Bill Clinton: Man of Action
FERGUSON, ANDREW
Bill Clinton: Man of Action by Andrew Ferguson First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him...
...This three-parter was only the first of the president's many lists...
...Then: "I will propose a detailed plan to balance the budget by 2002...
...We face no imminent threat," he explained, "but we do have an enemy...
...A sick child need no longer be a child alone...
...The president began with a paradox, the first of many to ensnare the speech, all of them unremarked and perhaps unrecognized by him...
...As any old pundit can tell you, the great technical problem inherent in a State of the Union speech is that it can disintegrate into a mere list of initiatives and accomplishments (a "laundry list," in the mysterious lingo of the pundit), as each cabinet department and regulatory agency inserts a reference to its own pet program...
...He did his Dudley Doright chin lift and went on: "Some may say that it is simply because the president and his wonderful wife have been obsessed with this subject for more years than they can recall...
...First," the president said, not for the first time, "a national crusade for education standards...
...Action is mobile and alert and, so to speak, active...
...One wonders: Does the president truly believe that without his intercession, sick children will suffer alone...
...But Coolidge and Ike were not purposeful men of action, on the model of our current president...
...every 12-year-old must be able to log on to the Internet...
...The enemy of our time is inaction...
...That's not a principle, of course...
...Doubtless the conference will not be as ambitious as it sounds, and in this it is like the State of the Union address itself...
...By this rendering, the welfare reform part seemed particularly tricky, since apparently what was unfinished about it was that we had to finish it...
...Inaction just lies there...
...And again the Congress rose as one to whoop and cheer...
...Okay: So it may not be his number one priority—he had just got done saying that "first we must move quickly to complete the unfinished business of our country," which would suggest that the unfinished business is his number one priority...
...Who...
...every "we must," every "I challenge" testified to that longing...
...But the more the better...
...every 18-year-old must be able to go to college...
...The dreaded Hun...
...For those who doubt it, there is the text of the speech itself...
...By 2002, this Congress, the 105th, will be long gone...
...This is a call to action, not a logarithm...
...You see what I mean about the complexity...
...Bill Clinton, State of the Union Address, February 4, 1997 I F YOU WERE WATCHING PRESIDENT CLINTON'S State of the Union address last week and turned off the sound—always a temptation—you still would have gotten the gist, even in pantomime...
...Our peacetime history, of course, has included many daunting challenges: depressions, financial panics, dust bowls, urban riots, Jimmy Carter...
...First, they aren't terribly ambitious...
...The president's education priority—call it number 1-A—is "the highest threshold to the future," and it (the threshold, I'm pretty sure) has three goals, to wit: "Every 8-year-old must be able to read...
...Actually, that's two axioms, but who's counting...
...The president ran through his entire repertoire of theatrical gestures: from the JFK finger jab to the Kirk Douglas jaw flex, from the genial Reagan head tilt to the Clint Eastwood eye squint...
...Too late: The president was suddenly advocating "world-class standards our children must meet...
...For this threshold with the goals must support a plan that has principles—ten of them, in fact...
...His solution: to make this nation better than any we have known, even though it already is...
...As it turned out, all this programmatic hyperac-tivity served him well, as a rhetorical matter...
...And the confusion deepens...
...We need action," the president said hurriedly...
...He ticked off the good news—four years of growth, crime down, welfare rolls down, lots of trade, Cold War over—and concluded, "the state of the union is strong...
...The premise of the speech was that we, as a nation, deserve no less...
...If the enemy were something else—say, action—we might have cause to worry...
...But he believes in smaller government that does just about everything...
...By now the president had been speaking for only three or four minutes, but with all the challenges and actions and calls and risings to decisive moments, his audience must have been exhausted...
...Can that be right...
...A child in bed can stay in touch with school, family, and friends...
...How difficult it must be for him, then, to stand in the august chambers of Congress, the people's representatives arrayed before him, with large and sonorous rhetoric unwinding from the TelePrompTer, and to realize—as surely he must, somehow—that he is all dressed up with nowhere to go...
...He grew desperate: Twice he compared our present situation to the onset of the Cold War...
...It is nothing less than a challenge to "rise to the decisive moment to make a nation and a world better than any we have known...
...Let this Congress," the president said, "be the Congress that finally balances the budget...
...Maybe so...
...And what if each state adopts different high national standards...
...No, now he can be a sick child downloading nudie pictures of Teri Hatcher...
...Another president—a Coolidge or an Eisenhower—might have let matters rest there, dismissing the congressmen so everyone could go home and find out what happened to O.J...
...and every adult must be able to keep on learning for a lifetime...
...We're Americans...
...Here is where the speech began to bounce around, and it continued to bounce from initiative to initiative all the way to the end, when he declared: "My fellow Americans, we have work to do...
...In the State of the Union, the president reaffirmed his belief in smaller government...
...it's not even a sentence...
...Is this how they do things in Japan...
...And as a call to action it is fugue-like in its complexity...
...Though the nation is strong, President Clinton will not rest...
...More cheers...
...My number one priority," he said, "is to insure that Americans have the best education in the world...
...To take one example: He challenged every children's hospital to connect to the Internet...
...Challenge piled upon challenge and imperative followed imperative: "We must move strongly . . ." "We must pursue . . ." "We must act . . ." His apparent urgency relied on the old rhetorical tool of the false choice...
...The president's challenge dwarfs them all...
...Sensing this, the president downshifted...
...Once again the president plunged into paradox...
...There was pathos in it...
...We can eat inaction's lunch...
...There are three pieces of unfinished business: "to balance the budget, renew our democracy, and finish the job of welfare reform...
...Moreover, "every state should adopt high national standards...
...Although the speech ground on for another half-hour, this was its most revealing moment, when the vanity that propels the president was most clearly exposed...
...And second, there are four of them...
...Nobody said welfare reform was going to be easy...
...A sigh of relief: In truth, this isn't much of an enemy...
...It is his misfortune, instead, to be an inconsequential man for a placid time...
...His words and tone are Kennedyesque...
...The president's speech last week did not overcome this difficulty...
...Each gesture, in its place, was meant to convey the speech's theme, which is that the president is a purposeful man of action and, furthermore, an active man of purpose...
...on the other hand, a man of action can't just do nothing for the next four years...
...It bounced from toxic waste cleanup to AIDS research to United Nations dues to safety locks on guns to the vice president's annual family conference...
...Somewhere in the fourth proposal, he delivered the interesting, not to say alarming, news that he and the first lady were going to convene a "White House conference" on "the brain...
...But . . . wait a sec...
...The president aches for greatness...
...Simplest thing in the world...
...John Kennedy, Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs, May 25, 1961 I ask your support for bipartisan legislation to guarantee that a woman can stay in the hospital for 48 hours after a mastectomy...
...He signaled his slower pace by starting a list...
...Then you've got a whole riot of national standards, which means that, as standards, they aren't standard, technically...
...And it created the impression of a president who is doing everything all at once...
...It gave the speech a specificity his disastrous inaugural address lacked...
...Not federal government standards, but national standards...
...There was even, briefly, a revival of the old favorite, the Molly Ringwald lower-lip bite, but it was quickly superseded by the Lee Iacocca thumb thrust...
...We will never know...
...On the one hand, there's the state of the union, which he clearly regards as much better than any we have known, thanks to him...
...The godless Reds...
...his proposals are fitted for a deputy county commissioner back in his native Hot Springs...
...In 2002, it will be the 107th Congress that actually...
...He turned next to education, which proved to be the heart of his speech...
...Yes, but if the state adopts them, they're state standards, aren't they...
...After his ten education principles, the president's rhetoric only intensified, even as, to judge by the camera shots, his audience's interest flagged...
...Even more dizzying, the ten principles aren't principles...
...Senior Editor Andrew Ferguson is the author of Fools' Names, Fools' Faces...
...Here the president has violated the first axiom of every speechwriter who makes a laundry list: Keep it short, and learn how to count...
...We face, he went on, "a challenge as great as any in our peacetime history...
...Bill Clinton: Man of Action by Andrew Ferguson First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth...
...He will do this by . . . taking action...
...And as Americans we now have a president who will take on inaction...
...Who says that...
...The president slogged through his ten principles...
...No wonder all the congressmen were so happy...
...The president was surely torn here between his famous immodesty and his equally famous ambition...
...But inaction is nothing...
...This delusion is kin to the greatest of Clintonian paradoxes...
...Tonight I issue a call to action," he said, and in case anyone missed the point, the remarkable sentence that followed contained the word action seven times...
...Some may say that it is unusual for a president to pay this kind of attention to education," he had said earlier...
...First," he said, "we must move quickly to complete the unfinished business of our country...
...And sure enough, by the end, they weren't principles anymore, they were "proposals...
...Another paradox: The federal government, led by the president, "develops national tests of student achievement," but the standards are not the federal government's, if you follow me...
...The public servants assembled before him were delighted with this announcement and gave him a big cheer...
...Now, educationists will make two criticisms of the president's three goals...
...Here, at last, is our first real taste of Clintonian action: Balance the budget now by assuming somebody else will balance it five years from now, and then—boldly, without fear of the consequences—agree to a process...
...We should balance the budget now, and then . . . we must agree to a bipartisan process to preserve Social Security...
...We do, we do...
Vol. 2 • February 1997 • No. 22
