The Trouble With Clinton

...Clinton replied that he had proposed building the additional Seawolfs last December 12, in one of the widely praised "covenant" speeches he delivered at his alma mater, Georgetown University...

...This New Covenant isn't liberal or conservative," he said...

...His carefully wrought "covenant" speeches at Georgetown left his competition in the dust...

...After this point, the image of the good-natured, sensible candidate from Little Rock changed perceptibly...

...The ranks of his admirers on the campaign circuit thinned...

...The trouble with Clinton can perhaps best be understood by looking at his response to nothing so sensational as marital infidelity, draft avoidance, or pot smoking—only the simple matter of building submarines in Connecticut...

...Fudging on Desert Storm is one thing, but playing fast and loose on congressional pay caused a storm on Capitol Hill...

...Through the more than six months from Iraq's invasion of Kuwait to the first allied bombing of Baghdad, the governor was silent...

...On the evening of February 6, obviously shaken by his buffeting over the draft and the Gennifer Flowers controversy, Clinton addressed a "town meeting" (New Englandese for a political rally) at Phillips Exeter Academy...

...Clinton denied it...

...His success at this feat is shown by his skill in coming over as a moderate Democrat able to recapture the South and the Reagan Democrats while openly avowing governmental activism that dwarfs in its reach and depth the proposals of his supposedly more liberal competitors...

...It places heavy reliance on government while preaching individual responsibility...

...In an era of deep public cynicism and anger about government, to be caricatured as someone who cannot give a straight answer is devastating to any candidate...

...His handlers might want to ponder what this failing will mean for their man over the long haul...

...And as President, I'll veto pay raises in Washington until middle-class incomes are going up again...

...Eugene Holmes think better of him for pulling out of the program...

...When I arrived in New Hampshire on February 4, three weeks before the primary, I was sympathetic to Clinton's plight...

...Instead of his usual impromptu stump speech, he delivered an eleven-page prepared address that marked a second turning point in his campaign...

...But in December, Clinton had said nothing whatever about submarines...

...While the question of military service underlined doubts about his credibility, the Phillips Exeter speech undermined faith in his constancy...

...That speech, he stressed, was "toRobert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist, a television commentator, and the publisher of the Evans and Novak Political Report...

...By the time of the last "cattle show" at the Democratic state chairmen's meeting in Chicago last November, he was ahead in money, endorsements, organization, media support, poll ratings, and every other conceivable category...

...Given that the news media have also lost interest in the questions surrounding Clinton's avoidance of military service, it's a strategy that could work in the short run...

...There might be some such specific save-Detroit plan hidden away in a volume of Clinton's campaign documents, but I have yet to locate it...

...With relief, the reporters noted that New Hampshire voters seemed unmoved by and uninterested in the Gennifer Flowers story, and that Clinton still led in the polls...

...Only on January 14, 1991, two days after Congress voted the war resolution, did Clinton speak—and then in a manner so equivocal that the Associated Press and the Arkansas Gazette, the state's biggest newspaper, disagreed about what he meant...

...Mangling of the truth by Jimmy Carter, who resembles fellow-Southerner Clinton in many ways, did not bar him from the White House...

...The American Spectator June 1992 21 Having clearly established himself as the "moderate" candidate, Clinton was now navigating a turn to the left to pick up the mainstream of Democratic primary voters...

...His first public statement on the Seawolf's future was not made until January 22, and then most definitely in a Connecticut political context—in conjunction with the endorsement of him for President by the state's popular Senator Joseph Lieberman...

...It's both and it's different...

...It contained no mention of the Seawolf or of submarines...

...industry...

...In eleven years as governor, I've never had a pay raise...

...In that crowded hotel lobby, I asked him if he had not known of the Pentagon announcement of September 19, 1969, curtailing draft calls...

...The bigger problem is Clinton himself...

...Andrea Mitchell of NBC asked whether that was not just plain pandering...

...I was aware of his background as a nationally known anti-Vietnam student activist and his subsequent work on behalf of George McGovem's presidential campaign...

...His reaction to his national humiliation revealed a two-sided Clinton...

...Against this formidable array of assets is one devastating liability: in poll after poll, more than half the voters say they do not trust or believe the governor of Arkansas...

...The consensus is that Clinton must be "presidential," talking about issues instead of himself...

...0 © 1992 The American Spectator 22 The American Spectator June 1992...

...His performance as a 22-year-old, while arguably deficient in such traditional values as patriotism and duty, broke no laws and indeed might be considered commendable by his peers...

...But his speech was a discussion of broad national security issues...

...Tiflis is when I could not have known if I'd be here in Connecticut or running or anything of the kind," he said...

...Perhaps the most important thing about that letter is what it did not contain...

...He came across as a slightly left-of-center Southerner who, though displaying the excessive ambition common to his profession, seemed a sensible enough fellow...

...As a journalist, I began to see him with different eyes...

...He explained he had pulled out of his long-term ROTC commitment and "opened myself up to the draft" because of a cry of conscience caused by the death in Vietnam of contemporaries from his hometown in Arkansas...

...No longer was there any talk of capital punishment, parental notification, or Desert Storm...

...It soon emerged that Clinton's remarkable December 3, 1969, letter to his ROTC colonel in Arkansas thanking him "for saving me from the draft" was not written until after Clinton had been given a very high lottery number that precluded his conscription (though he also denies being aware of this...

...George Bush had somehow forgotten by 1981 that in 1980 he considered Ronald Reagan's tax cuts to be "voodoo economics," and Reagan's memory often played tricks on him...

...When a battered Clinton retired to Little Rock to recover his voice and reorganize his strategy after his New York triumph, he again had to consider delivering a "Checkers speech" in which he would admit error and promise to do better...

...On the surface, Clinton would seem to be a designer Democratic candidate: charismatic, handsome, young, smart as a whip, charming, tireless, willing and able to adjust his views to the party consensus...

...But then on February 6, a single newspaper story irrevocably changed the course of the 1992 presidential campaign...

...That morning, reporters lay in wait for Clinton in thelobby of the Tara Hotel in Nashua, where he was to address a meeting of social workers...

...Clinton managed to pull off a straddle without getting himself in trouble...

...Considering that Clinton's steel-trap brain can remember the agonizing details of every single point in a myriad of four-point plans, it strains credulity that he could have been honestly mistaken about the Georgetown speech...

...They were also repentant, ashamed that the establishment press had so quickly reprinted what the supermarket tabloids had published about Clinton's alleged marital infidelities...

...Indeed, in general principles he had been thinking of this great campaign since adolescence, and his head start paid off in the short pre-primary campaign...

...While moaning that the Republicans and the news media were persecuting him, he battled with a tenacity that even his severest critics had to admire...

...In Arkansas, the state Common Cause director, Scott Trotter, said Clinton was backing a state constitutional amendment that would increase his yearly salary as governor from $35,000 to $65,000...

...What Clinton did twenty-three years ago wasn't much different from what many other well-educated young men did to keep themselves out of Vietnam and a war they deplored...

...In fact, on December 12 Clinton was well aware he was running, and surely knew the dates of every primary, including the relatively early test in Connecticut...

...He claimed he had an "automotive plan?' that would enable Detroit's Big Three to defeat their Japanese competitors, a revelation that generated only subdued applause from the friendly audience...

...On March 22, two days before the Connecticut presidential primary, Clinton was asked on NBC's "Meet the Press" about his pledge to rescue the Electric Boat Company of Groton, Connecticut, the state's biggest employer, by building more of the phased-out Seawolf submarines at $2 billion a copy...

...Trotter dismissed the denial...

...It was clear that the newspeople on the beat No longer was there any talk of capital punishment, parental notification, or Desert Storm...

...Nobody bothered to check the record, and Clinton was routinely depicted in news accounts as the only Democratic presidential hopeful who had favored the Gulf War...

...n reality, Clinton's record of hawkish public utterances is meager...

...His subsequent assertion that his wife Hillary did not know she was being quoted when she made accusations of marital infidelity by George Bush to famed interviewer Gail Sheehy was absurd, but by then predictable...

...This time, perhaps chastened by the San Diego newspaper account, he made no claims of previously disclosing the decision at Georgetown, but otherwise stuck to his guns...

...When I asked a Clinton aide about the plan, he seemed a bit puzzled, but recovered to say he assumed the candidate was talking about his overall economic strategy for reviving American...

...Although ordered to report for induction, he managed to stay on in England as a Rhodes scholar and then made plans to further delay service by signing up for the ROTC as a University of Arkansas law student...

...He might have closed the book then and there on February 6 by conceding he had done all in his power, within the limits of law and ethics, to avoid service...

...Still, I wasn't prepared for the level of support for him from political reporters—especially the younger ones—assigned to cover Clinton...

...The American Spectator June 1992 19 Nobody else in the field was close to him...

...Clinton the insider was seeking to win over congressional Democrats, including super-delegates to the national convention...

...His vigor and intelligence are undercut by a lack of discipline that always leads him to seek the easy way out...

...He fell silent again once the guns boomed...

...His seeming denial of youthful marijuana use until he was asked the precisely correct question, and then his absurd claim that he did not "inhale," have become symbolic of what's wrong with him...

...The reporters agreed with Clinton's explicit faith in the ability of government, if properly managed, to cure all worldly ills...

...When Clinton came to Washington last September 16 to sit at one of the regular breakfasts of Washington correspondents hosted by the Christian Science Monitor's Godfrey Sperling, he described himself as an unequivocal supporter of Desert Storm...

...It was this Clinton who in 1988 occupied roughly the same position that Al Gore and Richard Gephardt hold in 1992—the Democrat who should have run for President and whose allure was heightened because he did not...

...Clinton campaigned for a sixth term as governor in 1990, pledging he would serve out his four-year term...

...But Clinton's response to the Seawolf question fit a pattern that has been obvious since February, and is unusual even for politicians...

...Clinton was now unequivocally pro-choice on abortion, opposed to nuclear power, and supportive of anti-strikebreaker legislation...

...But that announcement had set off parties of rejoicing across America, and surely must have reached the ears of the worried young Rhodes scholars across the ocean...

...Clinton the outsider was running an early television commercial in New Hampshire attacking the bipartisan, administration-backed pay raise for Congress...

...His aides had prepared a bum's rush to get him through the gauntlet, but Clinton likes to face adversity and stopped to answer, with a smile and with no bad humor, every question asked him...

...The Clinton campaign would never be the same again...

...But what did they say about the direction in which he was heading...

...When asked about right-to-work legislation, Clinton managed to give the impression that, while it might be all right for Arkansas, it was certainly not for New Hampshire...

...In an era of deep public cynicism and anger about government, to be caricatured as someone who cannot give a straight answer is devastating to any candidate...

...As more information was divulged piece by piece in the days and weeks to come, Clinton's account suffered...

...From that day onward, he played the Walter Mondale insider's game ever more relentlessly, flinching at no pandering to pin down the nomination...

...Never once did he mention his concern, expressed twenty-three years later, for his young friends killed in the war, which he surely would have highlighted in his obvious desire to make Col...

...But he appeared to have ripened into a moderate Democrat, sharing the party's faith in activist government but also taking conservative stances on social questions...

...He pulled off this bit of political gymnastics mainly by breaking with the party's left wing on capital punishment, parental notification on abortion, and, even more significantly, on the use of military force...

...He was the victim of supermarket tabloids, which were invading his past private life and subjecting him to standards not applied to previous candidates...

...Birnbaum skillfully blended details that had appeared in humdrum profiles of the candidate with a few new facts for a volatile mixture...

...As his poll ratings fell and negatives rose, he reacted with the same combination seen after his 1988 fiasco in Atlanta: whining and grit...

...Pushing for the Seawolf was perhaps the most blatant example, but I was also intrigued by his performance at the United Auto Workers Local 458 hall in Saginaw, Michigan, the day before the Michigan primary...

...Clinton widened his credibility gap not by what he did in 1969, but by what he said in 1992...

...Thus, the two sides of Clinton in the face of adversity: whining and showing true grit...

...When Hendrik Hertzberg wrote in the New Republic that every colleague he had asked in a random check on the New Hampshire campaign circuit had expressed personal support for Clinton, his small sample might have been skewed—but not by very much...

...Clinton is in deep trouble because, while proclaiming himself an agent of change, he turns out to resemble an old-fashioned pol and not a very inspiring one at that...

...It is not pandering...

...This was a run-of-the-mill political fib, for he was even then planning a presidential campaign that would put him well ahead of his competitors...

...That marked two claims of untruth by the candidate on a single issue...

...First, he put out word that the fiasco had really been caused by his attempts to meet the Dukakis campaign's request that he stretch out his speech...

...According to the nearly unanimous advice he received, however, doing so would be a disaster, reopening the autopsy into his character and credibility...

...Combined with doubts about the sincerity of Clinton's Gennifer Flowers denials and the start of nagging questions about the candidate's veracity on such matters as the congressional pay raise, his handling of draft avoidance elevated the character issue to new heights...

...The accusations of Gennifer Flowers had given birth to the character and credibility issues, threatening his well-planned road to the nomination...

...He appeared to loom over the Seven Dwarfs, whose number, ironically, included Gore and Gephardt...

...Not until Saturday night, April 4, on the weekend before the New York primary, did Clinton acknowledge that he had received a draft induction notice in the spring of 1969, more than three months before he joined the ROTC...

...His advisers hope that just as the reporters covering him have since New Hampshire ignored all accusations of marital infidelity, their guilty consciences will now cause them to put a lid on the character issue generally...

...That day's edition of the Wall Street Journal contained a back-page report by Jeffrey Birnbaum detailing how Clinton in 1969 had avoided military conscription...

...The TV spot was soon pulled, and Clinton dropped the pay issue...

...The 30-second spot showed Clinton declaring: "For twelve years, the politicians in Washington have raised their pay, cut taxes on the rich, and raised taxes on the middle class...

...But this revelation, forced by a former friend's disclosure, was quickly passed over by reporters eager to be done with the draft question...

...The "New Covenant," in short, is an old-fashioned political balancing act...

...The description of him as "Slick Willie" by Paul Greenberg, editorial-page editor of the Pine Bluff (Arkansas) Commercial, has stuck nationally...

...David Obey of Wisconsin, a senior House Democrat, called Clinton a "goddamn liar" who had previously indicated his support for the salary hike...

...But then he appeared, dripping charm, on the Johnny Carson program to expiate his blunder...

...This distrust grew quickly over less than two months...

...Not since my first presidential campaign—in 1960, when the touring press idolized John F. Kennedy—had I seen such a degree of rapture from the boys on the bus...

...I didn't know that," he replied...

...His cooperation dug him a deep grave...

...The Clinton pattern has been to shade the truth, to be a little too cute, toanswer questions with lawyer-like tergiversations...

...Quite apart from the question of whether he was dissembling or improbably confused, his overall assertion that his stance on the Seawolf was unconnected to the Connecticut primary cannot be believed...

...The first sign that something might be amiss with Clinton as a candidate emerged at the 1988 Democratic convention in Atlanta, after his endless nominating speech for Michael Dukakis...

...He told of receiving advice from defense experts during "two extensive meetings...

...He was now unequivocally pro-choice on abortion, opposed to nuclear power, and supportive of anti-strikebreaker legislation...

...This is December...

...20 The American Spectator June 1992 would want to clog any further pipeline from the sleaze journals, which indeed proved to be the case...

...What might be considered plain and simple lying in normal discourse is discounted for political candidates...

...They were awed by his command of facts and cheered by his dynamism, after the diffidence of Michael Dukakis...

...He was told the reference to the Seawolf had been edited out of the Georgetown speech, though the text mentioned no other military hardware that would be retained by Clinton if he became President...

...After losing to Jerry Brown in Connecticut, Clinton was asked about the Seawolf again by Robert MacNeil of PBS in one of the New York primary debates...

...In late 1969, when President Richard Nixon began winding down the war and the draft call was radically reduced, Clinton opted out of the ROTC and returned home to go to school, not at Arkansas—which his mother says he never really meant to attend—but at Yale...

...18 The American Spectator June 1992 tally out of the context of the Connecticut election...

...Populist rhetoric calling for the rich to be taken to account is balanced by demands of individual responsibility imposed on the ordinary citizen—even the welfare recipient...

...In December, did I even know I was going to be in Connecticut...

...But the same impulse that two months later led him to stretch credulity over why he wanted to build more Seawolf submarines compelled him to put what he had done in the best possible light...

...by Robert D. Novak Ever since it became clear to Democrats that the New York primary election had effectively selected their nominee for President, the party faithful have been asking themselves in dismay what in the world is the matter with Bill Clinton: Why does he seem to be unelectable against a flawed and unpopular Republican incumbent...

...While Clinton clearly said he "agreed" with the two Arkansas senators who wanted to wait for sanctions to work, and the Gazette thought he said he would have voted no, the AP thought he said he would have voted yes...

...Otto Kreisher of the San Diego Union-Tribune, a newspaper long interested in naval affairs, noted the omission and asked the Clinton campaign what was going on...

...By that time, Clinton's campaign had run into its first serious trouble...

...His first "Slick Willie" problems as a presidential candidate derived from his efforts to run as both an outsider and an insider, to be Jimmy Carter and Walter Mondale at thesame time...

...That was not the Bill Clinton I perceived in occasional, casual contact with him over the past dozen years...