That’s Clinton, always assuming the best about the other guy’s motives. It’s a strange habit of mind for someone in such a cynical business. As Arkansans know, Clinton often governs with only half the tools available to a politician. He’s a gifted carrot man, proffering it with a deftness that even his enemies admire. But the stick has never rested comfortably in his paws.
“I grew up in an environment in which either nothing happened or all hell broke loose, so that the ordinary confrontation and conflict of daily life was not contained,” Clinton explained one day last year. “I do think it was one of my weaknesses. As a young man in politics I was trying to figure out how to reconcile my natural desire to have people be on good terms with one another and the need to stake out your ground and be in opposition.” For Clinton, conciliation is “natural”; confrontation is learned, labored and avoided whenever possible.
But it can’t be avoided for long. Confronting Serbians or even Republicans is easy compared with taking on members of his own party, most of whom have never felt the lash of real discipline. “At some point he’s going to have to grab some Democrat by the necktie and say, ‘This is the Clinton program-the Democratic program we ran on-and damn it, you’re going to support it,’” says one old Clinton friend. In the meantime, to avoid watching their handiwork get soundbitten to death, Clinton aides are privately reminding Democratic lawmakers of some political history. Republican Presidents Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan were all re-elected. The last Democrat re-elected was Franklin Roosevelt. The message is unmistakable: the plan unveiled this week is so big and historic that only Democrats determined to wreck their own party would dare trash it.
But how about if they just nibble away at it? Except for Lyndon Johnson, who busted chops for the sport of it, most presidents prefer not to be their own enforcers. That job usually belongs to a senior White House aide who keeps a long list of favors sought and “wrong” votes. The tough-guy role was supposed to go to Harold Ickes, a savvy New York lawyer who was denied his expected appointment as deputy chief of staff because of allegations against his law firm. Nobody is suggesting Clinton needs a John Sununu, who was both unnecessarily abrasive (“I’ll cut your balls off if you try that again,” he told one bureaucrat who committed a minor infraction) and inept at imposing party discipline on rowdies like Rep. Newt Gingrich. But the need for someone in the White House to inspire fear is not an airy hypothesis; it’s a fact of political life that goes back at least as far as Machiavelli.
While the Clinton camp recognizes this, no individual aide will be cast in the Darth Vader role. Instead, a core group in the top echelon of the White House staff, headed by Vice President Gore, will divvy up the enforcement chores on Capitol Hill. “We’re taking a team approach-kind of a divide-and-conquer strategy,” says chief of staff Mack McLarty. Clinton recently asked for the names of the 22 Democrats who dissented on the new family-leave bill. “Those who didn’t support us know we’re disappointed,” McLarty says.
Gore acknowledges a need for some bonecrushing. “It’ll be no-nonsense. We’re quite willing to say to a recalcitrant member, ‘Look, we know what’s important to you,’” Gore told me last week. Yet he says that he and Clinton have been surprised at how cooperative members of Congress are sounding: “It’s remarkable what we’re hearing. There’s widespread recognition about what has to be done. Everybody knows that this is it-this is our only chance.”
But unless politics has ceased to be politics, the beauty of the historical moment won’t carry this budget over the finish line. The basic calculus of enforcement will remain unchanged. In other words, the president will eventually have to make an example of one or two Democrats. “You don’t need any public woodshedding,” says Howard Paster, White House congressional-relations chief. OK, make that private woodshedding, with word of it leaking. The point will be to underscore the political pain of publicly breaking with the president, even if it’s just on a portion of the plan. If Clinton and Gore can keep Democrats from chipping away at their program, they might have a successful first year after all. But right now, the harness and whip seem buried in some White House closet, gathering dust.
