Presswatch/ What a Character!
Corry, John
N o doubt about it; Bill Clinton was in trouble. "The Incredible Shrinking President," the Time cover shouted, while Newsweek asked, "What's Wrong?" Just about everything, apparently—bad staff work,...
...It was all over for the Democrats the day he was first sworn in as president...
...Character...
...T hus the obvious question: Where was the president's center...
...Bolick, apparently, had led the campaign...
...Television pictures—Clinton leading a skirmish line of Marines across the White House lawn, say, or displaying his Mickey Mouse tie to reporters—can only go so far...
...Lewis identified him as "a protégé of William Bradford Reynolds, the rightwing zealot who wrecked civil rights enforcement in the Reagan Administration...
...It is hard to know where he lives, a difficulty the Times acknowledged when it led the paper with the results of a Times-CBS poll...
...Ted Koppel dryly pointed out then that the ideas were "precisely the things" the press had been discussing for weeks...
...Clinton demurred, however, and said Bill could take care of himself...
...You waited for a real emotion, but one never came, and even the promise to declassify POW-MIA records was partly fraudulent...
...Obviously, there was confusion here...
...Bolick is a co-founder of the Institute for Justice in Washington, which promotes free-market practices...
...Clinton had at stake as he struggled to get his Presidency back on course...
...Last fall he said that "when I am your president, the files will be thrown open, the roadblocks will be torn down, and the truth will come out...
...Just about everything, apparently—bad staff work, murky policies, and Harry and Linda Thomason—although the unanswered question was not what, but why...
...He said it sensationalized the news, and recalled the fuss everyone made when Khrushchev banged his shoe on the table...
...Clinton "may be one of, if not the, closest advisers to the president...
...The president was particularly scornful, Apple wrote, about an op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal by Clint Bolick...
...I would say this is about my center," he said, "not about the political center...
...When the Mormon Tabernacle Choir pulled up on a float in front of Reagan's box at the inaugural parade and sang "The Battle Hymn of the Republic," a camera zoomed in on the new president's face...
...Clinton had said it all before...
...The Times reported that Clinton's "eyes glistened with emotion as he listened to the speakers and singers tell of their fallen comrades and their wartime experiences," although when he spoke himself he did so without feeling...
...That the White House was a mess was self-evident, but there was a reluctance to associate this with character flaws in the president or to suggest that he was not up to the job...
...Therefore, nothing he said could be trusted...
...The media reported the promise as news, although it wasn't...
...Perhaps there is, and it may be the real reason everything now seems to be going all wrong...
...Vladimir, however, did not quite buy that...
...Meanwhile, the same night Goreby John Corry was talking to Koppel, Clinton was talking to the New York Times's R.W...
...The Times columnist had written that "Professor Guinier was the target of the most effective smear campaign seen in Washington since Joe McCarthy's day...
...Reporters do not show Clinton the respect they once did, and when they face him at news conferences now some no longer even address him as Mr...
...He once won a suit to overturn a District of Columbia law that banned outdoor shoeshine stands...
...Couric spoke...
...There was, for example, Katie Couric ("asking the questions only Katie Couric could ask," the NBC promo said) in a one-hour interview with Hillary Rodham Clinton...
...Last summer he "demanded the immediate declassification and release of pertinent government documents which deal with the POW-MIA issue...
...Nonetheless, the controversy over Lani Guinier was raging even as Mrs...
...Had the New Republic also been suborned by right-wingers...
...Over the beef Wellington, Apple wrote, Clinton spoke bitterly about what he described as "a campaign of right-wing distortion and vilification" of Guinier's views in the press...
...Two days later, Lewis's colleague Anna Quindlen picked up the same theme...
...I'm beginning to think," Vladimir said, "that the people who talked about character are not all that wrong...
...Couric said Mrs...
...Clinton has a problem, even if the respectable press is unwilling to name it...
...As John Chancellor solemnly said of Clinton in an NBC commentary a few nights later, "His highest priority now is how he is to be perceived...
...For that you must turn to the fringes...
...he must show he cares about at least something...
...he might have been commanderin-chief, but he seemed to be an intruder...
...Why hadn't the president been disturbed about them before...
...You could see his eyes were teary...
...The president's center seems so ambiguous a place that he may have thought so...
...It was all a tad difficult to follow, although it may be that Clinton had been misled when he read Anthony Lewis...
...Polls often showed Ronald Reagan on one side of an issue and most Americans on the other, but it never made much difference...
...Clinton must feel something real...
...How could Clinton be disturbed by "precisely the things" the press was discussing if the press was full of "rightwing distortion and vilification...
...He denied this had anything to do with a calculated move to the political center...
...Presumably, this is true...
...sistant attorney general for civil rights, while claiming he had only that day read her writings...
...When Clinton began his slide in the polls, "Posner/Donahue" talked about it...
...The poll also found that Clinton had an approval rate of only 38 percent, and that half the people it surveyed thought he had "lost touch with ordinary Americans...
...Then she moved in on the touchy stuff...
...The same issue of the New Republic that had an editorial, "Withdraw Guinier," carried an article by Abigail Thernstrom that came close to suggesting Guinier simply did not like white people...
...The headline on the New Republic cover had said: "The Clinton Nomination: A Clinton Betrayal...
...Perception is a big thing in politics...
...Then, apparently, he forgot about it...
...Phil asked Vladimir what he thought was going on, and Vladimir said, "The major thing is that nobody believes him anymore...
...It was meant to be solemn and moving, although it came off as only stagy...
...Bolick, she wrote, was a "conservative who has worked with William Bradford Reynolds...
...Had you been keeping your eye on the ball, you would have said, Hey, Bill, don't do that," Couric said, suggesting that Mr...
...At the same time, a White House press corps that once fell in love with a policy wonk grows increasingly testy...
...Contrast that with Clinton's visit to the Vietnam Veterans Memorial on Memorial Day...
...His drooping approval ratings prove that...
...That was only common wisdom, of course, but then came the big breakthrough...
...Clinton and the chirpy Ms...
...Vladimir Posner, the old Communist flack, and Phil Donahue, thetalk show host, team up on NBC's cable channel at night...
...The idea that a right-wing op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal was behind all the opposition to Guinier was excessive, too...
...It is almost as if they have decided there is an impostor in the White House...
...Media rules required reporters and correspondents to seek other explanations, some fanciful in the extreme...
...Why a president is perceived one way and not another, however, is more than mere cosmetics...
...A few weeks later, though, they talked about Clinton again...
...When a very uncomfortable Al Gore appeared on "Nightline" to explain further why Guinier had been dumped, he said her writings represented "a set of ideas the president doesn't agree with...
...David Gergen's political cross-dressing will not be enough, either...
...The headline said: "More People View/Clinton as Liberal/As He Seeks Center...
...C linton's weaknesses are catching up with him now...
...Phil once introduced Noam Chomsky as "one of the world's leading social thinkers...
...The characterization of Bolick as a right-wing nut, though, was excessive, even by Times columnist standards...
...Clinton had failed to exercise oversight...
...He seemed to think the press was at fault...
...By then, his slide in the polls had become precipitous...
...Clinton did not belong there...
...Apple...
...Not long ago this was called guilt by association...
...I have to tell you," he said at a news conference, "that had I read them before I nominated her, I would not have done so...
...It was at a dinner in the White House, and as Apple reported two days later, it was attended by "journalists, Democratic leaders, businessmen, figures from the capital's cultural life," all of whom "sensed how much Mr...
...Clinton's problems had arisen because Mrs...
...He might have saved the day if he had offered even the smallest apology for his anti-war activities or shown some appropriate guilt, but he neglected to do either...
...It was clear he was more in touch with himself and the rest of the country than his critics, and that in a pale, thin time he was real...
...Out of the mouths of babes and old Communist flacks—someone finally had used the c-word...
...The president had just pulled Guinier's nomination as asJohn Corry is a former New York Times media critic and the author of My Times: Adventures in the News Trade, forthcoming from Putnam...
...Its headline had called Guinier a "quota queen...
...Phil plays Lou Costello to Vladimir's Bud Abbott, and sometimes they get off some good ones...
...The country is as guilty as the president," Phil declared...
Vol. 26 • August 1993 • No. 8
