What We'll Remember

By Jay Branegan/Washington

James MacGregor Burns Presidential scholar

Clinton has been a superb "transactional" leader--that is, in making deals, navigating through the budget process, negotiating with opposition and allies. He's done this domestically, but also internationally, where he's been amazingly active and made an enormous commitment, just in terms of travel alone.

The problem comes when an issue arises above the everyday budgetmaking and the like, and big work has to be done. This is where the Clinton Administration has failed. In certain areas, he and his colleagues have not risen above the transactional level. They've done it rhetorically, in laying out great ideas and great dreams and hopes. But they haven't followed through strategically, or in terms of commitment and conviction, to even begin to solve these basic problems.

Take education. Clinton wanted to be the education President, but he simply did not make the consistent effort or advance the needed strategies and goals that would do something fundamentally about the state of public education in this country. In health care, he tried in 1993, then backed away from it quickly and unduly. It's a failure of moral conviction; a failure of imaginative, creative thinking about what has to be done, tested by moral values.

Edmund Morris Ronald Reagan biographer

I remember a photograph from one of Clinton's first visits to the Oval Office after his first election. He was wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt and was sprawling at his desk. He was drinking a large mug of root beer, and he had his large white thumb projecting through the handle around the tankard. The waves of vulgarity this picture gave off made me have the strong instinct that he was going to vulgarize the office of the presidency.

Reagan believed the office symbolized the dignity of the presidency. And [Clinton] to me was a man bringing in truck-driver values. We have had vulgar Presidents before, and they have not been bad Presidents. Andrew Jackson was just as vulgar as Bill Clinton. There's something fleshly and uncontrolled, and defiantly vulgar, about Clinton, which I think has been characteristic of his presidency. I think the presidency has lost a large part of its dignity in his tenure.

Harvey Weinstein Co-chairman, Miramax

I call it the underrated presidency. His brilliant handling of the economy is unparalleled in our time, and he was also impressive in foreign policy, like Kosovo. You felt like there was finally a President who understood the economy. I've been with the President in many social situations where I've seen him engage a brilliant economist. He can do it in a detailed way, and the great thing about the President is that he gets into a detailed level with anybody. I've seen him talk about records with David Geffen, where he can talk about an obscure 1950s bebop act, talk economics with investment bankers like Felix Rohatyn and Steven Rattner, talk movies with Steven Spielberg or Tom Hanks.

I remember talking to him about the movie Sling Blade and Billy Bob Thornton, whom he knew from Arkansas. He said to me there are two guys who understand this movie--him and Howell Raines [Alabama-born, editorial-page editor of the New York Times], who was blasting him all the time. And I called Howell Raines, and he said that yes, he did love the movie. So the critic in Clinton, even though he's getting pummeled every day, still had enough savvy to understand Raines' taste, and how this film related to Southerners. He's the most intelligent person I've ever met.

Roger Wilkins Civil rights activist and professor at George Mason University

The story will be one of lost opportunities. His political values, except when he was in trouble, were good ones. They were humane; they were decent. He promised to give us a government that looked like America, and he did that. But around him, it was just a group of white guys. So when it got down to the nitty-gritty, the people in the room did not look like America; they looked like the Hoover Administration.

He obviously enjoys being around black people and has a real empathy for black people, more so than almost any other white politician I've ever seen. He's got the culture down; it's not phony. But sometimes his racial program was lousy. He's been very timid about appointing blacks to the federal bench. The race initiative, well intentioned as it was, was a dud. I still think welfare reform was unnecessarily brutal. In the end, his racial program came down to a mild defensive stance on affirmative action, the appointment of some high-profile people in the Cabinet and to lower federal jobs, being wonderful in black churches and playing golf with Vernon Jordan. But that was all window dressing, the easy stuff, and he never did much for poor black people. He signed a crime bill that made it very difficult for poor black guys who get caught in the maw. When the rubber hits the road, on stuff like welfare reform or crime bills, that guy is not on our side.

Doris Kearns Goodwin Historian

The real turning point for Clinton was when the Republicans took Congress in 1994. If the Democrats had kept the majority, think what we would not have had: no rise and fall of Newt Gingrich, no triangulation, no pizza delivered by Monica Lewinsky during the government shutdown, no impeachment. Assuming Clinton would have been re-elected with a Democratic majority, then it would have fallen to Clinton and the Democratic Congress to figure out how to spend the surplus. If Clinton could have gotten passed the very legislation that Gore's been proposing, then think how extraordinary his legacy would have been.

The loss of the Congress straitjacketed Clinton from being able to fight for traditional Democratic goals and made him a much more tempered version of his original self. Ideally, assume he keeps the Congress in 1994, but it is really close, so that he has to deal with the Republicans and doesn't have a liberal majority. He responds to the pressures for a balanced budget with versions of that, and of welfare reform, that are less harsh, and there's no impeachment. Once the budget is balanced and the economy is prosperous, then his liberal instincts come back to the fore, and it's he who gets to spend the surplus on education, health care and Social Security. Then he would have had a brilliant presidency. But then again, I was one of those who wanted to believe he was more liberal than he was. But I admit there was hardly any evidence of it, even when he was freed up at times.

Dr. Laura Schlessinger Radio and TV host

I will always remember that the First Father of the First Family, who is responsible for setting a national example, brought shame and public humiliation on his wife, his daughter and his country by marital infidelity and by lying under oath--right into the camera, looking straight into my face! I take it personally. As President of the United States, he betrayed his obligation to his family, his profession as an attorney and his office.

Henry Cisneros Former HUD Secretary

The Oklahoma City bombing was when Clinton really became the President. He was steeled by the need to stand up to the venomous elements of hatred in the country that erupted there. This drove home to him the seriousness, the stakes of this business that we're in. It changed him inside. Afterward, he was more steady, rooted, surefooted in his understanding of where the American people are. Yes, he made personal mistakes, but those in some way have been a sideshow to the main current of his public leadership, and the approval ratings show that.

Don't forget, during the same period he lost his mother; he lost a friend like Vince Foster to suicide, a searing, personal moment. It took things from the realm of the gamesmanship of politics to a very profound sense of how important this business is to the people and to the country. The combination of these things made him President in the larger sense, as opposed to someone skilled at politics who had made it to the top level.

Jesse Ventura Governor of Minnesota

As time moves on, one thing that will identify the Clinton Administration is the opening of trade to China. It's the biggest economic decision this century. It will literally affect every person in my state of Minnesota, and everyone else in America. He ran into a lot of opposition from within his own party, so it took some courage on the part of the President to step away from his normal party politics. As a result of this decision, you're going to see China be much more capitalistic, and ultimately, better human rights will come out of it also.

Dick Morris Former Clinton adviser

On Aug. 22, 1996, Bill Clinton did what no other Democratic President would have done: he signed historic welfare reform into law. It made welfare recipients work to get paid and required that they leave the rolls in five years. For a liberal Democrat to sign such a law was akin to a staunch anticommunist like Nixon going to China or a President from Texas like Johnson signing the 1964 civil rights law. It was a day that changed America.

For years, welfare mothers had been the favorite political football of Democrats and Republicans alike. With welfare reform, he took away the football. In the 2000 election, race and welfare were nonissues. The President's signature set in motion a process that has led to 2.1 million welfare families leaving a brutalizing, inhumane system, most for good jobs at good pay. Contrary to the fears of many of his own Democrats, in each of the past four years the percentage of children living in poverty has dropped, and black and Hispanic incomes have risen.

His signature split the Democratic Party--half the House Democrats, exactly, voted against the measure. The entire White House staff, with only two or three exceptions, wanted a veto, as did the party establishment. Clinton hated the benefit cuts and flirted with vetoing the bill because of them. But he realized that he could probably repeal the cuts in the next session of Congress. He was right. The signature was a move of great political courage, foresight and wisdom.

Douglas Brinkley Historian

Presidents are remembered for their sound bites. Roosevelt had, "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself." Kennedy said, "Ask not what your country can do for you..." Sadly, with Clinton you will have, "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky." This is a double tragedy. First, he is probably our finest orator as President since Kennedy. He delivered dozens of dazzling speeches. But all of that oratorical emotion and showmanship will dissipate over time, and what will be remembered is the clip of his finger wagging.

Second, he'll always be hostage to the impeachment crisis, like having a scarlet I embroidered on his chest. Clinton may look better to historians when they take a bigger look at the boom time of the 1990s, perhaps the best time to be alive in America ever. He did an excellent job as President; he knew how to prioritize the most important issues of his time, America's debt and the need for balanced budgets. His foreign-policy record is underappreciated. He turned America from a cold war mentality to a globalization mentality. But no matter how well he does in his post-presidency, that moment will never be erased from the national consciousness.

Like Elvis Presley, Bill Clinton will always fascinate us. Both Clinton and Elvis are poor boys who made good; they're both good boys and bad boys at the same time, both pious with a midnight-rambler side. They're both profound and tacky, both perpetual adolescents. When Elvis was performing, the person in the farthest balcony seat thought Elvis was performing directly for him. Go into a large room of people with Bill Clinton, and it seems like he's talking directly at you. It's a kind of rakish charm on overload. There's a disdain for both Clinton and Presley by the East Coast elites, who saw them as backward, Pentecostal hillbillies, when in truth both were very sophisticated at what they do. They will both be forever lampooned, yet real people who understand popular music know why Elvis was a master, and real people who know American politics will think of Clinton as a master.

Wendy Wasserstein Playwright

I was at a White House dinner, just about two weeks after that first Mideast handshake with Arafat and Rabin. Afterward, Clinton took us out to the terrace to show us where the handshake had been. Then he took us into the Oval Office, showing us John Kennedy's desk and all. You had the sense that this was a guy who loved being President, and not merely for the power of it. It was also for the engagement with the ideas of it, with the possibilities. Then I saw him years later, at a fund raiser right in the middle of the Monica thing, and there was a distance from that exuberance I had seen in the Oval Office, a caution. When I looked at him, I thought back to when he was first elected, and a lawyer friend of mine was so excited: "Finally it's us," our generation; Bill Clinton is us. And I thought, What does this say about us?

Robert Bartley Editor, Wall Street Journal

The most telling moment of the Clinton presidency was the resignation of Webb Hubbell. This was when it became totally clear that Clinton had sent a crook over to supervise the Justice Department, who was also an old Arkansas hand. It was illuminating about the whole series of corner cuttings and subversions of the justice process that went on from there to the end of the Administration. We always had suspicions that Clinton was corrupt, but I have to say I was surprised by the extent, or the brazenness, of it. And I suspect that as history unfolds, we'll learn even more of the dirty linen.

Robert Reich Former Secretary of Labor

As we approached the November 1995 showdown over shutting down the government, Newt Gingrich was growing more confident and cockier because he'd already forced Clinton to accept a balanced budget over 10 years, and he was emboldened to escalate his demands to seven years. The government was kept running only through a series of continuing resolutions, and Gingrich and Clinton began to engage in an elaborate game of chicken. There was a real possibility of a serious government shutdown, and the blame could have gone either way.

At this pivotal, high-stakes point, Bill Clinton, through a remarkable set of pirouettes and verbal pyrotechnics, managed, through the press, to firmly attribute the fault to Gingrich and make it stick. Yet it was hard, even from close range, to figure out what his moves were. It was almost as if he was working on many levels at once, engaged in three-dimensional chess, simultaneously weighing and balancing the consequences of various moves, including quite risky and bold moves. He saw his opportunity and figured out how to grab it fast.

This was epigrammatic of Clinton's extraordinary rhetorical ability, his artfulness; also his tactical understanding of both politics and the press, his remarkable sense of timing. It is also emblematic of how the President has functioned when his back has been against the wall. When the times seem to be the worst, he functions the best. He comes up with brilliant ideas, very bold schemes, extraordinary insights. He summons forth from the depths of his very being these superhuman energies. Up until that point Gingrich had all the momentum. After that, Gingrich was on the run. It stopped the right-wing armada, which just a year before had looked unstoppable.

The Rev. Peter J. Gomes Preacher to Harvard University and professor

Apply one word to Bill Clinton, it would be perseverance, which in his case is both a great virtue and a minor vice. He persisted in the face of terrific obstacles to his own ideals, obstacles that in some cases were his own creation. Throughout all the stress and trauma of these eight years, he is as idealistic and optimistic, maybe even to a fault, as when he began. Usually, Presidents become sadder, wiser and far more cynical. And I think he didn't because he has been sustained by his core Christian values. A lot of my Christian brethren and sistren are very hardhearted toward him because he doesn't conform to a particular profile of contrition. But I think he has been guided, and probably saved from even worse disasters, by his passionate desire to do good. For most of us in this country, he has functioned as a religious figure, however flawed, someone who speaks out of the depths of his convictions, not simply as a manager or a leader. The biblical figure he reminds me of over and over again is David, who was God's beloved but also fatally flawed.

Lewis Lapham Editor, Harper's

At the televised gala, the night before he was inaugurated in 1993, Barbra Streisand sang Evergreen, and Clinton couldn't resist mouthing the lyrics. And the cameras--as he knew they would--started drifting away from Streisand and found the President, tears streaming out of his eyes, mouthing the words, devouring the words as if they were made of chocolate. And I then knew that what we had here was the story of a stomach. The man is defined--was then, is now and has been all through the eight years--as the Great American Consumer. He'll eat anything. Hugs, scandal, limelight, anything, as long as he gets to stay in the center of the stage. He's got this voracious appetite: more friends, more speeches, more food, more time onstage, more hands to shake.

He's a talk-show host. His diction is that of group therapy, and his tenure has been one long television gala. He's the man from Disney. It's been a series of poses, and very convincing ones. It's entertainment. Reagan was an actor pretending to be a politician; Clinton is a politician pretending to be an actor.

Michael Waldman Former White House speechwriter

The 1998 State of the Union was surreal and intense, like nothing I ever experienced in the White House. The Lewinsky scandal had exploded about a week before, and to me that speech was a moment that crystallized so much about Clinton's presidency. Clinton had to try to govern through media clamor and partisan pressures that were almost unbearable, yet at the same time, he was able to seize the policy high ground.

For the first day or two after the scandal broke he was a little rattled, but then he pulled himself together to really bear down and focus on the speech. He steadied all of our nerves by doing that. It was just becoming clear there were going to be budget surpluses well ahead of anyone's expectations. The Republicans in Congress were determined to use that projected surplus for a tax cut, and in our view, it would be gone before it materialized. So over a period of many months, Clinton decided that using the surplus for Social Security was the best proposal he could make. Amazingly, it didn't leak.

When he walked out into the chamber, he was under the most intense amount of personal pressure any President has ever had at a State of the Union. Nobody knew what he was going to say; nobody knew how he could do it. And he said, "What shall we do with our new surplus? I have a simple, four-word answer: save Social Security first." The Democrats jumped up and applauded. And Gingrich thought about it for a second; then he stood up and applauded. And the Republicans looked at him, and looked at one another; then they stood up and applauded. At that precise moment, a trillion dollars in the budget shifted from the column marked "tax cut" to the column marked "Social Security."

That set the stage for this election and for the budget politics of the next 10 years. It was the most effective use of the "bully pulpit" by a President that I can think of, and it was at his most difficult personal moment.

Bob Kerrey Retiring Democratic Senator from Nebraska

With the President, there has been a consistent desire to have federal policies that promote economic growth. In spite of my sometimes irritation with him when he makes a reversal or doesn't press ahead on important policy areas--like Social Security or Medicare--on the thing that got him where he is today, he has been unwavering: belief in economic growth, and belief that while the economy is growing, you've got to push the circle of freedom out with health-care and education investments. And he is relentless. Sure, he has altered course from time to time, but he's never backed away from his core set of beliefs.

He has redefined what it means to be a Democrat in several important ways. We no longer should be on the defensive about being a tax-and-spend party because we delivered just the opposite. We delivered economic growth. He delivered on law enforcement when the American people used to say Democrats were soft on crime. He hasn't abandoned the core Democratic belief that we should give people an opportunity. Even on defense, he's shown you don't have to have been in the military to be a good Commander in Chief.

Jim Wallis Evangelical leader

His lasting legacy is his contribution to the cultural discussion on leadership, and I think it's been a negative one. First, he and the White House tried to drive a wedge between personal behavior and public policy, which I think is a fundamental moral and political mistake. It didn't fly, but it damaged the national fabric, and I think it did hurt our kids. Second, he represents the triumph of style over substance, of celebrity over leadership, of success over character.

To me, one defining moment was his welfare reform. Now he's a smart guy; he knows social policy well. He knows everything I could tell him about what would happen to poor kids under his bill. If you had a President who just didn't get it, that's one thing. But his willingness to sign a welfare bill that he knew was high-stakes gambling with the lives and futures of our poorest children showed that the moral compass wasn't there. And that's linked to the other defining moment, dragging us through Monica, which also happened because the moral compass wasn't there. The problem was not having an affair. From a religious point of view, people make mistakes. Jesus was very forgiving of people's mistakes. But he led a yearlong campaign to first of all cover up that he'd made any mistake and lie about it, and then to say, "And if I did, it wouldn't matter," because personal behavior doesn't matter and public policy does. Trying to drive that wedge is the real problem.

Sean Wilentz Historian

The speech Clinton gave after the Oklahoma City bombing was the rhetorical and spiritual turning point of his Administration. That was where he firmly denounced the antigovernment mood that had so pervaded the country. It was an extraordinarily powerful statement, and in a way it pulled together what had been a rather diffuse rationale for his own political and policy efforts. He was as shaken by the tragedy as the country was, but instead of simply talking about lawlessness, he talked about the larger issue, that you cannot "love your country but despise your government." He put it in the framework of American political argument over the past 20 years in a way that was poignant, moving and powerful.

Remember, he had been trying to reshape the whole landscape of American politics, by revitalizing and reinventing a kind of liberalism that had passed away with Bobby Kennedy. Yet he often hadn't had the words to explain it. But the bombing speech was a moment where, out of the ashes of sorrow and horror, one is reminded of the transcendent political good. Clinton changed the political landscape in a way that makes him the major political figure at the end of the 20th century. And the Oklahoma City speech is where that was most clearly crystallized, not just intellectually but also spiritually. --Reported by Jay Branegan/Washington