A Painful Washington Baptism

...The First Lady was right when she said the Administration spent its first year cleaning up after 12 years of Republican heedlessness about the deficit...

...In his Epilogue, Woodward writes that Clinton "had not fully become the bipartisan, centrist reformer Gergen envisioned...

...As pollster Stanley B. Greenberg puts it: "People are antigovernment and progovernment at the same time...

...The obituaries are beginning to appear again...

...He never really separated his twin duties—political confidant of Clinton, and chief overseer of the Resolution Trust Corporation, the semi-independent agency charged with liquidating the Savings and Loan mess...

...In one of his periodic eruptions of frustration, Clinton fulminates that "we're all Eisenhower Republicans...

...But that moment contained the seeds of Altman's demise...

...A striking virtue of The Agenda is its vivid description of a major Clinton weakness: his in ability to make decisions crisply...

...Perhaps I shouldn't be surprised that David Stockman is never mentioned in this book...

...Clinton defied the concerns of Capitol Hill allies and her own staffers and told a meeting of Senators that her health care proposal would carry a $100 billion price tag...

...Recently, I talked to Representative Olympia J. Snowe, a moderate Republican from Maine, who pointed out that during her first term in Congress the Carter Administration consulted her far more often than the Clinton folks ever do—even though she is far more senior now...

...In his first year he did at times act like a new Democrat, pushing through such important measures as parental leave and student loan reform...

...But the designers of the strategy—from Federal Reserve Board Chairman Alan Greenspan to Robert E. Rubin, head of the National Economic Council—were inside players aiming their impact primarily at Wall Street...

...Here the big-government, probureaucracy faction, led by Hillary Rodham Clinton and White House Health Care Policy Adviser Ira Magaziner, captured the decision-making process and produced a dinosaur of a proposal that quickly became a parody of itself: overregulated, underfunded and dead from the day it was thumped down on Congressional doorsteps...

...He shifted the attention of the Democratic Party from the poor to the middle class...

...That turns out to be a prescient comment...

...Rog-er...

...Here is just a sample, Woodward's account of Clinton's early Presidential campaign: "He appeared locked in a perpetual debate and argument with himself and with dozens of friends and advisers...

...Woodward's insisting he is merely a reporter, and doesn't do context, is not much of an excuse...

...As a matter of legislative position," Woodward reports, "Boren maintained that the President needed to be a centrist and seek bipartisan support...

...The battle over Clinton's initial budget was interesting, yet hardly heroic...

...Clinton's economic strategy basically worked: His hard-nosed budget did reassure the financial markets and interest rates did go down...

...The battle over Clinton's health plan had a different outcome...

...Clinton and his aides made a basic, and ultimately misguided, decision during the budget fight to craft a Democratic proposal with little or no Republican input...

...Few Republicans are, except for Alan Greenspan and Senator Bob Dole, the Republican leader...

...Only when he started working with Republicans did the legislative process come unstuck...

...As the Budget Director during President Ronald Reagan's first term, he was the chief architect of Reagan's strategy to shrink the liberal welfare state by depriving it of tax revenues...

...We'll have to wait for Woodward's next book to see how this story finally plays out...

...Magaziner insisted at one point that health reform could actually save $89 billion by 1997, a contention nobody else agreed with...

...For all the childish outbursts by people like Begala, who advocated a revival of the sterile old class-warfare approach (in his view, "people needed to hear the rich squealing"), there was no getting around the basic fact that you can't create jobs without giving rich people the ability and incentive to invest their money...

...Interestingly, the man Clinton chose to replace McLarty was Leon E. Panetta, the Budget Director during the first 18 months of the Administration and the target of scorn and ridicule among the President's political consultants...

...The new Democrats won the day during the economic struggle, mainly because Alan Greenspan used his vast prestige to educate Clinton and the statistics backed him up...

...The political types, such as consultants James Carville and Paul Begala, despised the Wall Street strategy and never really developed a plan for capitalizing on its success...

...At another point, Mrs...

...On the other side are the traditional liberals, who have a government program for every ill and a lingering, visceral distrust of capital and profit...

...It bordered on chaos...

...The real truth was that both of them badly miscalculated the willingness of Congress to impose a huge new bureaucracy on health care and raise the taxes needed for a vast increase in insurance benefits and coverage...

...Woodward has become the master of the close up, fine-grained portrait of Washington power barons at work...

...Amid all the misjudgments and missteps it records, this book reminds us too why Clinton defeated George Bush, and why he still has the potential to be a good President...

...His wife Hillary assesses their accomplishment with the bitter summation: "We cleaned up the mess we inherited...

...But it has two significant flaws, starting with the lack of any historic context...

...Begala—whose judgments proved stunningly wrong most of the time—called him "the Poster Boy for Economic Constipation...

...Woodward's account also illuminates another basic tension that continues to bedevil the Clinton White House: The public really can't make up its mind about government, and holds two contradictory opinions at once...

...In Woodward's telling, moreover, Clinton shows a capacity for growth...

...But the President has repeatedly proven himself to be a resilient and resourceful politician...

...The first clue is a failure of communication...

...In fact, said Snowe, she would be hard-pressed to recognize Clinton's legislative liaisons...

...Too often, Altman wore his political hat when he should have been wearing his regulator hat, and in the end he lost the confidence of Congress and was forced to resign...

...now, Congress is trying to clean up after her reckless disregard for the political realities surrounding health care reform...

...The chaos persisted through the time frame of this book, and led to the departure of Clinton's Chief of Staff, Thomas F. McLarty, a boyhood chum with no Washington experience who proved totally incapable of instilling any discipline in the White House operation or the President himself...

...Indeed, Gergen felt a "campaign mentality permeated the White House, a War Room mentality" that poisoned efforts at bipartisanship...

...Yes, people do want government to protect them against forces they cannot control, from street crime to a loss of health insurance...

...He understood the power of the tax rebellion that rattled statehouse windows in the '70s and '80s...

...The second clue to Clinton's troubles is embedded in Woodward's account of a basic tension in the White House staff...

...But they do not trust government to do that job very well...

...News and World Report...

...That is a damning commentary on the President's failure to cultivate even his natural allies among Republicans...

...He was unable to bring his deliberations to any resolution...

...From all reports Panetta, a former Congressman, is finally reining in the President and his staff, a welcome and long overdue development...

...Nonetheless, this story of Clinton's introduction to Washington is useful because it contains many clues about how and why his presidency is in so much trouble...

...From the beginning, key moderates like Senator David L. Boren, Democrat of Oklahoma, warned against this approach...

...Otherwise he's the President of the left,'" Boren said...

...On one side are the centrist-leaning "new Democrats," who have a healthy suspicion of Washington-based solutions to social problems and a clear understanding that no administration can succeed without nurturing economic growth and capital formation...

...Deputy Treasury Secretary Roger C. Airman is a hero in Woodward's tale, the man who successfully managed the effort to pass the economic game plan...

...Rog-er...

...The asides about health care in Woodward's book contain some truly astonishing exercises in self-delusion and self-righteousness...

...More seriously, Woodward wound up picking the wrong year and the wrong issue for his opus...

...In one memorable scene, he is greeted like a rock star by the assembled staff chanting "Rog-er...

...Hence the dilemma: The public keeps supporting the principle of health care reform, while rejecting many of the specific remedies...

...His thinking never seemed to go in a straight line...

...As a result, Team Clinton has never received the credit it deserves...

...But the only one he ever actually hired was David R. Gergen—my old colleague from U.S...

...Even if they are creeping back up now, the stimulus of cheaper money continues to reverberate through the economy...

...Washington is littered with politicians and journalists who wrote off Bill Clinton at one time or another...

...The absence of any reference to Stockman, for example, borders on the willfully stubborn...

...Pollsters are amazed at the current paradox of rising confidence in the economy combined with dwindling confidence in the President...

...And in Bob Woodward's detailed account of economic policy-making during President Bill Clinton's first year, practically every decision is dictated by Stockman's deliberate deviltry...

...That's the truth and they'd better get used to it," she snapped...

...Stan] Greenberg was horrified at the process...

...Clinton had promised repeatedly to bring Republicans into the White House...

...former White House correspondent, New York "Times ONE OF THE main characters in this book, David Stockman, is never mentioned...

...The line around the capital—that so many people talk to him because they are afraid others will—is probably true, and his book has already entered the language inside the Beltway...

...On health care and the crime bill, Clinton waited much too long to reach across the aisle, and did allow himself to become shackled by the left wing of his party...

...News—who fell victim to the highly partisan climate inside the Administration...

...The current fight over health care is a far richer and more consequential tale...

...McLarty was not the only Clinton pal to self-destruct after Woodward finished his manuscript...

...In fashioning his health care plan, Clinton listened to one side of that equation but not the other...

...From worker retraining to bridge building, Clinton's agenda of social "investments" is held hostage by the Federal deficit, by the need to reassure financial markets that the White House is serious about reducing the shortfall...

...He listened to Alan Greenspan's explanation of how the economy really works, and did not allow his populist, profit-hating political buddies to knock him off course...