THE RAUCOUS Republican presidential race more than the folks at the Clinton White House. “It’s hard for me to accept that something this entertaining is coming to a halt,” says a senior White House aide, chuckling as he speaks. “I’ve had a ball.” Another presidential adviser derides Senate majority leader Bob Dole as “message man.” Dole, of course, has struggled in search of talking points as he’s wrapped up the GOP nomination. What’s great about the Republican primaries is all the exposure it gives to GOP candidates, the Clinton adviser insists. “More is better,” ‘he adds. The more exposure they get, the more President Clinton’s chances of reelection improve.
There’s a parallel here. It’s not a perfect one, but it’s close enough that Clinton and his strategists should be chilled by it. The parallel: The guys at the Bush White House ridiculed the Democratic presidential candidates, especially Clinton, in exactly the same way in 1992. Richard Darman, then budget director, led the Clinton-can’t-win guffaws. Other Bush advisers sneered at Clinton’s inability to drive former California governor Jerry Brown out of the race. Then, in a memo dated April 28, 1992, Bush pollster Fred Steeper wrote the ultimate putdown of Clinton. “Perot is a major threat to the President,” he said. “Clinton is not.”
The point of this comparison is simple: Just like Bush, Clinton has wound up with a White House that ” is dangerously smug about reelection. Now, smugness isn’t always a precursor of defeat, but it often is. And there are other, telling similarities between the attitude of the Clinton camp and that of Bush’s team in 1992. True, the circumstances Clinton finds himself in this year are different from Bush’s situation in 1992 in important ways. Bush’s approval rating, for example, was tumbling rapidly four years ago, while Clinton’s has been crawling upward in recent months. Also, a recession had struck during Bush’s term, and he was bound to get some blame for it on election day. Clinton has escaped a recession so far. And while Bush was a klutz at campaigning, Clinton is a dazzling campaigner. (It’s governing that Clinton has trouble with.)
Still, in its approach to the election, the Clinton White House is more like the Bush White House than not. It goes beyond smugness. To his detriment, Bush assumed his strengths would last forever. So does Clinton. Bush was in a state of denial. Some of his aides discerned this well before election day, but too late to make changes. Clinton is in denial now. None of his advisers seems to have figured this out yet.
Start with the economy, the issue Clinton thinks will assure him a second term. “Our economy is the healthiest it has been in three decades,” Clinton declared in his State of the Union address in January. This is a wild exaggeration that Clinton may soon regret having uttered. The economy grew at a snail’s pace (1.5 percent) in 1995 and has slowed further in 1996. Most economic indicators are lagging, and a few economists are predicting a recession later this year. Nonetheless, Clinton sounded even more bullish March 8 when he spoke in Northridge, California. “Just think where we were four years ago,” he said. “Our economy was drifting. Now we’ve had 8.4 million jobs created in three years and one month.” Clinton may think this is extraordinary job creation, but it’s less than average for economic ‘expansions. Everything’s better, Clinton went on, including auto sales, which in truth have begun declining. In short, Clinton is Bush4ike in his blind optimism about the economy. Despite a recession fol- lowed by slow growth, Bush rebuffed advisers who wanted him to propose a program for stimulat- ing the economy. “I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the situation that two points of growth wouldn’t cure,” he told an aide. Bush believed increased growth would arrive automatically, just as Clinton acts as if he has magically banished the business cycle.
If the economy let him down, Bush believed his reputation as a foreign policy president would pull him through the election. Now, Clinton thinks foreign policy is his ace in the hole. White House minions relentlessly push the line that after a rocky start Clin- ton has mastered foreign relations. They point to Haiti, Bosnia, Russia, and Northern Ireland as Clinton successes. Not only have Clintonites bought the spin, so have some journalists. “A new Clinton is emerging, a foreign policy president,” the Economist wrote last October. White House press secretary Mike McCurry argued recently that problems overseas “require patience, discipline, firmness and require very steady leadership . . . which is what the president has offered.” Marlin Fitzwater couldn’t have said it better. In fact, that’s what he did say repeatedly as Bush meandered to defeat.
Then, there are all the resources that the White House has husbanded, while Dole has exhausted his. The same thing was true in 1992: The incumbent, Bush, amassed a war chest, but Clin- ton spent every penny to win the Democratic nomination. In the end, the advantage this supposedly gave Bush vanished. Despite the Bush precedent, Clinton aides boast of the planning they’ve done and the mon- ey they’ve saved by delaying the for- mal start of Clintoh’s reelection dri- ve. They began strategizing earlier and raised the maximum amount of money faster than any incumbent president, and everything has worked out just as they predicted. “The rhythm of the cycle is what we thought,” says Doug Sosnik, the White House political director. “We haven’t deviated from the plan we set out a year ago.”
There’s a final similarity. The generals in Bush’s campaign army fought bitterly among themselves for status, so much so that the announcement of Bush’s reelection drive had to be postponed for two weeks until the title of each offcial could be negotiated. Now, Clinton and his lieutenants can’t agree on a campaign manager. When the Bushies squabbled in 1992, it wasn’t a good sign. It isn’t now either. *
by Fred Barnes
