Synopsis
President Clinton won't be remembered for soaring, Lincolnesque rhetoric--even top speechwriter Michael Waldman admits "Clinton does not leave a long trail of chiseled phrases," writes Waldman in his memoir POTUS Speaks (POTUS is the acronym used in White House memos for President of the United States). "Frequently his speeches read like what they transcripts of a highly persuasive man trying to win a listener's agreement." That's right on target. Clinton's best-known phrases have been either embarrassments ("that depends on what the meaning of is is") or clichés repeated with numbing frequency ("Let's build that bridge to the 21st century"). Yet Waldman hails Clinton for "transforming the way a president uses the bully pulpit to lead," by adapting to the current media environment in which 24-hour cable channels dictate how the news is made, packaged, and delivered. Waldman, who worked for Clinton from 1992 to 1999, is an unabashed "I was proud to work for Clinton, proud of what he accomplished for the country. For all his mistakes, I think that Bill Clinton was not only a successful president, but an important one." In other words, this is no kiss-and-tell memoir of the type that haunted the Reagan administration. Instead, it is the story of how an administration built its rhetoric around its policies, as told by a key player and an apologist. Waldman describes, for instance, how Bob Dole inspired that phrase about building a bridge to the 21st during his acceptance speech at the GOP convention in 1996, Dole said he wanted to "be the bridge to a time of tranquility, faith, and confidence in action"--i.e., the past. Waldman also recounts a few hilarious anecdotes, such as what happened when he saw Robert McNamara and Ira Magaziner--the failed gurus of the Vietnam War and the Clinton health-care plan, respectively--meet in the White House mess. Another "Every few days, in the morning staff meetings, [economic advisor] Gene Sperling would issue a cryptic report on the fluctuations of a currency. 'The Thai baht took a big hit today,' he would announce.... The staff would nod gravely, as if we knew whether there was, in fact, a Thai baht." POTUS Speaks is simultaneously loyal and revealing--a neat trick. It's an entertaining account of the Clinton presidency told from an insider's perspective. --John J. Miller
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Review
President Clinton won't be remembered for soaring, Lincolnesque rhetoric--even top speechwriter Michael Waldman admits that: "Clinton does not leave a long trail of chiseled phrases," writes Waldman in his memoir POTUS Speaks (POTUS is the acronym used in White House memos for President of the United States). "Frequently his speeches read like what they are: transcripts of a highly persuasive man trying to win a listener's agreement." That's right on target. Clinton's best-known phrases have been either embarrassments ("that depends on what the meaning of is is") or clichés repeated with numbing frequency ("Let's build that bridge to the 21st century"). Yet Waldman hails Clinton for "transforming the way a president uses the bully pulpit to lead," by adapting to the current media environment in which 24-hour cable channels dictate how the news is made, packaged, and delivered.
Waldman, who worked for Clinton from 1992 to 1999, is an unabashed supporter: "I was proud to work for Clinton, proud of what he accomplished for the country. For all his mistakes, I think that Bill Clinton was not only a successful president, but an important one." In other words, this is no kiss-and-tell memoir of the type that haunted the Reagan administration. Instead, it is the story of how an administration built its rhetoric around its policies, as told by a key player and an apologist. Waldman describes, for instance, how Bob Dole inspired that phrase about building a bridge to the 21st century: during his acceptance speech at the GOP convention in 1996, Dole said he wanted to "be the bridge to a time of tranquility, faith, and confidence in action"--i.e., the past. Waldman also recounts a few hilarious anecdotes, such as what happened when he saw Robert McNamara and Ira Magaziner--the failed gurus of the Vietnam War and the Clinton health-care plan, respectively--meet in the White House mess. Another example: "Every few days, in the morning staff meetings, [economic advisor] Gene Sperling would issue a cryptic report on the fluctuations of a currency. 'The Thai baht took a big hit today,' he would announce.... The staff would nod gravely, as if we knew whether there was, in fact, a Thai baht." POTUS Speaks is simultaneously loyal and revealing--a neat trick. It's an entertaining account of the Clinton presidency told from an insider's perspective. --John J. Miller
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 1
HIGH HOPES
Bill Clinton began his presidency with an enthusiastic stream of words.
On election night, November 3, 1992, the President-elect stood on a brilliantly lit stage in front of the Old State House in Little Rock, Arkansas. "My fellow Americans, on this day, with high hopes and brave hearts, in massive numbers, the American people have voted to make a new beginning," he declared. "This election is a clarion call for our country to face the challenges of the end of the Cold War and the beginning of the next century, to restore growth to our country and opportunity to our people, to empower our own people so that they can take more responsibility for their own lives, to face problems too-long ignored, from AIDS to the environment to the conversion of our economy from a defense to a domestic economic giant."
For the 40,000 people stretched out before him -- for the 44.9 million who cast their ballots for him that day -- this was a moment of supreme optimism and hope. For the first time in twelve years, in many ways, for the first time in three decades, those of us who had worked and voted for him would have a president in whom we believed. Our feeling of unity with America was whole and unreserved.
I stood a few yards from the side of the stage in a knot of campaign workers, standing on my toes to peer over the formidable hair of the governor's mother. "Today the steelworker and the stenographer, the teacher and the nurse had as much power in the mystery of our democracy as the president, the billionaire, and the governor. You all spoke with equal voices for change. And tomorrow we will try to give you that."
The President-elect, the Vice President-elect, and their wives waved and pumped the hands of those in front. Gore lunged out to grab James Carville, a few rows in, with Secret Service agents holding on to his waist. The loudspeakers blared the campaign song, Fleetwood Mac's "Don't Stop Thinking About Tomorrow." To my utter amazement, that bathetic song -- the same soft-rock Muzak that made me gag in the seventies -- now put a lump in my throat.
More amazing was the fact that I was there at all. Four months earlier, I was a public interest lawyer in Washington, testifying and lobbying and writing books and articles. I ran Congress Watch, Ralph Nader's lobbying office. Occasionally, we blocked something bad. We never passed anything good. Four more years of George Bush was about as dispiriting a prospect as I could imagine. I wanted to wield power, to engage in the messy, compromised work of governing. I was impressed by Bill Clinton; I liked his message about modernizing the Democratic Party. Most of all, he was a Democrat who could win.
One day, shortly after the Democratic convention, the phone rang. It was George Stephanopoulos, whom I had gotten to know while I was lobbying Congress and he was an anonymous congressional staff member.
"Hi, congratulations again," I enthused. I had been helping the Clinton campaign informally by writing position papers and advising on policy. A mutual friend, historian Eric Alterman, had let George know that I wanted to join the campaign full-time. But I didn't think I would actually get the chance.
"I think it would be great if you came down to Little Rock," he said. "We have the money now and you would do great. We could really use you."
I leapt off my chair but tried to sound cool. "Wow, that's great, George. I have only one question." I felt awkward asking it. "Um, what role, what title, would I have?"
"You'll be senior, Senior," George said. "Wait, here's James."
James Carville came on the line. "Role! What Role! This is the Wah Room!" he shouted. I had never met the man. "Pack up your toothbrush and get your ass down here!"
As I hastily prepared to leave my job, Ralph Nader called. He had been a hero of mine since grade school. Ralph was a constant goad to younger staff members whom he believed were too soft, too focused on their careers. When former assistants went into mainstream politics, he routinely turned on them. During the Carter administration, his top advisor had left to run the auto safety agency. Months into her tenure, Ralph attended one of her press conferences and demanded that she resign. I knew I might well face the same treatment. He disliked Bill Clinton, distrusted his obvious love of earthly pleasures, and had repeatedly predicted that Clinton would never be elected. "They aren't going to trust you," Nader said. "The Cajun and the Greek. They won't trust you for a while." He paused. He wanted me to understand that my mission was to help steer the candidate in a progressive direction. "Remember. Your purpose is not only to serve but to swerve."
I met Bill Clinton a few weeks later. I was working in the War Room in Little Rock, writing policy proposals, conducting research on the Republicans, listening and watching Carville rant. In a generous effort to expose me to the candidate, Stephanopoulos dispatched me to the campaign plane to brief Clinton and Gore for a television appearance on the Phil Donahue show the next day. I knew next to nothing about the subject of the show -- a government program that apparently paid American businesses to move jobs overseas. Bruce Reed, an old friend who was the deputy campaign manager and policy director, introduced me to Clinton, who had just dropped into the seat opposite me on the campaign's charter plane. "Governor, this is Michael Waldman. He is our foreign aid expert." I swallowed hard. I had, at best, a paragraph or two of things to say.
Clinton pulled out a USA Today crossword puzzle. Gore opened a thick, three-ring binder that his staff had prepared. I studied Clinton. His red face, graying hair, and blue eyes made him look strikingly patriotic, like an American flag. I was waiting to see if he would try to seduce me, to forge an instant connection, the Clinton technique I had read about in newspaper profiles. Instead, he frowned at his crossword puzzle and marked it up with a ballpoint pen. I didn't know whether to wait for him to look up, but eventually I began to recite facts and figures about foreign aid, and job loss in the textile industry, and what they could expect from Phil Donahue.
Gore piped in eagerly. Evidently he had studied his notebook. They began discussing "the Caribbean Basin Initiative" and "parity" and "transition assistance." Their discussion was friendly but competitive. Each seemed eager to show how well he understood policy. I sat silent, since I had little to contribute. The briefing was done. Clinton closed his eyes for the rest of the flight. When he left the plane, I pocketed the crossword puzzle. (You never know what might be valuable someday.)
The fall campaign was a sleepless blur. Carville held court from a couch at the center of an open newsroom, and he provided an electric charge that was felt throughout the old newspaper building that housed the campaign. Every attack had to be answered immediately; every fact had to be footnoted. At seven every morning, and again in the evening, dozens of campaign workers gathered for Carville's War Room meetings. (It was easier for me than for my wife, Liz, three months' pregnant with our first child, who was working as a researcher defending the governor's Arkansas record and had to haul herself out of bed each morning.) I wrote position papers on regulatory reform and banking, went on TV to defend Clinton's record,stockpiled research on Bush, and wrote press releases every few days attacking various administration shortcomings. In truth, there was not much to show for my efforts. Clinton was relentlessly positive, rarely assailing Bush for anything other than the overall health of the economy.
On the campaign trail, Clinton was a wonder. His moist, empathetic style was becoming familiar to the country at large. More interesting was his message. For decades, the Democrats had been locked out of the White House, seen by middle-class voters as culturally out of touch, more interested in exotic issues than mainstream economic concerns. The year before, in a largely ad-libbed speech to the centrist Democratic Leadership Council, Clinton had attacked "the stale orthodoxies of left and right" and unveiled a new approach. The Democrats should offer opportunity for all Americans, he said. "But opportunity for all is not enough, for if you give opportunity without insisting on responsibility, much of the money can be wasted, and the country's strength can be sapped. So we favor responsibility from all." It's hard to remember now that for a Democrat to mention "responsibility" was innovative; some even heard it as a racist code phrase. Clinton called this social bargain a New Covenant. During the general election drive, that innovative message was lacquered over by a more orthodox populist attack on Bush's economics. But underneath, still visible, was a new synthesis.
Now Bill Clinton was the President-elect. Standing onstage, young, tall, improbably handsome, he had the makings of a transforming president, one of the greats. The ghosts of Roosevelt and Truman, of Kennedy and Johnson, all those who had used the office and relished its power, seemed present that night. The expectations were high. His exuberant words raised them. Did he realize the power of his words and how loudly they would now ring? Did he know how high the hopes were, the expectations that he excited?
As I look back after seven years, it is clear that Bill Clinton entered the presidency with a grand and contradictory sense of the office and how he would fill it. He grew up schooled in the ideas of what has been called the heroic presidency. From the first hundred days of the New Deal to the collapse of Soviet communism, the office had been the dynamo powering the political system. We elected presidents to do big things. To conquer fascism. To win a world war. To create a strong social safety net and help usher in the civil rights revolution. And for half a century, to face down the Russians in the Cold War. Chief executives were judged by imposing accomplishments, bold strokes that almost invariably expanded the reach of the federal government. They were to display mastery in a series of dramatic foreign crises.
Almost alone on the national stage, presidents commanded the bully pulpit. Their voices fit the media of the day: Roosevelt's tenor voice and measured cadences were perfect for radio. Kennedy's deft press conferences, vivid rhetoric, and glamour were perfect for an era when television was becoming more important, and photography was going color. Reagan's winking delivery of sound bites before beautiful backdrops fit a time when the evening news compressed political messages into small pieces. The modern presidency was televised. The very first half-hour network evening news program featured Walter Cronkite interviewing John F. Kennedy, just weeks before he went to Dallas. Congress, by contrast, spoke with a babel of voices; in fact, until recent years, congressional proceedings weren't photographed at all.
Bill Clinton was determined to fill the role of the strong modern president. His speeches were sprinkled with references to Roosevelt and Lincoln. The crowd at Madison Square Garden, at his nomination, was enthralled by the grainy film footage of a teenage Clinton shaking hands with JFK. His signature initiative, a national service program, was directly modeled on Kennedy's call for young people to serve through the Peace Corps. To interviewers, Clinton readily spoke of his affinity for young Thomas Jefferson.
But at the same time, Clinton -- despite his years as a governor -- had no fingertip sense of the great institutional machine that is the presidency. Few Democrats did. Over two decades, Republicans had held the White House all but four years. And in that brief interruption, Jimmy Carter had run as an anti-president -- with few tangible goals other than shrinking the office and diminishing its pretensions.
Throughout this Democratic diaspora, the party had altered its view of the office. The strong presidency was created by liberals. But after Vietnam and Watergate and Iran-Contra, a generation of Democrats worried more about the dangers of an out-of-control executive than they craved the benefits of a powerful president. In the 1940s and 1950s, liberal historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote reverently about The Age of Jackson and The Age of Roosevelt, respectively. More recently, he had warned against The Imperial Presidency. Young Democratic lawyers and policymakers, excluded from the executive branch during Republican administrations, filled the growing staffs of congressional committees instead, where they found ways to trim the power of the executive. Democrats didn't defer to presidents; they investigated them. The only other source of political power for Democrats was governorships and mayorships, offices filled with men who distrusted the federal government.
When a party wins the presidency, it is a change as profound as if it had held no seats in Congress and now suddenly held the majority. Clinton had been thinking for years about how he would use the office. He was not ready; no Democrat was.
George Stephanopoulos urged me to rush back to Little Rock three days after the election, though I had no job. Within a few days, a hiring freeze was imposed. But George was able to argue that I was already there, and secured a place for me as one of his three deputies. The transition offices occupied two floors of what passed for a skyscraper office building in Little Rock. Transitions are a tossed salad of hard, often pointless work, ennui, and hope -- commingled with the terror, above all, that you might get left out. Nobody knew anything; nobody had a clear responsibility. Nobody could say for sure what his or her role would be, if any, once Clinton was sworn in. In one office, amid towering piles of paper, economic policy advisors Robert Reich and Gene Sperling began to pull together an economic plan. Two doors down, the foreign policy advisors worked, waiting for phone calls from Boris Yeltsin and trying to determine which calls were crank. A warren of offices upstairs were sometimes borrowed by Webb Hubbell, Hillary Clinton's law partner, and other ethics advisors.
Each night, transition staff members were feted by dozens of reporters at the few high-end restaurants in town: New Mexican food at the Blue Mesa in West Little Rock, steak at Doe's, ribs at a half dozen places. (Though the economy of Arkansas is heavily dependent upon poultry, it seemed nearly impossible to get a piece of chicken to eat in the state. Perhaps they know something.) The reporters had unlimited expense accounts. And they didn't even seem to care if we didn't give them any information. The journalists, especially the prominent ones, were happy to do all the talking. It was a heady and giddy time.
It was also, as it became clear soon enough, a missed opportunity. Of the wasted prospects in the Clinton presidency, the transition was not only the first, but in some ways, the worst.
There was, for starters, enormous wasted energy. The transition became the vent through which Democrat...
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