That was the Bill Clinton who had campaigned for the presidency, and won. Unfortunately, the president appears to be the victim of a multiple-personality disorder-be has at least three public personas-and the others aren’t nearly as winning as the first. A second, more traditionally liberal Clinton emerged during the transition and dominated his first six months in office. This Clinton hired a cabinet (and filled an administration) by gender and ethnic quota. This Clinton got caught up in the “gays in the military” mess and slavishly attended the congressional leaders he’d studiously avoided during the campaign. In fairness, he was forced into more strident partisanship by the Republicans, who adamantly refused to cooperate in the budget process. But still: Clinton seemed to get lost. He bung out with the Hollywood crowd. He allowed the remarkable, ridiculous-and now, almost entirely irrelevant-Health Care Task Force to be created. He slouched back toward the friends, and anachronistic politics, of his oxford and Yale Law School days.
Over time, a third Clinton has come into focus. This one is the likely suspect in the Whitewater inquiry, a pragmatic power politician who did whatever necessary to get and keep office in Arkansas. This Clinton played America’s favorite local political game with gusto, granting low-interest loans to not-very-needy business interests, who in turn contributed generously to his political campaigns. This Clinton snuggled up close to the Arkansas oligarchs, the bond daddies and chicken pluckers-and never quite escaped the orbit of the shadowy Stephens brothers, Witt and Jackson, who owned and operated one of the great American fortunes. Some of these connections were explored cursorily during the 1992 campaign. They would be of only marginal interest now, but for three factors: the lingering doubts about the president’s character, the First Family’s initial reluctance to release Whitewater information-and the disastrous decision, long touted by The Wall Street Journal, to bring the Little Rock courthouse crowd up to Washington to help run the country.
The three Clintons are not mutually exclusive; there is cross-pollination. One reason the president remains so devoted to his annual Renaissance Weekend may be that it is one place his three lives commingle-former New South governors and DLC types like Richard Riley sup with FOBs like Ira Magaziner and Arkansas oligarchs like Don Tyson. But life doesn’t imitate Renaissance. The president’s ability to swim so effortlessly in different waters would be an admirable trait-if it weren’t carried so often to excess.
One conclusion seems obvious: the moderate, bipartisan Clinton is the only persona that hasn’t brought him political grief It has, in fact, been his refuge when times got tough. It is therefore rather strange that Clinton has stocked the administration primarily from his other lives. There is no “New Democrat” guru in the inner circle. Worse, there’s a sense that “moderate” issues like crime and welfare are useful mostly to build support for “liberal” issues like health care-and a belief the centrist coalition that passed NAFTA was an exception rather than a model. A clearer commitment to creative centrism wouldn’t have saved the president from his current dilemma, but one wonders if a more ecumenical cast in the White House might have mitigated the bunker mentality that fed this disaster. (The need for a more professional staff goes without saying.)
Another “obvious” conclusion is more risky: one has to wonder about Hillary Rodham Clinton. She has had a central role in two of her husband’s three public lives. Guess which two. “We never saw much of Hillary,” says a DLC stalwart. While he chaired the Governors’ Conference, she chaired the Children’s Defense Fund. Of more immediate interest, she is the only former Rose Law Firm partner who hasn’t left town or been demoted-and, by her own admission, she was reluctant to indulge the media’s Whitewater fixation. It’s probably too easy to caricature her as relentlessly tugging the president to the left-she’s a pragmatist, not a communist-but she may well be the most influential of the many insiders who disdain the DLC, and see Clinton’s “New Democrat” persona as a tactic rather than a strategy. The combination of liberalism, legalism and her profound mistrust of those outside the inner circle probably hasn’t served the president well. But it’s hard to say. The precise nature of the Clintons’ relationship remains the abiding enigma of this administration, the missing piece to every puzzle, the reason why we can’t put this mystery down.
