Cabinet (Interior Secretary Bruce E. Babbitt and former Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen) have ever sought national office, and it's unlikely that any of them will.

Clinton's Cabinet-making started badly when controversies over nannies sank--in full public glare--his first two choices as Attorney General. The actions of three Cabinet members have prompted the appointment of special prosecutors. Agriculture Secretary Mike Espy was forced to resign for behaving like the Member of Congress he'd been, by soliciting and accepting favors from lobbyists. An investigation into Commerce Secretary Ronald H. Brown's private business dealings ended only after he was killed in a plane crash in April in Croatia. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Henry G. Cisneros is still being investigated on charges that he'd lied to the FBI about payments to his former mistress; he's expected to leave the Cabinet so he can earn big bucks to pay his lawyers.

Others have proved disappointing. Transportation Secretary Federico F. Pena, considered a captive of his department's bureaucracy and constituency groups, upset the White House when he publicly avowed the safety of ValuJet Airlines after one of its planes had plunged into the Everglades. Energy Secretary Hazel R. O'Leary has gotten into political trouble for her extravagant foreign travels and her efforts to monitor her own press coverage. Both are leaving.

Richard W. Riley, the mild-mannered Education Secretary, is beloved around the Administration. He's a former South Carolina governor and a mentor of Clinton's. But he's become known for poorly presenting his department's case in competing for dollars in an ever-tightening budget and for having lost the initiative on education issues in an education-conscious Administration. The idea of linking every classroom in America to the Internet, a staple of Clinton's campaign oratory, is the doing of Albert Gore Jr., the technology-minded Vice President, rather than of Riley.

But for all the disappointment, Clinton's Cabinet has been as stable as any first-term Cabinet in the modern presidency. Only three of its members have quit. Espy and Defense Secretary Les Aspin--indecisive and disorganized--were forced to, and Bentsen left out of frustration.

Some members of the Cabinet have been downright impressive. Brown was aggressive and politically canny in encouraging international trade. Cisneros, despite his legal troubles, has been innovative in keeping inner cities and homelessness on the Administration's agenda despite having little money to spend.

Outgoing Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich, brimming with ideas, is said to have effectively run his department and argued his positions in Administration councils. The same goes for Robert E. Rubin, the low-key Treasury Secretary. William J. Perry, a skilled manager who replaced Aspin at the Pentagon, and Dan Glickman at Agriculture have been seen as successes after predecessors who weren't.

Even some of the maligned members of Clinton's Cabinet have perhaps performed better than the common wisdom holds. Before she fell out of favor with the White House, Energy's O'Leary was lauded for her candor in releasing information on radiation experiments on unsuspecting civilians decades ago. Warren M. Christopher, the departing Secretary of State, has been criticized as a corporate lawyer unable to define a vision for America's role in the post-Cold War world. ``I'm not sure anybody has [done] that,'' objected James P. Pfiffner, an expert on the presidency at George Mason University, so ``why not have someone who's good at negotiating?''

The problem with Clinton's Cabinet hasn't been the competence of its members as much as the way it has worked as a unit. Or hasn't. ``It's a Cabinet that came into office with many personal agendas,'' Shirley A. Warshaw, an expert on Cabinets at Gettysburg College, said. ``The Cabinet officers speak to the President for their departments rather than speak to the departments for the President,'' as they should.

The examples are legion. Donna E. Shalala, the Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary, is known around the White House for fighting over what she may say at congressional hearings and then saying something different in answering Members' questions. Jesse Brown, the Veterans Affairs (VA) Secretary, was recently profiled in The Wall Street Journal as battling inside the Administration on behalf of his department's constituency as fiercely as if he were still the veterans' lobbyist he used to be. Reich has often gone off on his own and gotten away with it because of his long friendship with Clinton.

In part, Clinton's Cabinet officers are prone to sometimes run amok because of their distance from the center of power. More than in most Administrations, ``things really center in the White House,'' Pfiffner noted. In trying to remake the nation's health care system, the White House took over the policy-making process--bypassing Shalala's department, with its expertise--as well as the decision making.

Except for those in the inner circle on economic issues, Cabinet officers ``couldn't figure out how to work with the White House to shape the agenda,'' a former White House official said. ``They couldn't get George [R. Stephanopoulos, Clinton's senior adviser for policy and strategy] on the phone except sometimes. They couldn't reliably get Leon on the phone.''

Even as the White House has been loath to share power, it has also failed to give the Cabinet departments consistent guidance on policy. The Reagan Administration is considered by political scientists to have featured the most effective Cabinet in recent decades because the White House imposed a consistent, clear agenda. This White House has done anything but. Cabinet officers ``didn't get enough guidance from us,'' a former White House official acknowledged.

And for a good reason: There hasn't been much to give. The Clinton Administration ``didn't come in with a fixed agenda and is starting a second term with less of one,'' Stephen Hess, an expert on the presidency at the Brookings Institution, said. That isn't the Cabinet's fault or even the White House staff's. It's Clinton's. ``The Administration is a lot like the President himself--highly adaptable,'' presidential scholar Rockman said. ``What's this Administration about? What's the agenda?''

It's possible that Clinton will hire new Cabinet officers who'll pursue his interests--assuming they get a clear picture of what those interests are--more than their own. It's also possible that Bowles will take Cabinet members to the woodshed when they deserve it. But the problems with Clinton's Cabinet may remain, as long as the man in the Oval Office keeps changing his mind.

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Clinton: The Sequel

National Journal and Burt Solomon — Sat, 24 Aug 1996 00:00:00 -0400

e've seen this campaign before: Bill Clinton as the tough-minded New Democrat, a family values guy, a crime-fighting sportsman who's careful about how he'll spend the taxpayers' hard-earned dough.

That was how he got elected in 1992. He ran to the Right and ended the Democrats' string of presidential defeats. Then he governed toward the Left.

Not entirely, by any means. In the end, he halved the federal budget deficit, drove through the North American Free Trade Agreement, cut back on the size of the federal government and (tardily) proposed a tough-love approach to welfare reform--good New Democratic themes all.

But in tone and often in substance, he governed as more of an Old Democrat, at least at first. From the controversy over gays in the military that dominated his opening days in office to his mega-failure on health care reform to the Sixties-style indulgence that pervaded his Administration's culture, he often has come across like more of a liberal than a centrist.

Now he's running Right again. He started this election year by declaring that the era of big government was toast. He has tried to take on a culturally conservative cast by pushing for things, such as V-chips to shield children from televised violence and curfews for teenagers, about which a President can do little more than talk. The draft platform that the Democratic National Convention will take up is a ``stunningly'' New Democratic document, according to Elaine C. Kamarck, a senior policy adviser to Vice President Albert Gore Jr. who had a big hand in shaping it. The latest draft calls for ``a smaller, more effective, less bureaucratic government'' and ``a moderate, achievable, commonsense agenda.''

Since the Democrats lost control of Congress in the electoral shock of 1994, Clinton has governed at times like a pale version of a Republican, calling for tax cuts and a balanced budget. But whether he'd govern toward the Right in a second term is harder to know. The public doesn't. In an opinion poll recently conducted for The New York Times, 52 per cent of the respondents said they didn't know enough about where Clinton stands to predict what he'd do if he's reelected.

White House aides have been shy about saying too much about what a second term holds for fear of presenting Robert Dole, the Republican nominee, with fodder for his campaign. But there are some clues.

The advisers who drafted the platform--the White House's leading New Democrats--are confident that Clinton would govern as a centrist in a second term. ``He's really a New Democrat,'' Kamarck said. ``It will be a New Democratic second term.'' Bruce Reed, the deputy White House domestic policy adviser who was in charge of drafting the platform, said he foresees ``more vouchers, more tax credits, more efficient ways of delivering government services,'' instead of the big, bureaucratic mechanisms of the Democratic past. ``There's a recognition on our part that the government can't do it all, never could and shouldn't pretend to,'' Reed said.

Even some of the New Democratic activists, though, wonder how fiercely Clinton's heart would be with them in a second term. ``The acid test to me will be in the staffing,'' said Will Marshall, the president of the Progressive Policy Institute (PPI), the font of New Democratic thinking.

Others allude to Clinton's penchant for half-measures. ``The era of big government isn't over,'' said Robert D. Reischauer, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, noting Clinton's continuing enthusiasm for medicare, social security, federal student loans and other huge government programs. ``The more appropriate statement is that the era of even bigger government is over.''

Something else might keep Clinton from becoming a full-fledged New Democrat: a yearning for greatness. If he's reelected, his advisers say, he may push next year for a far-reaching budget agreement. He may also barnstorm the country in hopes of persuading the public to regard 14 years of schooling--two years beyond high school--as the new standard of American education. Beyond those, however, the initiatives that he and his advisers have in mind for a second term are plentiful but hardly earthshaking.

``If the era of big government is over, maybe the era of big ideas is over,'' said William A. Galston, a charter New Democrat who left the White House domestic policy staff last year. ``If neither the President nor Dole puts large ideas on the table during the summer or fall of 1996, it's extremely unlikely that [the next] Congress will be dominated by large ideas.'' If Clinton is reelected, he and Congress may strike what Galston described as ``modest, incremental, bipartisan steps'' in arenas such as education and health care.

But if governing as a centrist means fiddling with the levers of government and then getting out of the way, that may not be enough for a man with appetites as large as Clinton's. A Nov. 5 victory would make Clinton just the third Democratic president this century to win reelection, joining the august company of Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt.

Clinton told an interviewer during his first year in office that he hadn't come to Washington to warm a seat. ``I don't think that flame inside him is doing anything but burning brighter,'' an Administration official said.

If thinking small gets in the way of conducting a possibly historic presidency, it's easy to guess which way Clinton would go.

Baby Steps

One place to look for hints about a second Clinton term is the Democratic Party's 1996 platform. Scholars say that platforms matter. That's what Gerald M. Pomper, a political scientist at Rutgers University, concluded after studying the promises that the major parties wrote into their platforms from 1944-76. Almost three-fourths of the pledges were fulfilled in whole or in part, or at least an effort was made. ``Platforms do affect behavior,'' Pomper said, recounting that President Carter printed his 170-plus pledges and distributed them to his appointees and that President Reagan would check to see what his party's platform had promised. Pomper added, ``Why do people have fights about them if they don't mean anything?'' The 1992 Democratic platform was a hodgepodge. Half of it came from the New Democratic themes propounded by the Democratic Leadership Council that Clinton once chaired, and half from the customary pledges meant to satisfy the party's traditional constituencies. It read like a document written by a committee.

The 1996 platform, written for a sitting President, doesn't. A few changes were made in the latest draft, issued last month after painstaking negotiations with Democratic interest groups, in the hope of averting any challenges on the floor of the Chicago convention. Still, the result has made organized labor, for one, uncomfortable. The platform is organized around the concepts of ``opportunity,'' ``responsibility'' and ``community''--buzzwords in the New Democratic lexicon that Clinton can be expected to invoke again and again in the weeks to come. It sketches a revised form of governmental activism meant, as the draft says, ``to give people the tools they need to make the most of their own lives.''

``What's happened is that there's been steady progress in the redefinition of the party, the refocusing of the party, on New Democratic themes,'' PPI's Marshall said. ``The platform confirms that the Administration wants to define itself in terms of New Democratic reformism.''

Maybe what's most striking about the Democratic platform is what isn't in it: ambitious health care proposals. There's nothing about revamping the medical system and not a word about universal access to health insurance, the central visions of Clinton's most notorious failure. The absence of a health care focus isn't a surprise to anyone. ``I find it impossible to believe that the President would return to the issue that nearly destroyed his presidency,'' Galston said.

The Kassebaum-Kennedy bill, which will let people keep their health insurance when they leave a job, is expected to become the jumping-off point for debate next year. Clinton suggested in an interview with The New York Times last month that he'd favor subsidizing people who've been unemployed for a while so they could afford the health coverage that Kassebaum-Kennedy will allow them to keep. That's ``the next logical step,'' a White House aide said, one that would cost $2 billion a year and help as many as four million people.

Clinton policy makers are also working on ways to help small businesses set up voluntary purchasing cooperatives so they can buy cheaper insurance. There's discussion as well on letting states experiment more easily with the medicaid program.

``You've got to be careful about going too far, too fast, especially in the area of health care,'' the aide said, citing an erosion in the public's confidence that Washington can deliver. Another Administration official said he expected ``baby steps now and for the foreseeable future.''

An Eye on History

In the opening year of a second term, a well-connected Democrat reported, Clinton ``really wants to make a name for himself.''

One way he may try to do so, Administration planners say, is with a far-reaching budget package that moves toward ending the federal deficit in 2002. ``I think he envisions a '93-style package,'' an Administration strategist said, one that eases the pain of deficit reduction with a bag of goodies. ``I'd be surprised [if] there's going to be what I might call a Tsongas-like austerity package,'' he said, referring to former Sen. Paul E. Tsongas of Massachusetts, whose sourpuss demeanor on budget matters proved no match for the cheerier Clinton when the two men competed for the 1992 Democratic nomination.

It would be ``Balanced Budget Amendment Lite,'' Reischauer prophesied. Such a package would curb spending on entitlements--then add a plethora of programs that Clinton might want to claim as a second-term legacy. It might include the sequel to Kassebaum-Kennedy and a raft of other things that Clinton has been touting.

Some seem pretty modest. One is the set of pension reforms that Clinton has already proposed, which would let people who work for themselves or for a small company carry their pensions with them from job to job. Treasury Department officials have also been working on ways to funnel more capital to inner cities. One idea is to create a secondary market for mortgages in poor neighborhoods.

Other ornaments in a Clinton budget package would be considerably bigger--and pricier. Chief among them is the bundle of tax benefits that Clinton has dubbed the ``Middle Class Bill of Rights,'' which he proposed a month after Republicans triumphed in the 1994 elections. His proposals for a $500 tax credit for dependent children, a $10,000 tax deduction for higher education and an expansion of individual retirement accounts would, altogether, cost the federal treasury a whopping $109 billion over the next six years, according to the Administration's latest estimates. Having broken his pledge in the 1992 campaign to cut taxes for the middle class, Clinton would lose political capital by breaking the same promise twice.

Devoting so much money to tax cuts would intensify the pressure on the rest of the budget. The Administration's latest budget projections, issued last month, show the government's discretionary spending on most domestic programs ``in a freeze or worse,'' at least through 2002, a budget official said.

The things that aren't frozen suggest some likely priorities in a second term. Increases in discretionary spending are planned for environmental protection, law enforcement and science and technology.

But by far the heartiest increases in spending are reserved for education and job training. ``Education at every level will be a central focus,'' Reed said. He talked of distributing $1,000 scholarships to the smartest high school students, putting pressure on states to bolster their standards, encouraging the concept of ``charter'' schools, creating job-training vouchers and--in Clinton's latest initiative--spending $5 billion over the next four years to help local governments build and repair schools.

``Some New Democrats, like me, are not afraid to spend money,'' Reed said.

And they would. The price tag would come to $18 billion over six years for Clinton's proposed deduction for higher education and another $25 billion for the $1,500 tax credits he proposed last spring at Princeton University as a way to establish 14 years of schooling as the norm. The latter, pegged to the average tuition at a community college, would be available for an initial year of higher education and again for a second year to students who keep a B average and aren't convicted of certain felonies involving illegal drugs. Dealing with education issues, Reed said, would be ``the first thing out of the box.''

Some analysts object that the tax code is a horrendously inefficient tool to make higher education more widely available. But Clinton seems sold on it. ``Making the 13th and 14th years [of education] a standard for everybody is a pillar of our economic and educational agenda,'' Reed said.

It's also the closest thing Clinton has to a big idea, one that might capture the imagination of a cynical public. He seems to be aspiring to the label of Education President, much like the man he replaced.

Priorities Galore

The danger, as in Clinton's first term, is an Administration with so many priorities that it has none. Reed cited a ``shorter'' list that included education, deficit reduction, crime, portability for pensions and health insurance, ``reinventing'' government and family-related issues such as smoking and family leave. ``That's enough work to last four years,'' Reed said.

Of course, even the short list may not be so short. Each priority has sub-priorities. Next in line for reinvention are several federal agencies that will be allowed to customize their own rules for buying equipment and hiring workers. Among the anti-crime measures that officials are contemplating are a ban on so-called cop-killer bullets, a crime victim ``bill of rights,'' after-school programs to keep kids out of trouble and a plan for drug testing parolees.

The list goes on. Enactment of welfare reform would bring a second round of ``empowerment zones'' and an expansion in community development banks ``to make sure that there are jobs for people on welfare to go to,'' Reed said. Administration officials also talk (though vaguely) of expanding the hemisphere's free-trade zone into South America.

As part of its family and values focus, the Administration plans to raise the issue of fatherlessness. The Administration has already started to use the levers of government to address the issue by changing the rules for public housing to encourage fathers to live with their families. But Administration officials believe they can raise the visibility of the problem even further by having Clinton and Gore use the bully pulpit. ``This is enormous--this is classically new government,'' Kamarck said.

Much of what would dominate a second term, however, would lie beyond any Administration's control. Clinton and his advisers are dreaming if they expect to set the political agenda. Too much stands in their way. The Republicans have commanded the agenda since they seized control of Congress. Even more threatening are ugly realities that Clinton--and Dole, too--hopes to keep mum about as the campaign unfolds.

The spiraling cost of entitlements, for one. Clinton has gotten considerable political mileage since 1994 by defending medicare and other popular entitlement programs from Republican depredation. In a second term, though, he'd pay the price. The money that Clinton would need to finance his most ambitious plans for a second term assumes a deal with Congress on medicare and medicaid savings that is far from being struck. Maybe worse, the medicare trust fund is on the path to bankruptcy and will have to be bailed out. Clinton has suggested creating a bipartisan commission to figure out how. Once medicare is fixed, social security looms next.

Danger also lurks internationally. One date to keep an eye on is just after the election. Dec. 1 is the deadline for NATO and U.S. military forces to be withdrawn from Bosnia--assuming that nothing erupts there before then. A scaled-back version of a peacekeeping force is thought likely to come next, with American forces taking part (though Defense Secretary William J. Perry was muzzled when he mentioned this in public). The next four years are also bound to bring foreign policy crises in places as disparate--and potentially explosive--as Cuba and Saudi Arabia.

Along with the things that Clinton would like to keep quiet during the campaign, some of the issues he keeps raising on the stump may sink from view if he gets a second term. His calls for, say, school uniforms and curfews for teenagers, policies under the control of local authorities, have more to do with political atmospherics than the stuff of governance.

A Late Bloomer?

Clinton has had a second term before. His first term as the governor of Arkansas was a calamity. He tried to do too much, was considered out of touch, and soon became the youngest ex-governor in American history. The people of Arkansas forgave him and awarded him a second term, which turned out to be the most successful of the four and a half that he served. It featured his most far-reaching accomplishment as governor--education reforms, paid for with higher taxes, that have had a genuine impact on Arkansas schools.

His own history may offer the best hope for a productive second term. For most Presidents, second terms have been the pits. Fred I. Greenstein, a presidential scholar at Princeton, couldn't think of a single second term in the modern presidency that was more accomplished than the first, with the possible exception of Reagan's success in winding down the Cold War. Roosevelt squandered a landslide reelection by trying to pack the Supreme Court, turning his second term into a disaster. Dwight D. Eisenhower's was as reactive as his first. Harry S Truman got mired in Korea, and Lyndon B. Johnson in Vietnam.

But, Greenstein added, ``it's possible that this could be a late-blooming second-term presidency.'' Clinton has a lot going for him. For one thing, he may find Congress more cooperative than he has so far, no matter which party wins control in November. The recent spurt of congressional action--notably, on welfare reform and health care--suggests that Republicans sometimes would rather get something done than fight with the White House. If the Democrats reclaim control of either congressional chamber, they would have Clinton to thank and may find it hard to be as willful as they were in 1993-94. Both parties have learned during the past four years of gridlock that each needs the other to succeed.

Clinton has also grown on the job. He is more disciplined and the White House runs more smoothly than before. Since about the time of the terrorist bombing in Oklahoma City, more than a year ago, ``he's finally become President,'' a Democratic insider said. ``There's a confidence that's come into him in the last 8-10 months that I haven't seen before.''

He has never shown the deft touch of a Roosevelt or a John F. Kennedy in gracefully manipulating the political dynamics and playing interest groups against one another. This is a talent he'd find more useful than ever, given the fiscal constraints that have turned policy making--and politics--into a zero-sum game. He may have to rest content with the smallish accomplishments that the politics of limits entails, or else share the credit.

Even liberals in the Administration acknowledge that, as one of them put it, ``the center of gravity will be in the center of the political spectrum.'' Clinton, for his part, has shown that he can govern Left or govern Right.

If he wins a second term, for the first time in his frenetic political career he wouldn't have to face the next election. His endless campaign would be done. That would free him to be whatever he really is--the New Democrat, the tax-and-spend liberal or the policy wonk extraordinaire.

Or so the thinking goes. It seems likelier that the muddled, self-contradictory character of Clinton's first term serves as the truest reflection of his political soul. Clinton seems to believe in almost everything--and what's wrong with that?

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