It was a painful scene, but supposedly one with a purpose. Bill Clinton emerged from his 75-minute meeting with Lani Guinier last week looking like a mourner at the funeral of his best friend. It was “one of the most difficult meetings I ever had in my life,” said the president, announcing his decision to pull the plug on his nominee as head of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division. But politically it was necessary. Facing dismal approval ratings, Bill Clinton realizes his own political health is in danger if he doesn’t move his administration, or at least its image, to the right.
The decision to dump Guinier was only one in a series of moves aimed at bridging a cultural divide that has cost Clinton dearly in the polls. He won the election as a “new Democrat,” but since coming to Washington he has seemed like a composite of the worst of the old Democrats. A growing number of voters see him as too eager to raise taxes, too concerned with gay rights and too enamored of Hollywood celebrities. Clinton took another hit last weekend, when Texans gave GOP Kay Bailey Hutchison an overwhelming victory in the Senate election, a race widely regarded as a referendum on the president’s policies (page 37). Clinton is determined to change his image. Last week David Gergen, the man who helped create Ronald Reagan’s image, came aboard to run White House communications. This week the president is expected to name a moderate white male to the Supreme Court-probably Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt (PERISCOPE)–putting aside the quest for diversity that many voters read as quotas. And he is searching for a compromise on lifting the ban on gays in the military, the issue that has most branded him a social liberal.
Many White House staffers are watching these moves in a state of depression. Young aides who liked to stay up all night making policy over pizza sense that the party is over, possibly along with their jobs. As Clinton contemplates further staff shake-ups, aides are darkly joking that the president will have to put study carrels in the Oval Office to make room for all the new arrivals. “It’s like the Roman Empire around here,” said an aide. “If someone offered me a goblet of wine, I’d switch it.” Even White House Untouchable Hillary Rodham Clinton has become the object of sniping. “How come Hillary never gets tarred on this?” asked an adviser, pointing out the First Lady’s prominent input on appointments, from Zoe Baird to Guinier, and her selection of the much-maligned White House counsel, Bernard Nussbaum.
The messy departure of Guinier made the staff-particularly Nussbaum, who should have flagged Clinton on her liabilities-look as inept as ever (page 26). Hadn’t the White House learned anything from earlier debacles, like the failed Nannygate nominations of Baird and Kimba Wood? Guinier came across in her final press conference as reasonable and personable, hardly the lefty “quota queen” she had been made out to be in newspaper editorials and Washington talk shows. She seemed exactly the kind of “diversity” candidate Clinton was always talking about: qualified and able, just coincidentally female and a minority. Clinton’s unwillingness to stand by her has stirred a revolt among the 39-member black caucus in the House and an outcry from a parade of traditional Democratic interest groups.
Personally humiliated:But that may be just what Clinton wants. Sacrificing Guinier has its roots in the Sister Souljah strategy that Clinton used so successfully during the campaign. By criticizing a little-known black rap singer for making anti-white comments at a civil-rights forum, Clinton showed white suburban voters he could stand up to the more insistent liberal elements of the Democratic Party, personified by the Rev. Jesse Jackson. While Guinier’s nomination was badly bungled and she was personally humiliated, Democratic strategists believe Clinton ultimately gains by picking a fight with his political base.
Indeed, the revamped Clinton strategy can be summed up in three phrases: please white middle-class men; kiss off liberals; court Perot voters. Members of the congressional black caucus threatened to retaliate by holding Clinton’s all-important economic program hostage. To lessen the impact of his betrayal, Clinton offered them a voice in choosing Guinier’s successor. And he called many members personally, a ritual laying on of hands with the knowledge that they have nowhere else to go.
Meanwhile, the president struggled to return to the centrist themes that elected him. Campaigning in Milwaukee, he extended his visit to get an audience with Republican Gov. Tommy Thompson, who has won national recognition for his innovative crackdowns on welfare recipients. Whenever Clinton feels he is drifting too far left, he reaches for welfare reform like a life raft to bring him back. The issue resonates with politicians and the public as a defining idea of what a “new Democrat” is supposed to be about. A call to “end welfare as we know it” is one of Clinton’s surest applause lines.
The sudden emphasis on right-sounding themes extends beyond Clinton to his cabinet. Health and Human Services Secretary Donna Shalala, a card-carrying liberal, last week questioned the fairness of allowing welfare mothers to stay home and collect benefits while their middle-class counterparts must work to make ends meet. White House officials are negotiating with the Senate Finance Committee for a $5 billion down payment on welfare reform, which-like health-care reform would initially be more expensive than the current system. In an era of declining budgets and diminishing tolerance, welfare reform is ripe for abuse. Several states are already seeking federal permission to enact half the Clinton plan, cutting off benefits after two years, but without appropriating the funds for job training or child care that Clinton advocates.
Clinton also sought to refocus his economic plan away from the dreaded tax-and-spend label. He agreed to scale back his $71 billion energy tax to attract the votes of moderate senators. And in a separate action, he bowed to the wishes of the business community and delayed an increase in the minimum wage. Yet much repair work remains to be done on Capitol Hill. White House aides were stunned at how defeated some leading Democrats see me data session with congressional leaders on the selling of Clinton’s plan. “They were all in the bunker, saying, ‘Give us cover, we need cover’,” says a Democratic strategist. Clinton will keep up his road trips to put pressure on wavering senators. He is expected to emphasize the plan’s positive points as the first serious attack on the deficit, with better-off taxpayers taking the biggest hit. The Democratic National Committee may also weigh in with paid TV ads. If Clinton can’t turn around the tax-and-spend image of his economic plan, his efforts to reform the health-care system could be doomed. That plan, delayed now until at least July, will inevitably be attacked for calling for more taxes and government intervention.
Magnet for controversy:Aides portray Clinton as “dumbfounded” by his image as a star-struck, old-fashioned liberal. The notion that he is preoccupied with gay issues strikes him as particularly preposterous. He often protests that a time-management survey of his first hundred days showed he only spent two and a half hours on the military ban. “I don’t understand it,” he recently told a friend. “I’m working on the economy all the time, and everything is ‘gay rights’.” What Clinton is beginning to understand is that any highly sensitive cultural issue, like gays or quotas, is a magnet for controversy.
A move to the right is politically smart for Clinton and may even be where he is most comfortable. But it is not without its downsides. In the short term, abandoning Guinier looks less like a shrewd move than a Clintonesque cave in to conservative pressure. The lack of constancy on almost every issue from Bosnia to the energy tax revives the Slick Willie image that plagued Clinton during the campaign: who is this guy and does he stand for anything other than what works? Because he has been such a political Janus, Clinton has no natural allies within the party. Liberals don’t trust him to get around to their agenda any more than party centrists believe he is on their side. Having made this shift to the right, Clinton must now convince voters he has the backbone-and political skills-to make it stick.
