The Makings of a President

...So did Reagan, whose stature has grown correspondingly since he left office...

...What looked at the time like a President's good luck may be a mixed blessing for one who craves the adulation of posterity...

...How Conservatives Won the Heart of America by Thomas Frank...

...Crucially, we don't know yet whether it will then be nine years in the past or only four...

...In victory or defeat, they maintained the cheerful stoicism typical of small-town Southerners who had survived depression, war and integration...

...We may find out soon for how long...

...His uncertain touch on domestic issues, however, coupled with a dollop of Carter's bad luck, made him another one-term President...

...A native Kansan who seems to know everything about his state, Frank laments its transition from a bastion of liberal causes to a place where working-class voters routinely violate their own economic interests by choosing conservative Republicans on the basis of "values...

...The Presidency is another matter...

...His deficiencies of character and conviction, his tendency to evade crises by seeing every issue in terms of its impact on his own fortunes, transformed what might have been a great Presidency into a mediocre one...

...He did his damnedest to bring about peace between the Israelis and Palestinians...

...On the other side, Clinton's Administration and book both demonstrate an insecure man who developed a Nixonian paranoia about enemies he felt sure had always been bent on his destruction—from unreconciled segregationists in Arkansas to the apotheosis of the national Right-wing conspiracy, Special Prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr...

...Triangulation" and "moving the party to the center," clichés of the 1990s, worked well in bringing Clinton himself to office and keeping him there, albeit never with a majority of the popular vote...

...No wonder Coolidge looks so restful in retrospect...

...In hindsight, Clinton's greatest policy failure was his weak reaction to terrorism, though his two Republican predecessors also had unimpressive records on that score...

...Apart from good luck (Reagan and to some extent Clinton had it, Carter and the first Bush didn't), the qualities necessary for the making of a successful President all amount to platitudes—intelligence, articulateness, energy, strong nerves, an ability to connect with a wide variety of people, a character that will strike most voters as upright and honorable...

...He consistently supported free-trade agreements, despite the opposition of most Congressional Democrats, that clearly benefited the country and the world...

...As he reminds readers of his book in stupefying detail, his Administration rescued Europe (though tardily) yet again from its habits of paralysis and moral posturing by twice putting a stop to genocide in the former Yugoslavia...

...While resisting the temptation to denounce his neighbors as bigots, he makes clear how high a price the Democratic Party has paid in Middle America for letting East Coast and Hollywood millionaires dominate its image...

...George H.W Bush, in retrospect, has been underrated as a sophisticated foreign-policy President who managed the diplomatic issues occasioned by the collapse of the Soviet Union so effectively that most people never recognized them as crises...

...policy and had a Federal court indict Osama bin Laden, partly for cooperating with Saddam Hussein in developing weapons of mass destruction...

...To be stuck between two Bushes and overshadowed by the recent memory of Reagan was a hard fate for an immensely able man who began preparing himself in high school for the highest office...

...Reagan, much less well informed but surer of his convictions and superior in his instincts, ended up the most important President since FDR, if importance is defined as success on large issues in the present and influence on the future...

...We won't even know for a while whether or not he has luck...

...One of the most intelligent and engaging new books on this series of developments is What's the Matter with Kansas...

...ANOTHER CRITERION of a successful President is often thought to be his effect on the fortunes of his party...

...Everything is up for grabs...

...Second Thoughts The Makings of a President By Christopher Clausen When Ilived in southwestern Virginia 20 years ago, the backbone of the local Democratic Party consisted of men in their 60s who had come home from World War II and obtained jobs in the Post Office through their local Congressman...

...What more could you ask...

...When the Democratic Leadership Council came to prominence under Clinton after the defeats of Walter E Mondale and Michael S. Dukakis, two older-style liberals, it helped establish fiscal conservatism and social liberalism as the reigning slogan of "mainstream" Democratic candidates...

...Lately the question has been getting a lot of ink and TV time again, thanks to the death of Ronald Reagan, the cinderblock-shaped My Life by Bill Clinton, and—above all—a Presidential campaign in which myriad red-faced partisans consider the other side's candidate unfit to be dogcatcher...

...Was it all his fault...

...or 1948, when the tough-talking Harry S. Truman prevailed against the odds over a smoother Thomas Dewey...

...Choose your own favorite historical analogy...

...Few historians so far would put Reagan, Clinton or George W. Bush in the same class with the three consensus greats—that is, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln and Franklin D. Roosevelt...

...After the attempted assassination of former President Bush and the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993, and again following the 1998 bombing of U.S...

...Without question, Clinton's "third way" and Bush's "compassionate conservatism" both helped the Republican Party electorally, at least for a while...

...Democrats had been in trouble in his native region, their historic base, for 30 years before he came to office...

...That historians might have a more jaundiced opinion they neither knew nor cared...

...Ideologues on the Left thought it strengthened the Right—tax cuts for the rich, the abandonment of what Republicans call class warfare, a diminution of the welfare state, a truce with corporations, more money for defense...

...All of these men met and overcame great crises in the history of the republic...

...Perhaps it is because the qualifications for a successful dogcatcher (does such a job still exist anywhere...

...After vetoing it twice, he signed a Republican welfare-reform bill that by most accounts has been a great success...

...Nearly everyone who writes about him emphasizes the gap between what might have been and what actually was...

...Apart from articulateness (no) and firm convictions (yes), there is almost no agreement on which of these qualities he possesses or lacks...

...He even built a lot of post offices...

...While he may have been naïve about the intentions of Palestinian Authority Chairman Yasir Arafat, who scuttled an agreement at the last minute, the attempt was well worth making...

...embassies in Africa, the Clinton Administration carried out ineffectual, almost token missile attacks on Iraq, Afghanistan and Sudan...

...Clinton was the most talented, encyclopedically informed, and articulate of the lot...

...But in the Clinton years, the decline became a rout...

...The shrinking band of socalled moderate Republicans often uses the same phrase...

...Almost to a man, these Democrats considered Calvin Coolidge the greatest modern President...

...It is clear that he fears going down in history as another Coolidge, a President who accomplished nothing very dramatic and later got blamed for the troubles encountered by his successor...

...So where does all this leave us...

...By this measure Carter was a disaster, Reagan a major success, the first Bush a temporary misfortune, and Clinton—surprisingly for so deft a politician—a calamity...

...For the Democratic Party they never paid off at all...

...Will the 2004 election resemble that of 1864, in which Lincoln, who implacably pursued a controversial war to the finish, narrowly defeated a decorated military hero...

...Whatever one's views about the merits of impeaching a President for lying under oath about adultery and sexual harassment, this obsession of Clinton's marred the last two years of his Presidency and disfigures his memoir...

...or 1920, when a country exhausted by the moral fervor of Woodrow Wilson chose a glib, handsome Senator...

...And what about the incumbent...

...One of Clinton's big complaints ever since he left office is that no crisis on the order of war, depression, or a major terrorist attack afflicted his eight years...

...A look at the last five Chief Executives, from Jimmy Carter through George W. Bush, shows a gaudy variety of talents, temperaments, successes, and failures that would be hard to credit if it were fiction...

...Why that should be the standard comparison has never been clear...

...What will the current Bush Administration look like a decade from now...

...Conversely, ideologues of the Right thought compromising with the old enemy strengthened the Left's domination on such "cultural" issues as abortion, affirmative action, homosexual rights, and the content of popular entertainment, not to mention completely stymieing the perennial conservative desire to reduce the size of government...

...Experience seems to be a greatly overrated qualification—contrast Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, say, with Hoover or Lyndon B. Johnson...

...The trouble with assessing a leader in the middle of a national crisis is that you have no way to be sure how things will turn out...

...are comparatively clear and simple...

...After all, Silent Cal had presided over almost a decade of peace and prosperity in their youths...

...Whenever the press begins to obsess over the qualities that make a great President, I remember those dignified geezers...

...Carter, an able man of excellent intentions, compounded bad luck with bad judgment in virtually every crisis he faced and ended up as the Democrats' Herbert Hoover...

...Of course not...

...Every year since, they had spent the fall licking envelopes and showing up for the "mass meetings" that used to substitute for primaries in a state that had a lot of elections...

...It did not respond at all to the bombing of the U. S. S. Cole in 2000...

...But it never followed through on either of these aggressive pronouncements and bequeathed the problem to George W. Bush...

...In 1998 the Clinton Administration made "regime change" in Iraq official U.S...

...Like Coolidge, he wisely avoided interfering with a booming economy...

...Two years into his Administration the Democrats lost both houses of Congress after 40 years of nearly uninterrupted domination, as well as most of the governorships and an increasing number of state legislatures...

...He had reduced the national debt while keeping taxes low and, unlike his predecessor, had suffered no scandals...

...Firm convictions flexibly applied (again Lincoln is the model) probably makes as good a formula as any for the more ideological part of the job...