He loves being President - Wash Post Puffy
Randy Michaels
the Nation, Shaking Hands Right and Left. But It's Not a
Campaign. Not Yet.
By Joel Achenbach Washington Post Staff Writer
The president is not campaigning. He is not campaigning
all week long. He is not campaigning from coast to coast,
in nine cities over five days. He is not campaigning every
night at $1,000-a-plate fund-raisers that will in the span
of a few days pour millions of dollars into the treasury of
the campaign that will officially begin when he is no
longer not campaigning.
Asked by a reporter on Air Force One if the reelection
campaign has actually begun this week, Bill Clinton got
that big ol' gosh-shucks smile on his face and shook his
head. He's not campaigning, he's just doing his job. "I'm
just out here doing what I need to do," he said.
Sometimes it seems as if Clinton is almost the forgotten
man of politics. With others getting so much attention,
it's been possible to ignore Candidate Clinton completely
-- to register him only as background static. But at this
earliest moment of Campaign '96, he's tanned, rested and
formidable, the same voluble presence, brain whirring away,
eager to engage the fight.
He was wearing jeans and a green T-shirt and some shiny
black cowboy boots. He looked comfortable and at home on
this customized jet hissing through thin air somewhere
over the East Coast. He had said earlier that night in a
speech that he "loved" being president, and no one doubts
him. You can just imagine that sometimes the boy from
Arkansas looks around and says, this is one totally cool
airplane.
A speech that night had gone well, and he was in a good
mood, and the staff was relaxing around an oval table. The
president reviewed a list of movie options. Every leg of
the trip has a different set of choices. For some reason,
the staff had selected "The Brady Bunch Movie," which was
playing on the wall TV with hardly anyone watching. Clinton
scanned some of the other possibilities:
"Glory."
"The Graduate."
"Bob Roberts."
Air Force One has a lot of socially conscious, feel-good,
Democrat-appropriate movies. But the president's eye caught
one at the bottom of the page: "The Man Who Would Be King."
He lit up. That's a great movie, he said. Great movie! Sean
Connery! Michael Caine! Clinton doesn't hold back when he
likes something. His favorite movie is "High Noon" with
Gary Cooper, and he's seen it 20 times, mostly as a kid.
Anyone happening upon the Air Force One staff meeting room
(after somehow eluding the army of Secret Service agents on
the plane) would have had no trouble identifying the man
who would be reelected president. He was the only one
dressed casually -- power was crackling from those jeans --
and he is, quite frankly, an unusual-looking person,
because he's so large, with a big head and lots of graying
bristly hair and a big suntanned face and lively eyes and
words always coming out his mouth.
The big news is, Clinton's got a new stump speech. He tried
it out Monday night in Philadelphia. It was a safe audience,
in that everyone had already paid a thousand dollars to hear
what he had to say. Clinton had a one-page outline and
winged the rest. He told himself before the speech, "I'm
just going to go on up there and say what I think is going
on."
And that is not campaigning. That is just . . . saying what
you think is going on.
But the new speech does serve a crucial function: Clinton is
now shaping the reasons why he should be given another four
years. Other than simply because he likes the big plane.
A New Message
His basic message is that America is undergoing the most
radical and important change in 100 years. That leaders must
make "100-year decisions" that will affect the country a
century from now. And that the Republicans can't be trusted
to make those decisions.
"If we do this election right, if we make these 100-year
decisions right, the best is yet to be," he said Monday night
at the end of the speech.
Throughout the trip Clinton has scrupulously avoided using the
word "reelection." However, he has tentatively started to
mention that there will be an election next year.
"This is not an ordinary election," he said. Sound bites won't
cut it this time, he said. "This election must be won by the
mind and the heart, and the vision of Americans looking down
the road to the next generation and saying, `I want the 21st
century to be an American century, too.' "
Clinton said he believes there is a parallel between the
societal changes today and the changes a century ago. Then,
the country went from a rural agricultural society to an urban
industrial society. And today we are making another shift, to
being an information-based, technological society. His visit
to Philadelphia gave a perfect visual backdrop to these thoughts.
The ride from the airport into the city took the president
through astonishing industrial terrain, past great fields of
natural gas storage tanks, Byzantine power plants, scrap metal
yards, steel trussed bridges, stagnant rivers, abandoned brick
buildings, rusted rail lines -- places not yet dead but not
obviously alive.
He told his supporters Monday night: "It was about 100 years ago
when we basically became an industrial and more urbanized country,
shifting from an agricultural and rural country. A lot of the ties
that bound people together were uprooted -- families were uprooted,
whole communities began to disappear. We also saw children working
10, 12, 14 hours a day, six days a week in the mines and the
factories of this country. We saw an absolute disregard for the
preservation of our natural resources.
"And for about 20 years we had this raging debate, and we decided
that the national government should promote genuine competition,
if it meant breaking up monopolies; should protect children from
the abuses of child labor that were then present; should attempt
to preserve our natural resources; and should, in common, promote
the personal well being and development of our people. Those
decisions were made about 100 years ago -- from roughly 1895 to
about 1916.
"And what happened after that was the most dramatic, breathtaking
period of economic and social progress in the United States ever
experienced by any country."
The message is fundamentally optimistic. Stick with Clinton through
this chaotic time, and we'll bust out with prosperity in a few years.
At a subtle level the nation's top Democrat is ideologically
retrenching: Without government, we'd have robber barons and children
working in factories, and we wouldn't have national parks.
He never mentions any other candidate or potential candidate by name.
He is not even officially a candidate himself, and he doesn't plan to
announce until early next year. So to the extent that he is entering
the political fray -- exposing himself to situations where, for the
first time, you hear people chanting, "Four more years!" -- he is
coming in from way up high, from the stratosphere, the plane of ideas
and grand historical insights.
On Air Force One a reporter asked him what books had inspired his
historical analogy to the Progressive Era. Clinton cited one: "The
Progressive Presidents," by John Morton Blum. It's about Teddy
Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, FDR and LBJ.
"The last seven to eight months I tried to find some comparable period
of American history," he said. "I think it's the most profound period
of change since the Progressive Era."
On the plane his office desk had nothing on it except a glass of water
and a book. The book was "A World Lit Only by Fire," by William
Manchester.
It's about the Dark Ages.
This is the position Clinton is in at the moment: His rivals are
elbowing
each other in the face while, in whatever spare time he has, he reads
history books about things that happened a long time ago, on entirely
different continents, among people who were still fighting battles
with lances and maces.
The Great Divide
There was a rumor Monday that Clinton had kissed the first baby of the
campaign. But no one actually saw it. The White House press quickly
debated the matter.
"He didn't kiss her."
"Someone said he kissed her."
"Yeah, but I didn't see him kiss her."
"He just held the baby up."
It was unresolved. Some reporters ran with it, some didn't.
The trip lacks the superficiality and oiliness of a true campaign swing.
There are no heroic efforts to create photo opportunities with the
candidate sitting on a bale of hay and happy babies all over the place
waving American flags, as though a toddler has the slightest clue what a
Democrat is.
The clumsiest moment, by campaign standards, came Monday when Clinton
visited a strikingly empty food court in a downtown Philadelphia mall.
It
was just the president and some guys in dark suits surrounded by a sea
of
tables and chairs. Clinton ate a bit of a fast-food cheese-steak sandwich.
Overhead was a mural featuring an almost nude woman, apparently
advertising
a new store.
To an untrained observer it may, in certain key instances, look as if
Clinton is campaigning. It might also look that way to a lawyer trained
in
election regulations. The White House readily admits that the purpose of
the trip is to raise money, but it has blurred the lines a little by
adding, in recent days and weeks, some official events. Thus the trip is,
officially, part official and part political, though politically it
appears
more political than official.
An official event is one that Clinton has to do as the president of the
United States. A political event is one that he has to do to once again
win
his party's nomination and get reelected. Monday's meeting with
Pennsylvania
leaders about the closing of the Philadelphia Naval Shipyard was clearly
official business; immediately after he held a fund-raiser that was
clearly
political.
If the trip is political, Clinton's reelection fund has to pay for it. If
it
is official, then the taxpayers pay for it. Senior adviser Harold Ickes
briefed reporters on the complexity of separating the official from the
political. The White House has lawyers and accountants who will closely
scrutinize each event, and the cost of transportation and logistics
surrounding it, to determine what should be billed to the reelection
committee and what should be paid by taxpayers. Perhaps they will chopper
in
a philosopher for assistance, since an official handshake looks
maddeningly
like a political one.
Later the White House said it can't defray the cost of this week's trip
with
official business. But no one will yet concede that a political trip is
the
same thing as a campaign trip.
"He's not in campaign mode," said Ickes. "I don't think you have a
campaign
until you have a known opponent."
When Clinton, minutes after giving a speech in Jacksonville, Fla.,
stopped at
a carwash and worked a rope line for 10 minutes, Ickes held fast to the
not-yet-campaigning scenario. The handshakes, Ickes said, were just a
"great
burst of courtesy."
A Blip on the Radar
Clinton is truly a prodigal schmoozer. He views himself as the president
of
every American, and there are times when he seems to want to meet them
all,
from the rich Republicans in Jackson Hole, Wyo., to the little old ladies
he talked to over a chain-link fence Tuesday morning as he toured a
high-crime neighborhood in Jacksonville.
"He's for the people. Small people," said Julian Nix, a 34-year-old
funeral-
home owner who was waiting for the president to arrive Monday at Mount
Carmel
Baptist Church in a predominantly black neighborhood in West Philadelphia.
"What other president would come to a black community like this, a black
church? Clinton gets out there with the people, everybody."
The president's motorcade could be heard far away. Sirens. The rumble of
motorcycles. The motorcade came around the corner, a fleet of limousines
and
sport utility vehicles, bodyguards swarming everywhere, commando types
ready
to spring into action, and finally the president himself emerging with
that
big head visible for several city blocks. He waved as people cheered
from
their front porches.
"He waved to us!" said Ann Edmonds, who lives across the street from the
church.
"It's a once-in-a-lifetime thing," said her friend Leona Gray.
Edmonds said she'd vote for him. Though she has her eye on Colin Powell,
too.
"I'd try Powell out. I'd try him out. Why not?" she said.
The president is cruising along steadily if unspectacularly in the
public-approval ratings. You couldn't go so far as to say he's made one
of
his famous "comebacks," but he is nonetheless in pretty decent shape
considering the Republican landslide last November.
He's also been somewhat under the radar of the national media, at least
by
presidential standards. The big political star of the past year has been
Newt Gingrich, with Bob Dole and Phil Gramm and now Powell coming up
close
behind. There is a dynamic environment surrounding people like Ross Perot,
who could do something bizarre at any second, and Bill Bradley, with his
extremely slow presidential striptease.
It's almost been possible to forget that there are Democrats at all. The
Republicans drive the debate in Washington. Clinton is trying mightily
to
change that, but it is hard to know if a discussion about societal change
in
the Progressive Era can compete with the explosive sound from the
dynamite
job the GOP is doing on the federal government. Right now Clinton is one
of
about three Democrats still alive and still employed that most Americans
could name in a pinch.
(The other two are Jimmy Carter, who has already and fat. Tip O'Neill is
dead. Tom Foley is forcibly retired. Pat Moynihan is omnipresent and
perhaps
omniscient but he's a bit abstruse. Americans might still remember
Mario Cuomo, but he's just a talk show host, and Michael Dukakis, who
was
last seen teaching at Florida Atlantic University, and Gary Hart, who
was
last seen in a photograph playing the bongos on a boat in Bimini. It is
a
sign of the times when one of the Democratic leaders in Congress is
David
Bonior, maybe the only man in America with less name recognition than
Richard Lugar.)
Being obscured by other political figures is not actually a problem for
Clinton. It may be an asset. Overexposure is fatal to a talkaholic like
Clinton. Americans like him most when he's not taking up the whole
TV screen.
At one point this week Clinton visited the reporters at the back of Air
Force One. Someone asked him about a possible third-party challenge from
Colin Powell. Clinton said he couldn't control what other people did. He
wouldn't mention Powell by name, but he did come up with a larger
context
for the situation:
"In a time of change, people are open to all kinds of
things. If people can subscribe to 25 special-interest
magazines, and 50 channels on cable television, if you say,
`Would you rather have three candidates than two?' they'll
probably say three."
If voters are, indeed, essentially consumers of political figures, then
Clinton could be in trouble. Because he is no longer new and fresh. His
greatest danger is that the people who liked him last time and who
haven't
found reason to dislike him will nonetheless simply decide they are
bored
with him and don't want to watch him and listen to him for another four
years.
But Bill Clinton isn't talking about four more years at the moment. He's
talking about those 100-year decisions. He's talking about centuries of
change.
And compared with 100 years, are four more years that much to ask?
Duane J. Roberts
(Randy Michaels) wrote:
> Bill Clinton, Preparing for Takeoff; He's Jetting Around
> the Nation, Shaking Hands Right and Left. But It's Not a
> Campaign. Not Yet.
>
> By Joel Achenbach Washington Post Staff Writer
>
> [Extra Deleted]
>
> A speech that night had gone well, and he was in a good
> mood, and the staff was relaxing around an oval table. The
> president reviewed a list of movie options. Every leg of
> the trip has a different set of choices. For some reason,
> the staff had selected "The Brady Bunch Movie," which was
> playing on the wall TV with hardly anyone watching. Clinton
> scanned some of the other possibilities:
>
> "Glory."
> "The Graduate."
> "Bob Roberts."
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
I find it ironic that Mr. Achenbach included the movie "Bob Roberts" in
the list he compiled especially in light of the new evidence implicating
President Clinton to the drug smuggling, gun running, and money laundering
activities of the Contra resupply operation at the Intermountain Regional
Airport in Mena, Arkansas.
Do you suppose he is trying to tell us something?
Sincerely,
Duane J. Roberts
eao...@ea.oac.uci.edu
Undergraduate Student
Criminology, Law, and Society
School of Social Ecology
University of California, Irvine