What, me worry?

With the scandals on hold and crises at hand, 16 political, social, and cultural observers look at whether Bill Clinton knows what he's doing

by Dan Kennedy

Last year, Bill Clinton's principal adversaries were Ken Starr, Linda Tripp, and Monica Lewinsky. This year, they're Slobodan Milosevic, Yevgeny Primakov, and Zhu Rongji. A singular moment of tawdry triviality is over; we have re-emerged into a dangerous and uncertain world.

Snickering questions of "Did he do it?" have given way to sober considerations of whether he knows what he's doing. The competence issue, almost beside the point when Clinton's enemies were tracking down the semen-stained dress, is now paramount.

Even as revelations about Clinton's reprehensible private life were driving his personal popularity to a Nixonesque low, his job-approval ratings remained high. Only now, as he finally spends some of his carefully hoarded political capital in an attempt to stop "ethnic cleansing" in what's left of Yugoslavia, are his numbers beginning to slip.

With Clinton's sexuality finally off the front pages, the public's long-standing take on him -- that he's a jerk (or worse), but an unusually effective president -- needs to be re-examined. Much like the man himself, his record is filled with contradictions.

On the one hand, the federal budget under his watch was balanced for the first time in a generation, and the economy is humming. On the other, these goals were accomplished by raising taxes after he'd promised a middle-class tax cut, and by supporting Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan's Wall Street-friendly tight-money policies, which have arguably contributed to rising inequality.

On the one hand, he blew universal health care, the biggest domestic-policy initiative of his presidency. On the other, he brilliantly marginalized the extremist Republicans who came to power in 1994 by defeating them in the budget showdown, supporting a number of small, poll-driven measures such as school uniforms, and signing a welfare-reform law that, though seriously flawed, was less harsh than Newt and the gang would have liked.

On the one hand, he changed the McGovernite, far-left image of the Democratic Party and restored it to viability in presidential politics. On the other, the result -- a political organization that panders mainly to corporate America and the white middle class -- can be criticized as little other than a more culturally adept, secular version of the Republican Party.

Nearly six and a half years ago, Clinton entered office after defeating George Bush, who lost in part because of a perception that he was more interested in foreign affairs than domestic policy. Now, after focusing like a laser beam (as he once put it) on the home front, Clinton is beset with problems abroad.

After paying fitful attention to the horrendous human-rights violations that have gone on in Yugoslavia for his entire presidency, Clinton finally made a rather sterile commitment -- bombs, but no troops and (as the subliminal message would have it) no casualties -- to stop Milosevic from driving Muslims out of the Serbian province of Kosovo. But Clinton's and NATO's actions may actually have worsened the situation on the ground, and Western leaders seem to have been completely, unforgivably unprepared for Milosevic's brutal response. At press time, there were reports that parts of the Milosevic government were beginning to send out peace feelers -- no doubt related to the fact that Milosevic has essentially accomplished his evil goal.

Clinton was critical of Bush's accommodationist policy toward Tiananmen-era China, but Clinton, too, has opted for pragmatism in dealing with China's brutal government. That may be good policy, but it's difficult to defend in the wake of revelations that China stole American nuclear secrets and attempted to buy influence through illegal campaign donations to the Democratic Party.

Elsewhere in the world, from the saber-rattling of Iraq and North Korea to the chaos of Haiti and Somalia, from the economic collapse of Russia to the grotesque massacres of Rwanda, the Clinton administration's response has been either tentative and inadequate or wrong-headed and damaging.

The Phoenix asked 16 political, social, and cultural observers -- black and white, male and female, gay and straight, left, right, and center -- to weigh in on the question of Clinton's competence. Their views differed widely, but some common themes emerged. Even Clinton's most vehement critics concede his daunting political skills, crucial to getting things done. And even his staunchest supporters admit that his personal shortcomings have severely damaged his presidency.

It is, perhaps, a sign of national Clinton fatigue that another dozen or so declined to respond, even though they often speak out on issues of public importance. The fatigue is understandable: Clinton has exhausted the entire nation. At such an uncertain moment, however, this is not the time to turn away. Clinton will be president for 20 more months. A lot can happen -- for good or for ill.

Let the conversation begin.

Danny Schechter

A cultural surfer and corporate servant

Danny Schechter is co-founder and executive producer of Globalvision, a New York-based television and film production company. His 1997 book, The More You Watch, the Less You Know (Seven Stories), was recently reissued in paperback. His latest project is the Media Channel, a Web site that will be devoted to media criticism.

Clinton has resonated more with the culture than the Republican opposition did. They began to lose support because of their extremism, their recycling of the same issues over and over again. They began to drive more and more people to Bill Clinton's camp by virtue of making a big deal, if you will, of things that many people didn't feel should be made a big deal of -- for example, the bedroom and what goes on in it. I think what that showed is that both the far-right Republican pincer movement and the media, which became its megaphone, were out of touch with the public. In that respect, he's ridden the culture, which is more libertarian than it is far right.

He's been able to project himself as a liberal, but he's advanced policies that are basically pretty conservative, with welfare cutbacks, appropriating a Republican platform, putting a big emphasis on balanced budgets, working in tandem with Wall Street. He's the one who, when it came down to the question of linkage between human rights and economic policy, argued against linkage. In fact, American policy has been to put human rights in a subordinate position, which is partly why now, in the Kosovo situation, a lot of the rhetoric about human rights rings hollow for a lot of people.

It's an era of intense contradiction. There's the Clinton whom a lot of people wanted to believe in and the Clinton whom nobody could believe -- both inhabiting the same body, and both acting in the same way, because he's a person who's essentially an opportunist, which is what modern politics is. His biggest success, if you really look at it, is as a political fundraiser. The man has raised a gigantic amount of money for political candidates, but he hasn't really raised the level of political debate, the awareness of issues adequately. He lectures high-school students -- "don't practice violence" -- when every night they see on TV bombs going off over Belgrade.

The economy has maintained a level of prosperity that he's been able to claim credit for even though -- and this is what's important -- inequality in our country has increased dramatically. Even though working people have not kept up with the cost of living. Even though we've had a global crisis in the economy, and the IMF right now is predicting no economic growth in the year ahead. The forecast is dismal. If you look at globalization, which he champions, the essence of it is the shrinking of the power of the national state, and the growth of multinational companies, international markets, the movement of capital, and the like. So, in international terms, the poor are getting poorer and the rich are getting richer, with Clinton representing, in a sense, the yuppie and upper elite in world terms. But as far as most Americans see, he's doing well, largely because in this same period that all this is happening, the news media have stopped covering the rest of the world except when there's a crisis.

Part of this is a reflection, I think, of a media culture that's out of touch, and a lot of this goes back to what we mean when we talk about global institutions. It's not just banks, it's not just markets, it's global media conglomerates that have chosen to cover certain things and not other things. As a result, the American people are not very well informed about any of this. In June of '93, Rights & Wrongs, a series on human rights that I co-produced, reported that Kosovo was the next powder keg in the Balkans if action wasn't taken, and the ethnic cleansing there was going to be worse than anywhere else. Now, we weren't such geniuses. Anybody could have seen this whole thing coming if they were paying attention to it. But both the policymakers and the media makers were ignoring it. The consequence was that a week before this whole thing happened, 50 percent of the American people, in one poll, said they thought Kosovo was in Africa. They didn't know where it was.

That's why I wrote The More You Watch, the Less You Know, and that's why I'm trying to work on media reform, because that's the key to democracy. We can't have a democracy if only 36.1 percent of the eligible voters turn out, as in the last election; if more people are watching political ads than political reports on television. So to me, it's a central issue. But the last place you hear about it is in the media.

Alan Brinkley

Small accomplishments in difficult times

Alan Brinkley, a professor of history at Columbia University, is spending the year abroad as the Harmsworth Professor of American History at Oxford University.

Clinton has served as president under more-difficult circumstances than almost any president I can think of, in recent history at least -- perhaps in any period in our history. There is the really extraordinarily partisan nature of public life in the '90s -- the kind of partisanship that we haven't really seen before in this century; the personal attacks and investigations and preoccupations that are now so much a part of politics; and a very uncertain international system, for which no rules exist at present. So it's true that Clinton has no great landmark accomplishments to boast of, but given that six of his eight years will have been under a very hostile Republican Congress, that's probably not surprising. I don't think this is a great presidency by any stretch of the imagination. I think it's been a rather hobbled presidency, partly through Clinton's own failings and partly because of the climate of the times.

I think he's been, on the whole, a competent president and a reasonably responsible president except in his personal behavior. He's had a number of small accomplishments that, when taken together, will be of some significance. Not enormous significance. Regarding the present crisis in Kosovo, I think it's really too soon to evaluate whether he knows what he's doing. It certainly doesn't seem to be going very well. All the leaders of NATO are coming under some political pressure on this score, but obviously the president of the United States is the most important figure in that group, and I think he probably can be faulted for not having thought very far beyond what they assumed would be the initial response to the bombing. When Milosevic didn't fold after a few days of bombing, as they expected, I don't think they'd ever thought through what the future steps would be, and hence they're in this very difficult position. On the other hand, given what was happening in Kosovo, and the true crimes against humanity that were occurring there, it's almost as hard to think of having done nothing as it is to envision the present course succeeding.

If you look at the trajectory of domestic policy after the health-care debacle, or even beginning before it, there's the earned-income tax credit, which has been a very significant innovation in public policy and a very effective one. There's the increase in the minimum wage, the first in a generation. It's still not enough of an increase, in my opinion, but nevertheless it's a significant increase. After the failure of the big health-care plan, there've been some reasonably significant, although still inadequate, reforms in health-insurance law. There've been increases in the kinds of assistance people can look to for various kinds of education. I think what ties all these things together is something Clinton outlined early in his presidency, which is the idea that government's role today is to try to empower people to deal with a very different kind of economy, one in which they're going to be called upon to learn new skills, to change jobs quite frequently. All of these things are modest protections for middle-class people or, in the case of the earned-income tax credit, working-class people, who are trying to make their way through an increasingly difficult work environment.

I don't think his personal life is any more sordid than that of a number of other presidents, who paid very little price for it. But the fact that it has become a public issue in this way, for whatever reason, has certainly damaged his presidency. It totally preoccupied public life for almost the entire year of 1998 and part of 1999, and prevented any serious discussion of more-important issues. It's created a heightened level of personal mistrust of Clinton. It's amazing how quickly the whole issue seems to have vanished from public discussion. But I think there has been serious and lasting damage to his presidency.

Michael Kelly

Competence fueled by conservatism and cynicism

Michael Kelly is editor of the National Journal and a columnist for the Washington Post. His status as one of the president's most caustic critics was solidified in 1997, when Martin Peretz dismissed him as editor of the New Republic for his unrelenting Clinton-bashing.

This is a White House that gets into immense battles with its opposition where it is not clear that they should necessarily win, and they win. They do this time and again, whether it's the 1995 budget battle or, most extraordinarily, the impeachment trial. The White House waxes the Republicans. Just waxes them. Judge Susan Webber Wright did us all a favor by pointing out that Clinton did what the Republicans said he did: he really did perjure himself. Yet he won the public-opinion battle, at least to some degree. With Clinton, you always have to stop and remind yourself of how far removed he is from the norm. The political norm is that when something like this happens to an elected official, he simply resigns. Within days, with his wife standing by his side, he wants to spend some time with his family, good-bye, good-bye, gotta go now.

The White House has also handled international economic and trade issues with great competence. I do not approve of their policy regarding China, but that's a different question from competence. In other aspects of foreign affairs, I think the record is much more mixed. To me, the most disturbing and worrisome part of the administration's legacy, apart from what Clinton personally has done to the White House and to the institution of the presidency, is the pattern of repeatedly declaring victory and going home when victory has not, in fact, been achieved. We've seen this in North Korea, Haiti, Iraq, and China. To me the most morally consequential failure was Rwanda. For political reasons, because Somalia was still fresh in our minds, Clinton made a conscious, knowing decision not to do anything and to allow a half-million people to perish -- and then made a false apology for it, saying we had not paid enough attention to what was going on when, in fact, he knew everything that was going on.

In domestic policy, I think he's proven incompetent on most of the big-ticket things, but very competent at knowing when to sign on to the inevitable given that we have a divided government. Apart from interest-group policies, which are largely race and cultural policies, this is a conservative president. He's a law-and-order president, he is an anti-welfare president, he is in significant ways more conservative than Ronald Reagan dared to be. Or at least more willing to sign on to conservative programs. That's one thing they can do in domestic politics. The other thing they can do is the little stuff. You know, the endless sort of nitpicking, Gore-ian ideas. We should have, what is it, a 211 number so everybody who's stuck in traffic can have a number to call

In the black sections of a city like Boston, you've got entire neighborhoods where there are no men left because they're all in jail. This is a national catastrophe of immense proportions -- a great moral, liberal cause. It's stunning the degree to which you simply never hear the administration talk about that. Nothing. Dead silence. Meanwhile, the vice president is assuring us that he's going to do something to ensure parking spaces for sport-utility vehicles in every suburb.

That's where I think they're incredibly competent -- on pure politics and identifying push-button, polled issues that appeal to the group that they understand as their core constituency. That group is not the traditional Democratic constituency. That group is highly affluent, highly educated white suburbanites, and they really do care about getting stuck in traffic jams more than they care about the 40 percent unemployment rate in Roxbury.

Clinton and his people developed a new theory of Democratic politics that makes it possible for a Democrat to be elected and re-elected to the White House and clearly makes it possible for the Democrats to win the long-term battle for majority-party status. But at what cost? It isn't actually liberalism. It is an incredibly cheap, shallow, profoundly cynical, deeply valueless emptiness. So I give him full credit for restoring the Democratic Party and Democratic liberalism, if he wants to call it that, to viability -- to use the phrase he made famous himself. But it's a pretty horrifying victory. I'm not denying the sheer political skill here, but to put it in context, all you have to think of is two words: Dick Morris. That's what it is. It works.

Randall Kennedy

Black politicians' embrace is unrequited

A professor at Harvard Law School, Randall Kennedy is the author of Race, Crime, and the Law (Pantheon, 1997). In "Is He a Soul Man?", in the current issue of the American Prospect, Kennedy critically examines African-American support for Clinton.

I was struck by the open and enthusiastic embrace of Clinton by black politicians in his moment of peril. What grabbed me was not simply the embrace, because I could understand that. I could understand a certain calculation. I could understand somebody saying, well, let's stand by this guy, he's a powerful guy, and if he survives he'll owe us. But what I saw was a degree of enthusiasm that seemed to go beyond that. It seemed to be true enthusiasm for him -- so much so that you got this talk of Clinton as the first black president, you know, Clinton's passing for black.

That I just simply could not understand. After all, here was a guy who at various points wanted to be very clear in showing his white constituency that he would be willing to stick it to the blacks. And it just struck me that some of the people who were the strongest Clinton supporters were people who had also been supporters of policies that Clinton had stiff-armed.

Think about the death penalty -- life or death, the state taking people's lives. Clinton on the death penalty has been very clear -- and there's an element of symbolic politics here -- that he's simply not going to relent, no matter what. Even in the face of the Racial Justice Act, which would have allowed for challenges to death sentences if a pattern of discrimination could be shown, he was not going to relent. The Congressional Black Caucus was very strongly and emotionally in favor of it, and Clinton said no. The crack cocaine/powder cocaine distinction -- Clinton said no. He relented a little bit, saying, well, it shouldn't be 100 to 1, it should be 10 to 1 or something, but still, basically saying no, no, no. Welfare -- again, the Congressional Black Caucus is saying one thing, Clinton says no.

Now the irony of this is that my politics are not the Congressional Black Caucus's politics. In a piece I wrote recently for the American Prospect, I end up asking, Why is it that Clinton's supporters on the left are so supportive of him when, on a number of important occasions, he has not gone their way? It seems to me that they're not making him pay a price; they're not holding his feet to the fire. They are sending out a signal that suggests that, actually, they may talk emotionally about some of these subjects, but they really don't mean it. That it's for show.

Obviously the number-one thing Clinton cared about was becoming president and staying president. The thing that he seems to have been most attuned to, and has been very successful at, is becoming president of the student council in the world's dominant nation. He did that. Nobody can take that from him. After that's out of the way, then what do I think his politics are? I get the sense of a person whose politics were basically, though vaguely, progressive, but only vaguely. And that was always going to take a decidedly second seat to this first thing, which was getting elected and staying elected. How else does one explain this guy having Dick Morris as his right-hand policy confidant?

Clinton has encouraged in various ways more of an opening up of society with respect to historically disadvantaged peoples, whether it's women, racial minorities, or even gay people, though very skittishly. And, of course, to the extent that he ties himself to other things, he besmirches the other things. That's true of the conversation-on-race initiative, as well. It seems to me that that's part of the Clinton tragedy, actually.

When I heard Tony Blair say very straightforwardly that we're going to stay the course in Kosovo, gosh, I was glad to hear him say it, and I felt more trust in him saying it than I felt in anything Clinton would say. You want somebody really strong and self-assured and just altogether at the helm.

Barbara Ehrenreich

Worse for the poor than Reagan or Bush

A journalist, novelist, and activist, Barbara Ehrenreich is an honorary chair of the Democratic Socialists of America. Her article for the January issue of Harper's, "Nickel-and-Dimed: On Not Getting By in America," recounted her undercover experience of trying, and failing, to survive in the post-welfare-reform, low-wage work force.

What Clinton's been good at is being a candidate. That's not the same as being a good president. A candidate shifts and tacks with the breeze, and that's what he's done. He's turned into a Republican. He was never much of a Democrat -- he was with the right wing of the Democratic Party before he was elected -- but then he went all the way.

Welfare reform, for example, was a Republican initiative. I very much doubt Reagan or Bush would have gotten away with or even would have attempted something this sweeping -- eliminating a cornerstone of the New Deal. He did it, and he did it even though it went totally against his own initial notions of welfare reform, which was that you really have to spend more money. That is, you have to fund child care, health care, adult education, and so on. And of course, that's not the welfare reform that was passed. If there were low-cost, subsidized child care for everybody and if there were health insurance, you wouldn't have some of the terrible crises women are now facing when they enter the job market.

Of course, the Clintons tried to address health care, but they failed. It was difficult to come up with a plan that would so thoroughly offend both the right and the left, but Hillary did it. The planning was done completely in secret. There was no need for that. It offended all sorts of people. It offended the media. The approach should have been the very opposite. Open up the process. Have town meetings, bring in people. Actually, I think this was our chance for a Canadian-style national health-insurance plan, because polls were saying that 70 percent of people favored that. But what Hillary came up with was something that nobody favored.

Clinton's foreign policy has been tragic. Here was an opportunity to take us beyond the Cold War into a new world -- one, for example, where international bodies such as the United Nations would really have the strength and the respect to play the role that only they properly can play, which is intervening in these horrible cases of civil wars and ethnic cleansing and genocide. Building up the United Nations seems to be one of the key things you would do in this post-Cold War world. And he has undercut it in many ways.

First, the United States still doesn't pay its dues, and second, through his military incursions against Iraq -- and that almost seems to be like a ritual now -- he does not consult the United Nations. He did not consult the United Nations before the Christmas/Ramadan bombings. He did not consult the United Nations Security Council before giving the okay to the NATO bombings in Yugoslavia. Now that may seem like a small point, but it's part of undercutting, undermining, and rendering totally impotent the United Nations at a time when we should be building it up.

The expansion of NATO undertaken by Clinton is another worrisome step, not toward creating a post-Cold War world but toward re-creating the Cold War world. When you add three ex-communist countries -- Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic -- to NATO, that was thumbing his nose at Russia. The only excuse for NATO's existence was the Cold War. This was not the time to build it up. It was the time to take it down. The only plausible explanation I could find is that NATO is a major arms market for the United States. That's why it has to exist.

I wish I knew why so many liberals still support Clinton. I just can't understand any lingering attraction to him. I get plenty of arguments, from friends included, that he's better than the alternative -- the alternative being the far right. And I say, why are those our options? I say, hey, come on, this is not a good enough choice. I can dislike them both.

Joe Klein

A C-plus/B-minus president for C-plus/B-minus times

Joe Klein is the Washington correspondent for the New Yorker. His 1996 novel, Primary Colors, written under the pen name "Anonymous," was about a dauntingly talented presidential candidate with an undisciplined libido.

The most important thing Clinton did is something that I and most people didn't give him credit for at the time: his 1993 budget plan. Giving control of the economy to the conservatives rather than to the liberals helped to sustain this remarkable prosperity. Politicians can screw up an economy fairly easily. He could have if he had gone the route that some of his more-liberal advisers wanted him to go, which was goosing the economy rather than trying to lower the deficit.

Every last economic indicator -- and every last social indicator -- is headed in the right direction: less crime, the drop in the teenage-pregnancy rate, and a hundred other things. That's not entirely attributable to him, but it's not an accident either. You cannot underestimate the importance of sanity and moderation on the economy. I think that his greatest strength as president has been his utter sanity in the policy area -- aside from occasional lapses into insanity, such as giving the health-care initiative to his wife.

There are other things that he's done that have made highly significant changes for the better in the lives of the poor, especially the working poor, such as the expansion of the earned-income tax credit. That has eliminated working poverty in this country. It's a major, huge achievement, but you don't see it. Clinton is sometimes criticized for his bite-size initiatives. But this is the most placid, happy time for this country in the 20th century, and maybe in its entire history. You don't want anything more than bite-size. What do you want? To impose socialism on this country at this point? No!

I was opposed to the welfare-reform law for a couple of reasons. The dirty little secret of welfare that neither liberals nor conservatives really want to acknowledge is that there are a significant number of people on welfare who are there because they simply don't have the wherewithal, either intellectually or emotionally, to work. I didn't want to play games with kicking some of those people off. There also wasn't nearly enough funding for things like second-chance homes for teenage mothers. But the proposal that he signed wasn't all that different from what he proposed during the '92 campaign.

In foreign policy, he's faced a much less difficult but more vexing situation than any president we've had since Hoover. He didn't have a war; he didn't have the Cold War. He had a kind of unsettled world situation that some people thought had to be redefined, but that actually had to seek its own definition -- which it hasn't really found yet.

In the areas where he's acted boldly, I have the gravest doubts. I think, in the end, the thing that will probably prove most troubling is expanding NATO. The risk of offending the Russians when we should be doing everything we can to keep them democratic and free-market might not have been the best thing, long-term. I think that what he's done in China has been absolutely the right thing. We should be far more concerned with big-country problems than with the kinds of ethnic disputes we've seen in Bosnia and Kosovo. China and Russia are forces that are going to be there forever. We have this incredible opportunity now to draw them into something approaching a partnership.

Clinton's high job-approval ratings and low personal-approval ratings are a sterling mark of the overriding sanity of the American people. As a personal human being, he's not a very admirable figure. He's a jerk. And the impact that his stupidity has had on public discourse has been awful. But that is in stark contrast to his performance as a politician and as a public servant -- which I think has been C-plus/B-minus in a kind of C-plus/B-minus period.

P.J. O'Rourke

He wasn't good, but he had good intentions

Humorist and author P.J. O'Rourke, a former editor of the late, great National Lampoon, is international-affairs correspondent for Rolling Stone. His 1995 book, All the Trouble in the World, anticipated the war in Yugoslavia -- and railed against the intervention of "moral buttinskis."

Clinton takes credit for the economic boom, but everything he's actually tried to do would be deleterious to that boom. Health-care socialism, just for starters, and expansion of regulatory powers, an increase in the spending -- the actual amount of money our government is spending, balanced budget or no, is greater than it's ever been. The percentage of GDP being taken by federal taxation is higher than it's been since the height of World War II. So this is not the kind of stuff that the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development recommends that the Ukrainians do.

The economy has boomed, but there's no way to point to anything that Clinton has done to make it boom, and now we have Kosovo. There's evidence that he's an economic dullard, there's evidence that he's a moral idiot after the whole Monica thing, and now he turns out to be a foreign-policy Daffy Duck. I mean, it's one thing to go into a situation like Kosovo with no exit strategy, but he seems to have gone in with no entrance strategy.

There was lots and lots more that the European community could have done before the US intervened. This is something like, depending how you're counting, the fourth war in the Balkans, and there were probably better grounds to intervene in all three of the previous ones, or at least two of them. The initial breakup of Yugoslavia and the fighting that resulted. Then there was, of course, the civil war in Bosnia, which was a much worse humanitarian disaster than this. And Croatia did the very same thing to the Serbs that the Serbs are now doing to the Kosovars. And so we stand aside, stand aside, and stand aside, and finally when it gets to this -- yeah, sure, I understand the impulse, but I would understand the impulse a little better if what NATO has done didn't seem to exacerbate the situation. I mean, there were a few hundred Kosovars killed before the bombs started. And now they're being killed by the thousands and displaced by the hundred-thousands.

If you do decide to act, you have to act like George Bush acted in the Gulf War. You have to make sure that there will be absolutely no question that you can achieve your objective and that everybody knows ahead of time what your objective is, and that you will use any means necessary to achieve it. We went into this saying we weren't going to use ground troops. Now his administration is talking about putting Milosevic on trial for war crimes. That gives the guy a lot of incentive to negotiate. It was a bad situation. You want to help, but good intentions mean nothing in this stuff.

The remarkable extent to which Clinton has deployed the US military, almost always on missions that were non-military in their fundamental nature, is pretty disturbing. He strikes me as someone who is irresponsible, out of touch, who desires to be loved. The Haiti thing was a disaster. Maybe it's not quite as bad as it was under the worst part of the rule by the generals, but it's a mess. The peacekeeping troops in Bosnia -- that was a mess.

People try to separate Clinton's morality from his performance as president, but I just can't see how the two would be separated. We wouldn't separate them in a spouse. We wouldn't separate them in a child. We wouldn't separate them in a boss or an employee. Why would we separate them in the president of the United States? One has to affect the other. Clinton's job-approval ratings are high, but America has traditionally been a bit of an apolitical nation. We don't ask our political system to do nearly as much as the Europeans ask of theirs, and when things are going well, we don't pay too much attention to it. Probably a good sign.

John Perry Barlow

An enemy of civil liberties in the digital age

A former lyricist for the Grateful Dead, John Perry Barlow is a co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the author of "A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace," a 1996 manifesto. He is a fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, part of Harvard Law School.

I've had a lot of battles with the Clinton White House on issues like cryptography, copyright, privacy, and freedom of expression. And I frankly think that whatever his personal feelings, he has done more to knuckle under to the FBI and the National Security Agency and to diminish our civil liberties than any president in my lifetime -- most of it in ways that are probably not visible to ordinary folks, because they involve a fairly deep level of technology.

First of all, there was the Digital Telephony Act, which his administration supported heavily. As originally conceived, before we finally got it amended down to something a little less terrifying, it would have made it possible for the FBI to tap any phone in the country from Washington. It would have turned the nation's telephone network into a giant surveillance network.

The administration also has not yielded in any meaningful way on cryptography, after years of being hammered solidly on the subject. Free and open cryptography is terribly important, because cyberspace is a naturally transparent medium. It's very easy to create a digital simulacrum of anybody, made up of your transactions and your e-mail and everything else. Gather it all together and it's possible to know a lot more about you than I think is probably safe for large, paranoid institutions to know about people. But the Clinton administration has been unwilling to allow the only solution to that, which is for people to have their own privacy at their own disposal through the use of cryptography.

The White House has also been stopping strong cryptography in areas where I think that policy really degrades computer security. If we're going to have an economy that is largely based on electronic commerce, you've got to have good computer security. But they're so continuously paranoid about kiddie pornography and drugs and terrorists that they don't see just how vulnerable they're making the nation's financial system to real criminals.

The Communications Decency Act was another area where they really blew it. They could have just let it go after it passed Congress, and let us defeat it in court. But instead they put up a very strong defense of something that was patently unconstitutional. It went all the way to the Supreme Court. And then, when it was overturned, Congress went right back and did it again, by passing the Child Online Protection Act. And Clinton signed it.

The other area where I think the Clinton administration has really made a mess of things is in regard to copyright. They're going to create a system that essentially stifles freedom of expression worldwide in the service of a very few, very powerful organizations, like the Motion Picture Association and the Recording Industry Association of America. They basically wanted to have a system that would make it a licensable copy any time you read something into computer memory. You can imagine what that would do to fair use or free expression.

The idea that the president runs the country is absurd. Nobody runs the country. The country runs itself to a large extent. So giving him credit or blame is a little misplaced. But I personally think that on larger issues, such as the economy and foreign policy, he's done a reasonably good job. And I think the reason his job ratings go on being high is because the people notice that. Even this whole Lewinsky mess finally made people recognize that it was time to let people lead their own lives, because everybody's got skeletons in the closet.

I don't think anybody could survive that level of examination without looking pretty foolish. And I think everybody finally realized that. So I'm grateful to him for that.

Michael Dukakis

A president who's kept his promises

Governor of Massachusetts from 1975 to '78 and from 1983 to '90, Michael Dukakis is a professor of political science at Northeastern University and vice chairman of the Amtrak board of directors. He was the Democratic Party's candidate for president in 1988.

If you go back and read Putting People First, the Clinton-Gore campaign bible from '92, you'll see that he has done virtually everything he said he was going to do except for the health-care thing, where he tried and obviously failed. Even when it comes to health care, since the demise of the Clinton plan he's got Kennedy-Kassebaum -- admittedly a baby step. And the Children's Health Initiative, which is major. So there has been significant progress.

In all of the noisemaking that took place around his personal problems, people kind of forgot that we've had the greatest expansion of federal assistance for college and university education since the GI Bill. I don't think it's dumbing down Republican initiatives. There's nothing Republican about a lot of the stuff that Clinton has done. And he's done a fair amount of this with a hostile Congress. He and Gore have been great on environmental policy. On the education front, this guy has been more deeply involved in public education, K through 12, than any president in the history of this country. And frankly, he's also transformed policing in the United States. Nobody gives him any credit for that, but the fact of the matter is that these declines in crime are not an accident. This is the guy who introduced community policing around this country, and the results are there. Under the circumstances, I'm not surprised that he has high job ratings, regardless of his personal problems.

I wouldn't have signed the welfare-reform bill. On the other hand, it is a mistake to say, as many, many commentators have, that this was repealing the New Deal. That's a lot of nonsense. Anybody who knows anything about AFDC knows that it was largely a state program with very loose federal rules. I think in Massachusetts we were providing a benefit three times greater than Texas under this so-called national plan. There were enormous amounts of state discretion in the AFDC program. There was nothing terribly uniform or national about it except for the fact that the feds were putting in some money.

To his credit, while he signed the thing, he said he was going to come back and repeal the anti-immigrant stuff. He's begun to do that, and he will complete that job this year. But I was disappointed, frankly, that he didn't simply implement the bill that he and I and the governors worked hard on and got passed in '88: the so-called Family Responsibility Bill, which was the best welfare bill that has ever been passed. Clinton was the lead governor on that bill. It introduced the concept of mandatory work for the first time in history, but it also provided substantial support for child care and health care and so forth, which this welfare-reform bill does not do. I never understood the need for a new welfare bill. We had it. We passed it in '88. It was poorly administered by the Bush administration, and I think Clinton could have picked it up and just run with it.

On foreign policy, I think Clinton has been reasonably competent. He got a lot of knocks in his first year, maybe justified, that he was a little inexperienced. But I don't think there's anybody who doesn't think that Clinton can handle foreign policy. What you do in Kosovo -- I wish I had an easy answer. I don't know myself. I certainly don't think at this point ground troops are what's called for, if you know anything about the history of Serbia and what it's like to fight over there.

Overall, there's a good deal that you can point to, and I think that's one of the reasons why people are positive about his performance. Had his personal life been other than what it is, I think this guy would be a very popular president.

Mary Matalin

A lefty in Republican clothing -- and a wuss

Mary Matalin, a conservative commentator, didn't coin the phrase bimbo eruption in regard to Clinton. But she launched it into the public lexicon by using it in an explosive press release while she was working for the Bush campaign, in 1992. She is married to James Carville, one of Clinton's most dogged defenders.

What these guys do best is counterintuitive campaigning. They campaigned as centrists. People feel comfortable with Republican philosophy and Republican solutions -- they just don't like Republicans. That's just the reality of it. You ask any pollster. If you give people problems and then solutions, potential government solutions, they'll always choose the Republican solution until you tell them it's Republican. Clinton raised his approval rating by lowering ours. He's defined Republicans as extremists, as mean-spirited, as bickering, as partisan, and so people just don't like them. I'm not being whiny, but that's the reality.

See, we did not try to get credit for what we did after the 100 days of '94. He took credit for everything we did. As a matter of fact, if you go back and look at his Chicago -convention acceptance speech, he took credit for 14 Republican legislative initiatives. Easing adoption restrictions. Targeted tax cuts. Individual retirement accounts. The 100,000 teachers, which was a Bill Paxon idea. It was mind-boggling. It was awesome. I was sitting in the rafters watching it, and my mouth was open through the whole thing.

His philosophy hasn't changed. He would always rather have government monitor these programs. But he's moved more toward us while pushing us or making us look like we've been the extremists. So I would say he's been competent, but only because he's been tethered. What has happened since the president's been in office would not have happened if the Republicans weren't holding him in check. In other words, if we lose Congress -- say the unthinkable -- and Gore wins, they're not going to go in the same direction as they've been going since the Republicans took over Congress. They would immediately revert. There's no third way. There's no centrist Democratic party. What remains of the Democratic Party are nothing but the lefties.

The one thing James [Carville, Matalin's husband] always says -- not to be using him as an example, let's just say the Jamesians of the party, who are pretty much what the party is -- the only thing they ever went batshit over was welfare reform. You know? They didn't care about Monica, they didn't care about any of the moral issues. They cared about welfare reform. They thought that was the most immoral thing that he'd ever done. Well, unconstrained and untethered by a Republican Congress, that party would revert to those views.

Regarding Kosovo, I'm not some military person, but what is the reason we're there? Because we're the only ones who can fix it, okay? If you're the superpower, that means by definition that you have the means to snuff out something of this nature in quick order. Clinton's undermined our capacity to do that by telling Milosevic that he wasn't going to send in ground troops. We just handed it to him. We failed before we began. The Kosovars, the Albanians, are out of Kosovo, and it's not going to be partitioned.

If you read George Stephanopoulos's book, you'll see that Clinton thinks Americans would never go for ground troops. Well, if they trusted him, if he had the moral authority, then Americans would rally around their president in a situation like this. But he doesn't have the moral authority. If he had confidence in these situations, like he does in domestic situations, he could really explain to Americans what the mission is about. But he couldn't even do that, let alone explain how we were going to achieve it or what the exit strategy was. So of course people aren't for ground troops. I don't care what his job approval is, his trust numbers are always at 20 percent, 30 percent. Always have been. This is exactly the kind of situation where that low number comes into play.

Clinton's such a wuss. That's all I can say.

Michael Isikoff

The corrosive effect of repeated lies

In January 1998, Matt Drudge reported that Newsweek was holding back on an explosive story by Michael Isikoff: that Clinton had had a sexual affair with a young intern named Monica Lewinsky. Isikoff may have lost his scoop, but he gets the last word in his book, Uncovering Clinton: A Reporter's Story (Crown).

Clinton's pattern of reckless behavior was far greater than was commonly understood. It went back many years, and it continued well into his tenure in the White House. As a result, it was always clear to Clinton and those closest to him that all of this had to be concealed to ensure his political survival. When allegations about his personal life arose, it became accepted that he would lie about it, and that those closest to him would lie about it. As I argue in my book, Uncovering Clinton, lies repeated often enough and brazenly enough have a corrosive effect. It ultimately led to what I call this culture of concealment that infected his entire presidency and had ramifications far beyond simply his personal life.

It was simply accepted that that which is politically embarrassing will be lied about. As a result, it led to many of the problems that have upset and affected his presidency: a lot of the criminal investigations, the congressional investigations, the contentious relations with the press grew out of this culture of concealment. It led to a prolonging of the Whitewater investigation, the travel-office investigation, the campaign-finance investigation. All of these investigations and scandals that have swirled around the Clinton presidency grew out of this culture and were fueled by this culture of concealment.

Now, that doesn't explain all of it. That's not to say that every charge against the Clinton presidency was on the mark. There were plenty of bogus charges, there were plenty of vicious political enemies who were out to get the president and go after him and smear him with a lot of scurrilous charges. But the reason that a lot of this had traction was the very deep-seated suspicion, much of it justified, on the part of the mainstream press that the Clinton White House was not leveling with us. And that ultimately had a very long-lasting effect on the course of his presidency.

The entire Lewinsky scandal, leading to his impeachment and trial in the Senate, was a huge distraction from other business, for the country, the news media, and the White House. Now of course, some people will blame that all on the news media and on Clinton's enemies. But if one accepts -- as Clinton himself has said -- that he bears his own personal responsibility for this whole mess and, even more than that, for his decision in January 1998 to simply brazen it out by lying about it, then yes, he must bear responsibility for the distractions to the extent to which they kept him and his senior aides from grappling with more-important public business. So there's a connection there. I'm a little wary about taking it too far. I think he really does compartmentalize well. But I think ultimately he does what he believes is in his political self-interest. That's the one constant in Bill Clinton's career.

You can't overstate the distraction that all this was, and all the things that didn't get done because this did. I'll say one thing in his favor, and one thing that may be worth noting in his dealings with Milosevic. One positive attribute that he displayed in the whole Lewinsky thing was a steeliness of will where a lot of other people would have caved, where some other presidents might have quit. A lot of other people would have been too shamed. He set his course and he stuck to it. Now, it was sticking to the defense of a lie, but he stuck to it. That steeliness of will may serve him well in our dealings in Yugoslavia.

Elizabeth Birch

An incomplete legacy on gay and lesbian issues

Elizabeth Birch is executive director of the Human Rights Campaign. With some 250,000 members, the campaign is the nation's largest gay and lesbian political organization.

If Bill Clinton were to finish his presidency tomorrow, the legacy he would leave for gay people is that they could not be free and open in the United States military, and that it has been solidified as federal law, through the Defense of Marriage Act, that we have no right to marry.

What President Clinton has contributed, which shouldn't be underestimated, is that he introduced the notion of gay Americans' being treated equally and our issues' being part of everyday discourse. I mean, he put us on the radar screen of America. That shouldn't be devalued. It's important, also, to recognize that he appointed a great number of gay and lesbian people to his administration. That has made a difference in Washington. So I want to give him credit where credit is due. Then, too, he made a number of smaller policy changes that are important. They're just not as dramatic as we all would have liked.

But unless and until he can really make happen a watershed event, like the passage of the Employment Non-Discrimination Act, a basic civil-rights bill that is now moving through Congress, there is nothing in place today that could eclipse or match or heal those two political realities, marriage and the military. Overall, he would leave a very bad legacy for gay people.

Putting aside his extremely bad judgment on the personal front, I think that he is the beginning of what will become a new species of politicians. And we don't recognize it yet because he's the first of them. There is something about this man and his instincts -- beyond using polling and research -- that enables him to reach through the most profound kind of noise and hear the people, or assess what is important to people, on a day-to-day basis. There was something that Bill Clinton understood about environmental issues, education issues -- to pick up the key nuggets that everyday folks cared about -- and he was able to translate them into tiny baby steps that resonate. He's done a brand of integration of the left and the right that we've never seen before, to the point where it's completely muddled. You have role reversals, where you have Republicans taking on Social Security and Medicare, and a Democratic administration signing a welfare-reform bill. George W. Bush is being analyzed for his Clinton-like approach on a variety of issues. There's also the Republican Main Street Partnership, spearheaded by former congressman Steve Gunderson, that is the moderate-Republican version of the Democratic Leadership Council, which Clinton pioneered.

I think that this is good. But it makes stuff very gray, so it's difficult to sort out. And in the middle of all of this integrationist thinking you have unbelievable rancor. So you still have the parties at war in Washington. They're not working together. There is not a spirit of bipartisanship. So, ironically, you have more polarization even while this integrated approach to politics is occurring. Any solutions that can be fashioned that take the best of the left and the right, I think are good. But if you can't get basic legislation passed, that's not a good thing. If you can't deliver the sausage out of the other end of the machine, it's a problem. I think we need another 10 to 15 years to see how this is going to play out.

Lloyd deMause

Psychoanalyzing the phallic presidency

Lloyd deMause is director of the Institute for Psychohistory and editor of its publication, the Journal of Psychohistory, for which he wrote a post-Lewinsky analysis of Clinton titled "The Phallic Presidency." Psychohistory, according to the institute, "combines the insights of modern psychotherapy with the research methodology of history and the social sciences."

There are four stages of a leadership cycle. Early on in Clinton's career, there were lots of pictures of him as St. George killing the dragon, as though we were little tiny people and he was the great big daddy. We call that the strong phase. The second phase -- cracking -- comes in the second or third year of the presidency. The third phase is called collapse, in which he's falling apart. We're showing a bit of paranoia in this phase, because people abroad seem to be more and more menacing, even though they are no different at that particular time. And then finally, in the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh years of presidency, we start to have wars.

Very rarely do we have a war at the beginning of anybody's presidency, when he's strong. But when he gets to cracking and collapsing and then, finally, upheaval, the fourth phase, we have what's called the purity crusade. That is to say, "Oh my God! Things are getting out of control." We can't possibly exist any longer unless we find an enemy. We're all too sinful. We're just like the ancient Aztecs, who got to the point every so often when they thought they were going to have to engage in a war in order to give blood to the great goddess, who was mad at them for being so sinful.

We tried to make Bill Clinton the object of our purity crusade. We went after him and we said, "Oh, he's bad! He's terrible! All we're going to do for a whole year is look at how sinful he is and how sinful we all are." And so we had him for what I call a poison container, a container for these fantasies, for a while. Unfortunately, he escaped. If we had thrown him out of office, we'd never be in this war. If you're a historian, you say, "Why now?" It's excess. It's because we think that we're just enjoying ourselves too much. "Oh my God, Mommy's going to kill me that I got more sex than she ever had! Daddy's going to kill me that I got more money out of my mutual fund than he ever made in his whole life!" So we've got to punish somebody. Well, if we haven't got Bill Clinton to punish, we're certainly going to punish some other bad, greedy, Hitler-type person.

We go to war at the ends of expansionary periods, of economic prosperity, four times as often as in down periods. And when you get to the point of saying that we're going to need a war, you pick a guy like Bill Clinton, who, after all, was running behind until he came forward and said, "I cheated on my wife." You listened to him and you thought, "Aha! Here's a guy who cheats on his wife. Well, you know, potency is important to him; I guess we've got to pick him. We're not going to pick one of these other guys who would be more peaceful." You pick the John F. Kennedys, the guys who go to war for you when you want. Clinton's proven over and over again that he would go to war. Hell, we've gone into Haiti, we probably would have gone into North Korea if it hadn't been for Jimmy Carter. Clinton's a phallic president. He'll go out and conquer women because he's very lonely inside and fragmented and his grandmother beat him and his mother left him all the time and his father was a drunken alcoholic and so on.

The war gives you the illusion of that macho façade, and makes you feel, temporarily, a little more powerful. It's like those kids who were shooting in Colorado. For the moment they felt powerful, and underneath it they felt crumbling. That's a symbol of the nation. And of course the sexual excitement of the war in Yugoslavia is part of what spilled over into Colorado.

Debra Dickerson

Black loyalty is a sign of self-hatred

A military veteran, lawyer, and journalist, Debra Dickerson is a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and a Washington-based national correspondent for the online publication Salon.

I don't know what Clinton would have to do to alienate African-American voters. It's really interesting, because he abandoned us even before the first sign of any kind of trouble. But because he does and says all the right things, and he'll put on a robe and sing Baptist hymns, it's just clear that he's not Bush. It was so painful when Bush was president to watch him at the obligatory "We Shall Overcome" during Black History Month, with the crossed arms. It was painful to see how uncomfortable he was. But Clinton can do that with gusto. We know who's disgusted by us and who's afraid of us and who's not. And Clinton's not afraid of us.

But that's part of the man's personality. I think he can just be whatever he needs to be in any particular situation. His charm wore very thin for me very quickly. The Sister Souljah thing was, to me, a frightening signal that he was very consciously sending to the white folks, saying, "I will keep these darkies in their place. Don't worry." He dissed Jesse Jackson in his own house. He was telling us point-blank that he's the abusive boyfriend -- from day one it's obvious where you stand, but we just don't get it. And because of our low political development, attacking Clinton is attacking us. We really see it that way. We really see the black community as attacked, because he is so loved in the black community. Once you've been adopted, I guess you just have to show up with an Uzi to get yourself thrown out of the community. Black voters have a really low set of expectations.

I think that African-Americans are at an arrested state of development politically. We're terrified of Republicans in a big, overarching kind of way. We don't really distinguish between Arianna Huffington and Pat Buchanan, or James Dobson and Mary Matalin. To us, Republicans are the people who fought against the civil-rights movement and who, given a chance, would continue to oppress us. Clinton, on the other hand, is an adopted member of the clan, and that makes him the first black president, because he appears to be. He's done a good job of pretending to be very identified with the black community, and we're just pathetically, childishly grateful to anybody who's willing to associate with that. My firm belief is that self-hatred is at the base of every social pathology in the black community. And I think this is a really deep and really complex psychological manifestation of self-hatred. We're so happy that a powerful guy pretends to have our best interests at heart.

He is basically -- what's the right word? Sort of a moral coward. He doesn't lead. He's known from birth that he wanted to be president. He's a smart guy when he can sit around in the law-school library and write a paper, but when people answer back, he doesn't know then, because he doesn't have a strong core. Sometimes you have to make the hard decisions, and you need a strong, basic compass. I don't think he does. He just thinks, "Well, I'll take everybody's opinion, divide by two, and that's what we should do." He was the perfect guy to win the presidency, but he's not the guy to be the actual president.

He's certainly not the guy to be leading us in a war right now. I spent 12 years in the military. The military is not Western Union. You don't use it to send these subtle little messages. You use it to kill people and destroy things. I don't think you have to have served to be president, but you certainly have to understand about force. And you have to be prepared to kill people: our own and others. He doesn't have the stomach. One serviceman gets a stubbed toe and they think that the American people are going to crumble, but I don't think so. Certainly not if you've got a strong leader there.

Martin Peretz

On foreign policy, an utter and dismal failure

Martin Peretz is editor in chief and chairman of the New Republic. His April 26 TNR article, "The Tilt," argues that despite the Clinton administration's pro-Israel reputation, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright has increasingly cast her lot with Yasir Arafat and the PLO.

On the domestic front, whether it is Clinton's achievement or not, we have palpable and rising prosperity. Before he was elected, there was still a very high sheen on the Pacific Rim economy. By this time we have retrieved the markets we had lost to the Japanese. This is a country where technical innovation continues, and it's being accelerated. So the fact that there's so little unemployment and so little inflation to speak of, willy-nilly, that's a plus for the president, and therefore it will register in the ratings about whether he's done a good job. He's also moved the Democratic Party, and liberalism, toward the center of the political spectrum, and I reluctantly praise him for it. I think Clinton is a man who lies before he thinks. I shudder to think not only what kids and young people take from his ugly personal episode, but what they make of his flexibility and fluidity and fluency in talking about policy. This is not a man who has really deep commitments.

In foreign policy, I believe he's actually been an utter and dismal failure. One of the factors here is that he is not really interested in foreign affairs. Bush was bored by domestic policy. Clinton is deeply engaged in domestic policy and is bored by foreign policy. He's bored by foreign policy not only because he has no interest in it, but because he's always afraid that it's going to force him to go against his '60s instincts. So he surrounded himself with amateurs. Madeleine Albright is rhetorically very aggressive and strategically very timid. That's a terrible combination, because once she's done that act two or three times, it neither threatens the adversary nor engages the ally. Sandy Berger is a trade lawyer. Every nation to him is seen as a potential customer. That's the filter through which he would like the president to observe problems in foreign policy.

In the Middle East, despite the fact that Clinton loves Israel oh-so-much, the people who are running our peace-process policy are the identical folks to the ones Bush and Baker had in their employ. These were people who didn't have qualms working for "fuck the Jews" Jim Baker. They're still there, still in place, and they know nothing else about the Middle East but the peace process. Their initiatives in Iraq are a dismal and utter disaster. The opening to Iran, which Mrs. Albright prophesied so exuberantly, has not happened. So they revert to the old habits, and the old habit is to press Israel to produce another gesture, another concession. They say, if Israel would have given another 5 percent of territory or would have been more forthcoming on this or on that, the Arabs would have been more cooperative in our mission against Saddam Hussein. I don't believe that for a moment. It's a limited conception, but again, it's all that they know.

Milosevic saw how we treated Saddam Hussein. It must have been a tremendous encouragement to him. We now have a new paradigm of war: we're not allowed to wage a war in which the troops, US personnel, and the personnel of our allies are in danger. We're not allowed to have casualties on the side of the adversary. So we have computer-based warfare that doesn't kill Americans and doesn't really kill Serbs. We have made mind-boggling mistakes. We certainly have been contemplating for very many months doing what we have been doing, but without having made arrangements, for example, for the inevitable, unquestionably predictable rout of Albanian Muslims. We also should have had tent cities built in Macedonia and Albania. We should have had Apache helicopters there. That might have even had some deterrent effect. Then, when we finally begin to bomb, we say, well, we will never send ground troops, as if we can say that and only the American people will hear. Mr. Milosevic won't hear that? I mean, that's a very brilliant tactic. It encourages him.

Alan Simpson

His treatment of loyalists is sordid and sad

A former Republican senator from Wyoming, Alan Simpson is director of the Institute of Politics, which is part of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

He's the master magician of the age. I've often said he's Harry Houdini and David Copperfield and Merlin and the Phantom of the Opera. He has the most amazing machinery pumping stuff out of the White House. His spin machine is like one million Maytags, just grinding up soap out there on the South Lawn. Every time he gets hit and takes a shot, the next half-hour, they've got a response, and then the next day, he's on the road, hugging a hurricane victim or meeting a child. He's managed to take all of the venom out of his critics simply by being, I think, genuinely a very almost naive, boylike person who wants desperately to be loved. Most politicians are like that. I know; I mean, I did it for 31 years. You love to be loved.

On domestic policy, his record is very, very, very tenuous. The cupboard will be nearly bare. This Social Security mantra, this unbelievable "Save Social Security first," is a total farce. The surplus is there for Social Security, which will begin to go broke in the year 2011. I remember when I was in the Senate and Clinton came in as president. I said to him, Mr. President, there's one thing that you won't be able to escape. That is, you can finesse this Social Security issue all you want to, and Medicare, you can keep doing that, and you'll get re-elected, and life will go on. But in the year 2010, and in the year 2005, people will say, "Wait a minute. Who the hell was at the helm when all this was happening?" And they'll say it was Bill Clinton, and he did nothing.

He's doing great now. Every time somebody suggests something, he just says, "Save Social Security first, but then take the surplus." Let me tell you, if that isn't the greatest Ponzi scheme I have ever seen. There are only two ways you save Social Security. You either reduce the benefits or increase the payroll tax. It's time Republicans admitted that; it's time Clinton admitted that. This other stuff, the surplus, stock market, all the rest of it is romance.

His support of welfare reform was pretty gutsy, because those who were most opposed to it were those who were most closely aligned to him, and people who really thought he was the toast of the town dumped him after he signed the bill. But remember, that bill passed 73 to 20, you know, whatever. That wasn't some 51-to-49 squeaker. We may not have fixed it right, but we sure as hell fixed it and made it different.

In Kosovo I think he did what he had to do. The key for me, and it's a total bias on my part, is my knowledge of his defense secretary, Bill Cohen. Bill Cohen and I were elected to the US Senate the same day and we left the Senate on the same day, after 18 years. Marvelous, bright, thoughtful, articulate man. I know enough about his fiber and substance that if he felt in any way that this was some manipulative caper by Bill Clinton, he would resign. The chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Hugh Shelton, is in it. They are not in it to cover the president's fanny. They're not in it to trick the American people.

Madeleine Albright is taking a lot of the heat now, which is a typical Clinton thing. Give somebody else the heat. They must have a rule on his bathroom door: NEVER TAKE HEAT. Dish heat off to someone; dish it to Hillary; dish it to whoever, whoever, whoever. Just get the hot coals out of my hands into somebody else's. He's a master of it. He's got the great shrug, the bitten lip, the poor-me-I-didn't-have-anything-to-do-with-this. He leaves his friends holding the sack. He's left his wife holding the sack with his indiscretions. He's left his cabinet holding the sack. He lied to them. He left his daughter holding the sack. He lied to her. He left Lani Guinier holding the sack. He left Zoë Baird holding the sack. I mean, he hasn't got enough sacks.

He's left more people who were loyal to him just hanging. That, to me, is the most sordid, saddest trait of Bill Clinton. It would be interesting to see how many really true, true friends he has.

Dan Kennedy can be reached at dkennedy[a]phx.com.