Title: No Place for Amateurs: Some Thoughts on the Clinton Administration and the Presidential Staff
Abstract: When apportioning blame for the missed opportunities of the Clinton presidency, history may well accord the greatest weight not to the Paula Jones/Monica Lewinsky/Katherine Willey sex scandals but to the series of political misjudgments Clinton and his aides made during the fourteen months after his November 1992 election. Ill-advised legislative ventures,(1) botched executive branch appointments,(2) and a variety of miniscandals(3) in this period shortened Clinton's honeymoon, produced a precipitous drop in his public standing, and contributed to the Democrats' loss in 1994 of both houses of Congress to the Republicans for the first time in forty years. More important, Clinton's first-year troubles left him politically incapable of preventing the January 1994 appointment of an independent counsel to investigate the Whitewater real estate transaction. Eventually, that investigation expanded under Kenneth Starr to include allegations that Clinton and/or his aides improperly used the FBI to investigate employees of the White House travel office, illegally removed Whitewater-related files from Foster's office after his suicide, and obstructed justice and suborned perjury in a sexual harassment suit brought against Clinton by Jones, a former Arkansas state employee.(4) Starr's ongoing investigation has undoubtedly marred Clinton's historical legacy. It may yet cost him the presidency. With hindsight, of course, it is easy to pin the blame on Clinton, his wife, and their senior aides for his failure to hit the ground running in 1993. But their troubles also highlight the growing disjunction between what is required to win the presidency in a media-driven, primary-based personal campaign versus what is necessary to govern in a system of separate institutions sharing powers. Simply put, the current electoral system does little to prepare the victor for the presidency. Indeed, Clinton's experiences suggest it teaches exactly the wrong lessons. Like Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan before him, Clinton and his wife campaigned as outsiders, determined to clean up the mess in Washington, DC. If this strategy proved appealing to an increasingly cynical electorate, however, it did little to help build political bridges to the members of the Washington community whose support Clinton would need to govern. He could boast that his election owed little to their efforts on his behalf, but neither did they feel particularly responsible for his political fate as president. Indeed, most Democratic members of Congress ran ahead of Clinton in the voting in their districts. Clinton's estrangement from the political establishment was compounded by his choice of senior aides. He filled key White House staff and cabinet posts with FOB's (Friends of Bill's) from Arkansas, including White House Deputy Counsel Vince Foster, Chief of Staff Mack McClarty, and Director of Personnel Bruce Lindsey, and with those, like George Stephanopoulus and Ira Magaziner, who demonstrated their political loyalty to Clinton during the dark days of the 1992 presidential campaign. Unfortunately, as Foster indicated in a memo he wrote shortly before his suicide, neither experience proved particularly useful in preparing for life in the White House.(5) Indeed, the lesson of recent years is that campaigning and governing are fundamentally antithetical processes.(6) Presidential campaigns place a premium on rhetoric, political symbolism, and skillful use of the media to castigate opponents and respond to their attacks in timely fashion (preferably in the same news cycle).(7) Governing in a system of shared powers, however, places a greater emphasis on patience, the ability to compromise, a knowledge of arcane policy details, and sensitivity to the bargaining interests of other Washingtonians. Despite these differences, presidents and their aides who survive the electoral process are naturally inclined to believe that the skills they honed during the campaign will prove equally effective in governing from the Oval Office. …
Publication Year: 1998
Publication Date: 1998-09-22
Language: en
Type: article
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Cited By Count: 1
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