Clinton's Virtuoso Performance
SCHORR, DANIEL
Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Clinton's Virtuoso Performance AT THE START of Year II, the Republican Thermidorians found their revolution suddenly stalled and President Bill Clinton, the...
...Edward Howey of Gordo, Alabama, a 45 year-old businessman who was in one of the Post's focus groups, could not name his Congressman, the Vice President, or the party that controls Congress...
...Forty-six per cent don't know the name of House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who was simultaneously on the covers of Time and Newsweek...
...A pity, because Mrs...
...Whatever the reason, the Republicans seemed uncomfortably aware that, after his virtuoso performance, President Clinton was once again a formidable adversary...
...The government was now personified in one Civil Service hero of the Oklahoma City explosion, Richard Dean, who had gone on working after being fur-loughed from the Social Security office...
...Defending the Vulnerable "CHILDREN depend on the adults they know and they need to be raised in a nation that doesn't just espouse family values but values families...
...But Mrs...
...Seventy-five per cent do not know that the House of Representatives has passed a balanced budget plan...
...It was a civic America that created the government to serve the general welfare (if you will pardon the expression...
...Comes the devolution, we may witness protests against not so benign neglect...
...He believed the President was obliged to move closer to the Congressional Democrats because the White House needed them to help stave off a Whitewater and Travelgate investigative field day involving the First Lady...
...I don't follow it, don't vote, don't care," Howey said...
...asked scornfully on television during the longest government closing...
...And 58 per cent think that the United States spends more on foreign aid than on Medicare...
...What has changed this nation of endless optimism, endless opportunity and endless open-heartedness...
...You may not believe Mrs...
...Only 34 per cent know the name of the Senate Majority Leader (you know, the one who is running for President...
...There were additional effects that weren't felt immediately, like the toxic waste dumps that could not be cleaned up on schedule...
...Clinton when she tries to explain away her lawyer's activities in Arkansas and her interventions in White House business, but you cannot listen to her, or read her, on the subject of children and doubt her missionary zeal on behalf of those she calls "the vulnerable beings in need of love and care...
...Senator Phil Gramm (R.-Tex...
...Americans in large numbers have tuned out not only individuals but the whole government...
...The groans of three quarters of a million Civil Servants, furloughed or unpaid, unable to meet mortgage and day-care payments, may not count for much...
...In the context of family, too, with great finesse, he introduced the beleaguered First Lady, who was accompanied for the first time by their daughter, Chelsea...
...One high-ranking House Republican, speaking off the record, said there had been a major miscalculation on the GOP side...
...A mere 6 per cent know the name of the Chief Justice of the United States (William H. Rehnquist, lest I presume too much...
...Clinton has been a subject of controversy from the day she moved into the White House...
...Perhaps Dole needs the services of Oliver Stone...
...Whitewater and Travelgate came up in many interviews during her book tour...
...They, after all, are the "pointy-headed bureaucrats"—as Alabama Governor George Wallace used to call them?whom the Republican revolutionaries came to vanquish...
...Increasingly Americans say, "Just politics," which is their way of dismissing a government they consider irrelevant to their lives, or worse...
...With Dole courting the Republican Right, where the delegates are, Clinton moved into and occupied the Center, where the votes are...
...The Children's Defense Fund, for one, is planning a million-child march on Washington on June 1. Professor Robert Putnam, in an article in the American Prospect entitled "The Strange Disappearance of Civic America," writes about Americans no longer joining, trusting or voting...
...Always had to make a living...
...I am thinking of the less visible garment workers who could not file complaints of substandard wages, of those who could not get an adjustment benefit for jobs lost because of imports, of the college students who could not get their grants and loans processed, of the 600,000 elderly Americans nourished by Meals on Wheels, of the Medicare and Medicaid contractors who could not get reimbursement...
...He shamelessly appropriated themes the Republicans have considered theirs, from downsized government to upsized crime fighting...
...And also Elie Wiesel, perhaps taking victimization too far...
...I do not only mean the ones you have read about—those who could not see the fabulous Vermeer exhibit at the National Gallery of Art, or get passports, or visit national parks...
...Professor Robert Blendon of Harvard University, which participated in the Post survey, says a succession of policy failures and scandals, from Vietnam to Watergate, may have contributed to the spread of distrust...
...Many scholars blame physical and economic insecurity—muggings and job layoffs...
...A third of all Americans believe health reform has been enacted...
...But the bigger question is: Did the other citizens miss their government...
...Those who consider the First Lady a liberal may be surprised to find that she applauds dress codes in schools, thinks everyone should abstain from sex until the age of 21, and would make divorce more difficult because she feels couples should stay together for the sake of the kids...
...Have you missed the government...
...Because of the record snowstorm in early January, the pre-publication excerpt that ran in Newsweek reached many readers late...
...The Right, she says, argues against the excesses of government but not the excesses of the marketplace, where "there is great power to disrupt the lives of workers and families...
...Do you miss the government...
...There is nothing in the survey to laugh about, however...
...So writes Hillary Rodham Clinton, who says in her new book, It Takes a Village, that she has spent much of the past 25 years trying to improve the lives of children...
...Three decades ago a majority felt most people could be trusted...
...No one was wondering aloud any longer if he was relevant...
...Both personal and mutual responsibility are essential, she asserts...
...The turn in Clinton's political fortunes coincided with, but was not entirely due to, his State of the Union address on January 23...
...Appearing firm but not confrontational, the President, rather than demanding, appealed to the Republicans: "Let's never, ever shut the Federal government down again...
...It appears that in every generation since the 1950s people have become increasingly mistrustful of one another and of their institutions, starting with the Federal Government...
...Today, two out of three say most people can't be trusted...
...If there were a law protecting political as well as intellectual property, Clinton might be in trouble...
...In that speech he was running for re-election, while Senate Majority Leader Robert Dole of Kansas, who gave the Republican response, was still fighting for his nomination...
...The one government program that 80 per cent are familiar with is job leave after the birth of a child or for a family emergency...
...Washington Notebook BY DANIEL SCHORR Clinton's Virtuoso Performance AT THE START of Year II, the Republican Thermidorians found their revolution suddenly stalled and President Bill Clinton, the "comeback kid," enjoying yet one more comeback...
...Tuning Out Government THE MORE SERIOUS Republican miscalculation, though, concerned the efficacy of shutting down the government...
...Clinton's book is interesting both for what it tells about her and for what it says about her policy prescriptions...
...Eighty-six per cent, on the other hand, can tell you who was President during Watergate...
...And because of the political storm over newly released Whitewater and White House Travel Office documents, her views on raising children received less attention than they otherwise would have...
...Among those anxious about their economic position, a majority see government as a major threat...
...Unsuccessful in dictating the terms for a balanced budget by straitjacketing the Administration's spending and borrowing authority, the GOP's Congressional leadership covered its retreat by saying it would use other tactics, such as "targeted appropriations," and finish the job with a new President...
...Some Republicans, who had apparently been expecting that in the end Clinton would cave in and make a deal with them on matters like the budget and welfare, appeared surprised by his resolute stand...
...In a republic that has no royal family, any alleged misstep by the First Family is the closest we get to the kind of scandal that holds the British public spellbound...
...She herself, she tells us, at times has had to "bite my tongue to stay married...
...This suggests that Americans respond to what directly affects them, and that the big issues like a balanced budget make less impact than politicians think...
...Harold Varmus, Di-rectorof the National Institutes of Health, told me that while research grants to universities were on hold, clinical trials of possible treatments for aids and cancer could not be pursued...
...He seemed to be trying to assure them that a deal over their heads with the Republicans was not in the works, whatever they may have heard about a triangu-lation tactic...
...Actually, foreign aid is less than 2 per cent of the budget and Medicare is 13 per cent...
...Where her liberal advocacy comes through is in the case she makes for a bigger government role in protecting children...
...Perhaps even more depressing than their alienation from government is the way Americans have become alienated from one another...
...He even kidnapped the matter of sex and violence on television while talking about strengthening the family as though he had invented that issue...
...Seldom have I read a survey more depressing than the recent week-long series in the Washington Post on Americans' attitudes toward the political system...
...Clinton was not lucky with her timing...
...In asking, he may have defined the basic issue of this election year...
...Untutored, they cannot tutor their representatives, whose names and party affiliations they often do not know...
...Never had time for it...
...Unchallenged in his party, the President seized the opportunity to travel the high road toward the future...
...At the same time, Clinton sought to reclaim his tie to the Congressional Democrats, praising their work on deficit reduction...
Vol. 79 • January 1996 • No. 1
