Presswatch (I) / Counting the Days
Eastland, Terry
T here are many good reasons for the press not to take the pulse of a presidency after its first hundred days—a practice begun when Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the New Deal upon taking office...
...He often quoted Roosevelt's 1932 campaign remark about the need for "bold, persistent experimentation...
...The most charitable answer is: new blood is needed on this beat (even if that means the First Lady quits granting interviews...
...To debut this fall, the quarterly will evaluate the print and broadcast news media according to the traditional standards of accuracy, balance, fairness, depth of insight, and (for opinion pieces) the quality of the arguments...
...I've read that speech...
...A sidebar on the first first hundred days would have been helpful—and easy to execute, given the numerous histories of Roosevelt's presidency...
...Here's what a news consumer needed to know: Having won by a landslide (57.4 percent of the vote), FDR took office on March 4, 1933, "a time of acute national privation and foreboding that the closing of the banks reinforced," writes Frank Freidel in Franklin D. Roosevelt: A Rendezvous with Destiny...
...Clinton asked for the hundred-days treatment when he promised (another campaign vow) "an explosive hundred-day action period" that would be "the most productive . . . in recent history...
...Or did he (my explanation) know of them, but refuse to allow them to undermine his belief ("I'm from a place called Hope") that he could be another Roosevelt?' / n the wake of Clinton's negative press, quite positive stories about his spouse began appearing...
...Significantly, society is also less trusting of governmental authority—or any other authority...
...Hillary Rodham Clinton," the Post's media writer Howard Kurtz reported on May 8, Finally, as we go to press, Newsweek's Robert Samuelson has written a column in the May 24 issue pointing out that Bill Clinton is not FDR...
...The defeat by Senate filibuster of his weirdly named "stimulus" bill is evidence that today's senators do read...
...Having filed glowing pieces on HRC for the past year, Time's Margaret Carlson, a former Carter administration official who has trouble separating her politics from her journalism, was given access...
...The sum of Roosevelt's first hundred days was greater than its parts, large as some of them were...
...On March 10, he recommended legislation cutting government salaries and veterans' pensions, which Congress also passed...
...And already—in a development noted only by the Wall Street Journal's Robert L. Bartley on March 25—Clinton has acted the part of the weak executive, signing on, for example, to a new independent counsel law...
...another is that—a fact neglected in many hundred-day stories—Clinton got only 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race...
...Immediately he sent Congress an emergency banking measure, which the members passed, despite not having read it...
...And on the eve of the century mark his staff tried to spin the press with a celebratory document that somehow left out such bad moments as the failed Baird nomination...
...I'll be back, and often, writing on the presidency, legal issues, the courts, maybe even a journalist or two—and whatever else needs the eye of this American spectator...
...But now the time has come for me to yield this department, as I will be editing the Forbes MediaGuide Quarterly...
...Does anybody have a problem with that...
...three months later he agreed to a stronger solution, federal insurance of deposits...
...His greatest single contribution to the politics of the 1930s was, in Leuchtenburg's words, "the instillation of hope and courage in the people...
...Here are a few: The FDR Sidebar...
...But readers of this space should know that I am not leaving the pages of this magazine, the first to publish me (you can look it up—June 1975: "The Amazing Grace of C.S...
...T here are many good reasons for the press not to take the pulse of a presidency after its first hundred days—a practice begun when Franklin Delano Roosevelt launched the New Deal upon taking office in 1933...
...Finally, 1993 is not 1933, there being no "acute national privation and foreboding," i.e., a Great Depression...
...And again, he's the one who built expectations for a Rooseveltian beginning...
...Both could be true...
...Then (to quote Freidel again) "dramatically, in helter-skelter fashion, Roosevelt every few days sent Congress a new proposal": March 13, legislation to end Prohibition...
...Carlson treats lightly the closed-door meetings of the health-care task force...
...It's the first group that got access, of course, but how to judge their work...
...Still, it would have been hard for the press not to have examined Bill Clinton's...
...She virtually neglects Hillary's role as the administration's diversity commissioner...
...Among other key actions taken pursuant to executive authority, he also took the nation off the gold standard...
...True, the Constitution having been changed, Clinton took office six weeks before FDR did...
...Needed was a compare-and-contrast piece, along these lines: Clinton has not been as busy legislatively as Roosevelt was, or nearly as successful...
...But I could not find the stories, analyses, and columns that begged to be filed...
...March 21, unemployment relief legislation (which included the Civilian Conservation Corps...
...Lewis...
...a public-relations analyst would say that Hillary was trying to get good press before unveiling her bound-to-be-controversial (and costly) health-care plan...
...The problem everybody should have is Time's preference for hagiography over journalism...
...As for the people's "receptivity," which is to say the Great Depression that made such receptivity possible, it would seem that the very lack of a similar national emergency should have warned Clinton off making extravagant predictions about his first hundred days...
...In any event, Kurtz's piece shows that HRC and her press people gained what they wanted by following this rule: grant interviews to friendly reporters, and force others to submit in writing the questions they would ask were they so lucky as to be granted time with the First Lady...
...Where FDR ended his first hundred days signing new legislation and preparing to enforce it, Clinton found himself, as a New York Times headline put it, trying "To Focus His Goals and Sharpen his Staff," as his approval ratings declined and disapprovals went up...
...Or consider the Post's Martha Sherrill, long on the HRC beat...
...Another striking contrast: Bill Clinton on executive power is no FDR: It is hard to imagine the post-Watergate Congress giving any president "broad executive power to wage war against the emergency," even if there was an emergency...
...April 10, the Tennessee Valley Authority...
...The quarterly also will report stories that journalism has ignored or for other reasons failed to cover...
...April 3, legislation to save farm mortgages from foreclosure...
...My new assignment will chart new territory, and it promises to be some adventure...
...is engaged in a media offensive that is being conducted very much on her terms...
...The democratic right to criticize has metamorphosed into the need to criticize—incessantly and angrily...
...March 29, federal securities regulation...
...The hundred-day pieces done by both print and broadcast media were generally thorough reviews of the Clinton presidency through April 29...
...It is the speech of a college sophomore, full of what columnist Charles Krauthammer called "adolescent self-discovery...
...While Clinton is Rooseveltian in one political sense—his programs would enlarge the constituency dependent upon government—he is not in another: He has not transformed himself, as Roosevelt did, from (in Freidel's words) "an ambiguous figure seeming to possess more charm than backbone" into a "confident, commanding president...
...March 15, farm legislation...
...Another journalistic genuflection: Bill may be doing poorly, but Hillary's doing great...
...FDR and Clinton: Compare and Contrast Clinton went to Hyde Park early in his first hundred days...
...I've now written this column since President Bush's first hundred days—which is to say, I've written it for more than 1,500 (fifty-four consecutive issues)—a record, as I see it, nearly on the order of Lou Gehrig's...
...It deserved a tougher look than Sherrill gave it...
...In a hundred-daymark interview with U.S...
...In his inaugural, Roosevelt famously declared his belief that "the only thing we have to fear is fear itself...
...Voicing his intention to ask Congress for legislation to meetthe crises of the time, he announced that if Congress did not act, he would, according to Freidel, "ask the Congress for the one remaining instrument to meet the crisis—broad Executive power to wage a war against the emergency, as great as the power that would be given to me if we were in fact invaded by a foreign foe...
...Sherrill focused in particular on HRC's April 6 speech at the University of Texas—her "politics of meaning" speech...
...A cynic might think that Hillary was trying to take advantage of Bill while he's down...
...And is HRC really, as Carlson writes, "the icon of American womanhood...
...Her cover story asked: "Hillary Rodham Clinton is the most powerful First Lady in history...
...But who, other than Clinton, believes this wee bit of extra time would have facilitated a faster start...
...Sherrill wrote a front-page Style section piece that sought to probe "Hillary Clinton's Inner Politics...
...News & World Report, Clinton complained that Roosevelt had had two advantages over him: FDR didn't have to take office until March ("he got a hugely greater time to get started"), and the people were more receptive to him because "one in four people were [sic] unemployed...
...The Clinton Delusion...
...At some point, the Hillary Journalism (most of it written by women) needs a thorough review—though don't expect such an effort to win a Pulitzer...
...I move now to the op-ed page (although what I'm about to suggest could have been fleshed out in one of those pieces the New York Times calls "news analysis...
...He should be thankful for small favors: as it was, Clinton's inaugural on January 20 saved him from a transition that was already spinning out of control...
...During his first hundred days, says William Leuchtenburg in Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal, FDR sent fifteen messages to Congress and saw fifteen "historic laws through to final passage"—often with the help of Republicans, whose votes he skillfully sought...
...Was Clinton, the voracious reader, unaware of these developments...
...May 17, a national industrial recovery bill...
...She has "warmth" and "charm"—even "gravitas...
...Surely Clinton knew this, just as surely as he knew that the electorate today differs from that of the 1930s in other important ways, as Columbia University historian Henry Graff explained in Newsweek: It is more eruptive, more skeptical of political leadership, and, fed a daily diet of print and electronic commentary, it is better informed and more fragmented...
...One reason is that, unlike Roosevelt, Clinton did not cultivate Republicans, instead using a one-party strategy...
...Roosevelt did not have to make good on this promise...
Vol. 26 • July 1993 • No. 7
