Clinton's latest comeback - Bill Clinton counters his decline in popularity

National Review, July 19, 1993 by Brit Hume

WITH THE hair's-breadth Senate passage of a bill that resembled the Clinton budget, at least in its overall contours, the President seemed well on his way to what the media were sure to characterize as a major "comeback." It is true that the bill that passed the Senate could not have passed the House, and the bill the House did pass had gone nowhere in the Senate. And there were dark warnings of a deadlocked Senate-House conference. But remember: both versions of the bill purported to reduce the federal budget deficit by about $500 billion over five years; both would do so largely by means of increased taxes on the wealthy," by taxing energy, and by counting such things as reduced interest on the national debt (from presumed lower interest rates) as spending "cuts." There were major disagreements over such details as whether to tax most forms of energy (the House/Clinton preference) or just gasoline (the Senate's version). The Senate was also far more willing than the House to curb entitlement spending. These are important differences but they pale beside the political consequences for the Administration and congressional Democrats of failing, after all this huffing and puffing, to produce a budget at all. Thus the conference seemed likely to take a while but unlikely, in the end, to fail.

All this coincides with the President's surprisingly prompt use of force against Saddam Hussein, his hiring of the nominally Republican David Gergen to add some seasoning to his nearly all-rookie top staff, and the beginnings, at least, of a thaw in his chilly personal relations with the reporters who cover him every day. Perhaps more importantly, it all comes at the end of an unmistakable media cycle, heralded a few weeks earlier by the Time cover showing a thumb-sized Mr. Clinton beneath the headline "The Incredible Shrinking President." Short of resignation or impeachment, it doesn't get much worse than that. It was inevitable the media would soon be in search of another Clinton story line, whose only possible direction seemed to be up.

Beyond that, however, it was much less clear that anything had changed in the Clinton White House. The Gergen appointment was supposed to mark a shift by the President away from the decidedly leftward policy drift of his first five months in office toward the centrist policies he had stressed in his campaign. Gergen's influence was felt when the budget came up for debate in the Senate, and the White House went all out to move the focus away from the Clinton/Democratic plan and its higher taxes and onto the supposed meanness of the Republican alternative. Even before Bob Dole had produced the GOP substitute (which had no chance of passage) the President and his team denounced it in class-warfare terms that must have delighted Mr. Clinton's partisans on the Left. Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers, reciting the party line in her daily press briefing June 23, couldn't keep a straight face. The Republican plan, she said, by virtue of not raising taxes, either would not reduce the deficit enough or would "shift the burden ... to the middle class and to working people and to the poor and to veterans and the elderly."

Responded a reporter (this one, as it happened), "You don't want to leave out the lame and the halt and the blind, do you?" Miss Myers broke up laughing. "The lame and the blind, unbelievable," she said, then broke up again. This went on for several minutes, at the end of which Jim Miklaszewski of NBC News asked, "Do you want to drink some water, or maybe wear my necktie?"

That, of course, was a reference to Mr. Clinton's prime-time news conference a week earlier. CNN's Wolf Blitzer had paused to give Mr. Clinton a chance to have some water, and Gene Gibbons of Reuters had given the President his Mickey Mouse necktie after the President admired it. Mr. Clinton had spoken humbly that night of his being new to Washington and needing to learn its ways. As for the press, he said, "The most important thing is that we attempt, you and I, to create an atmosphere of trust and respect and that you at least know that I'm going to do my best to be honest with you."

There was little evidence in the days thereafter, however, that Mr. Clinton understood that his problems with the press went deeper than mere atmospherics. From the start, the Clinton White House has tended to say whatever was useful to the politics of the moment. For example, in his all-out effort to sell his $16.3-billion "stimulus package," Mr. Clinton said time and again that the economy was in the midst of a "jobless recovery." When employment leaped by 365,000 new jobs in February, Labor Secretary Reich and the President both claimed that most of the jobs were part-time. It later turned out that the government had no way of knowing whether the jobs were part-time or not and the Labor Department admitted Mr. Reich had used invalid statistics.

Recently, Mr. Clinton changed his mind about the recovery. He started speaking proudly of "755,000 new jobs in the first five months" being part of a pretty good record." Asked about the apparent inconsistency, the President explained that "the economy is still bad for most Americans but the trends are good." Privately, aides insisted the change in emphasis was caused by a change in "the facts." But what facts? Nearly half of those jobs were February's, the ones the Administration had falsely belittled. Well, officials also said, the Clinton program has now had a chance to work. But what program? The policies in effect today are those of George Bush. The Clinton team, however, has a theory of how its policies can be working without being enacted. It was stated by the President himself on June 17. "The trends are plainly tied to the determination of this Administration to bring the deficit down," he said. "We began to see a substantial drop in long-term interest rates after the election when Secretary of the Treasury Bentsen announced that we were going to have a serious deficit reduction plan."