Polls tell the truth — if you look closely enough. And Bill Clinton’s poll numbers over the past year have been impressive indeed. At the time he was impeached his job approval rating had reached a staggering 72 percent. But there is a striking gap between polls and feelings at the heart of the Clinton presidency. Public respect for the man is as low as his job approval ratings are high. This is commonly thought to tell us something revealing about the people. But the polls are actually more interesting for what they tell us about the president. He is like a kid who gets straight A’s by flattering the teacher: There is doubt about what the grade signifies.
Bill Clinton has devoted himself to the getting of good poll numbers with astonishing single-mindedness. He loves polls more than any cause. High poll numbers seem to be like a mother’s warm embrace to him, conveying approval, affection, and security. He may have started as president by wanting to do things, but the things he did — Hillary’s health care plan, gays in the armed forces — brought criticism, ridicule, and public rejection. They brought the big chill of the 1994 election, a political near-death experience he vowed never to repeat. As a result, from 1995 onwards, he has not done a thing without polling first. Polls became the end in themselves, more than governance. Issues were picked when they polled well, used to boost his own numbers and then dropped. He polled to find out where to go on vacation. He polled to manipulate feelings of grief, fear, and sorrow, and turn them to gold in the ratings. He polled when the federal building was blown up in April 1995 in Oklahoma City, to find out how to link his critics to militant terrorists. He polled after the crash of TWA 800 in July 1996, pleased when he found out that his well-planned and well-publicized meetings with families of the victims made 50 percent of those who heard of them more likely to vote for him than for Bob Dole. He even climbed aboard a train to the 1996 Democratic convention just to exhort Americans in speeches along the way that their country was on the “right track.” And soon the numbers of people responding yes to the venerable polling question — Is America on the right track? — began to mount, and with them the electoral fortunes of Bill Clinton.
Having used polls to climb back from public disaster, it was only natural that Clinton, when struck with a personal scandal, should turn to polls for salvation again. People would never impeach/try/censure/convict a president with good poll numbers, he and his aides told each other. But there were indications that few of his backers were ready to man the barricades. Since January 1995, polls had consistently suggested that people did not think the words honest and trustworthy applied to Bill Clinton. He was considered more likely to lie under oath than Bob Dole, more likely to cheat at cards than Al Gore. By large majorities, he was considered less moral than his predecessors George Bush, Ronald Reagan, and Jimmy Carter. Unsurprisingly, most Americans were quick to accept the idea he had lied under oath.
So the White House changed the subject, as best it could, to “job approval” — a category of judgment about which the public might more readily be favorable to Bill Clinton. Starting with the president’s first post-Lewinsky State of the Union speech and continuing like a drumbeat for the past year, the president, the first lady, the vice president, and top presidential aides have ceaselessly invoked not the high office to which Bill Clinton was elected, or the trust which was bestowed on him, but rather his desire to “do the job” the American people want him to do. This trope — the idea that we retain a president to “do a job” — has been so robotically deployed by the Clinton entourage that it has been more mocked than understood. Never before has a president deliberately sought to describe his responsibilities in the vocabulary we use to talk about finding a plumber to unclog a drain. But by this denatured standard — can the man keep the national drains unplugged? — the public opinion polls would show that Bill Clinton was exceedingly capable. And that would prove sufficient to keep the president from being fired from his job, to use the new Clintonian idiom.
But that’s all the polls showed. The problem was vividly captured just days before the impeachment vote, when the Washington Post visited the Connecticut district of Nancy Johnson, a Republican moderate. One Clinton backer there said she thought it was “ludicrous” that the president should leave office. But she added, “if Clinton can make the issue go away by resigning, he should resign.” Another staunch Clinton backer praised the president for bringing flush times to his state and his city. “I say the prez is doing a good job. Leave him alone.” But when asked what he personally was prepared to do, he calmly said, “Nothing. . . . I guess I just don’t care that much.”
Such is the support on which Clinton depended. His enemies got no traction in the polls or in the congressional elections. But neither could Clinton whip up outrage against them. Rallies held in the biggest cities drew only a few of the usual lunatic suspects. Marches planned for the Washington area were called off, due to profound lack of interest. No one was eager to march in either direction due to a two-faced dilemma. Most of the people disgusted by Clinton did not think removal an appropriate punishment, and most of the people opposed to impeachment did not really think it was unfair. A Washington Post poll the day after impeachment, found that while 67 percent approved of Clinton’s performance in office, 71 percent thought he had low moral standards, and only 25 percent described themselves as “angry” at the House’s vote to impeach him. Typically, a survey by independent pollster Scott Rasmussen found that while only 37 percent of his respondents actually wanted the Senate to toss out the president, 61 percent felt that Clinton would “deserve” this fate.
Perhaps a new set of words should be coined to describe the condition of the Clinton presidency, as the ones that we have now do not fit. We appear now to have a situation in which this presidency is exceedingly popular, or approved of, while the president himself is not. How else does one explain the great discrepancy between Clinton’s numbers and the visible effects they seem to have?
For all of Clinton’s high job ratings, none of the usual effects of popularity appear. His political presence appears to be weightless. He does not have, and has never had, coattails. In 1992 and 1996, he brought no one in with him. In 1994, Democrats suffered one of their worst setbacks ever because of him. In 1997, before the Lewinsky scandal, the candidates he stumped for lost big. Clinton’s friends brag that his ratings are higher than those of Reagan and Eisenhower, the only other presidents of the last half of the century to serve two full terms, at comparable times in their tenure. But he has been less successful than either in getting his programs through a Congress of the opposing party, a sure sign of diminished political power.
Congressmen of both parties have stood in awe of Clinton’s politics of personal survival, but they have never feared him. He has never been able to carry a cause on his say-so, impose his will on the public agenda, or turn public opinion around. The reason is, as always, his curious relationship with the polls. Why try to move public opinion, when what you really want to do is align yourself with what is popular? When your popularity rests on the tactic of polling to find out what people want, and then giving it to them?
This is a politics of self-indulgence, not of bonding or loyalty, on the part of both the president and his admirers. And it raises the suspicion that his numbers, though quantitatively similar to those of a Reagan or Kennedy at the peak of their powers, are qualitatively different.
Clinton’s opponents may have been overawed and intimidated by his job-approval numbers. But he and his supporters have been overimpressed by them as well. The Democratic euphoria after the November election seems to have led the White House (and everyone else) to underestimate the prospects for his impeachment. And to an almost surreal degree, the judgment of the polls seemed to matter more to the White House than the fact of the president’s being impeached. According to one report in the Washington Post, the day after Bill Clinton became the second president ever to be impeached, his pollster was on the phone to his political people saying things couldn’t be better. “As he has throughout the crisis, pollster Mark J. Penn told lawyers and political strategists how the public remained strongly behind Clinton in his impeachment fight.”
Clinton, then, was impeached in spite of the polls, which seemed to record high levels of support. But he was also impeached because of them; it was the euphoria of seeming to have popular backing that confirmed the president in his hair-splitting non-answers to the 81 questions that hardened the House Republicans against the president. Without the polls to comfort him in his illusions, he might have been more cautious and politic. Indeed, one presidential adviser, though surely overstating things for comic effect, told Post reporter Peter Baker that he blamed the impeachment on “the mesmerizing power of Mark Penn.”
It seems more likely that the president is self-mesmerizing. When the White House incantations that the president is doing his job for the American people are echoed back in high job approval ratings, Clinton is no doubt tempted to mistake this for public affection. And he forgets to apply his own hair-splitting skills. What is the meaning of “job” when the public says it approves of Clinton’s skill at doing it? Foreign disturbances seem distant and minor. The economy, through whoever’s doing, is humming and purring. A new breed of mayors and governors is restoring order to our states and big cities. Leading indicators of social dysfunction — crime, welfare, abortion, illegitimacy — are down. The country, it seems, is doing so well that it might seem his “job” approval ratings should be close to 100 percent, if by “job” we mean only these other things. But is the president in a position to ask for help and support from the people and receive it? Asked and answered, as the lawyers say. Do we respect him? Asked and answered.
Bill Clinton has managed to demonstrate that if a president works hard at boosting his job approval ratings to the exclusion of all else, the resulting high ratings are not inconsistent with public feelings of indifference and even disgust. In the week before he was impeached, as Clinton’s job approval scores shot up past 70, the percentage of those who thought he should resign if impeached at one point reached 58 percent. Likewise, favorable reactions to the State of the Union seemed to carry all the authority of a theatrical notice. “I think he was a prince,” said a man in one focus group. “I was overwhelmed.” But this same man, in the same session, also uttered this judgment: “When I look at Clinton, I don’t see a president. I see a manipulator, a conniver, a liar.”
Compartmentalization, anyone? In the people who responded to his pollsters’ questions, Clinton finally met people who could compartmentalize as well as he ever could, and perhaps could split hairs even more precisely. In the end, few of the people who so manifestly “approved” of the job he did, would lift a finger to help him. They, too, knew how to put things in boxes. And did.
The Clintonites also seem to have attributed an intensity to the president’s numbers that doesn’t exist. “Seventy percent of the American people strongly support President Clinton,” his supporters like to intone on the talk shows. Actually, 30 percent of Americans strongly support President Clinton, which corresponds to the base of his party. Another 30 percent strongly oppose him, which corresponds to the base of the Republican party, and want to see him convicted and possibly hanged. The 40 percent in the middle don’t want to see either side win: They oppose a move to evict the president forcibly, but would hate to see him dance a victory jig, and would not be disturbed if he left.
Clinton’s friends can still whip up mob scenes like the one when he visited Buffalo after the State of the Union. This no doubt makes him feel good, and may even impress gullible journalists. The interesting question is whether Clinton mistakes it for public support. Has he fallen prey to what intelligence adepts call “blowback,” which is what happens when you come to believe your own propaganda, and the stories you put out to dazzle the enemy mislead your own side? It will no doubt be an incredible temptation to Clinton to overinterpret his survival in office as a form of public acclaim. And it will be an ironic turn if Clinton allows himself to be tricked by polls that are technically accurate, if misleading.
No pollster has mesmerizing power except over a gullible client. Bill Clinton, in his utter fixation with public approval, and in his need to find himself in other people’s eyes, put polls above all else: above power, respect, and authority. He put the appearance of action above actual movement, acquiescence above genuine leadership, and the illusion of backing above affection itself. One can imagine him making a Faustian bargain, trading his soul for the thing he most covets — stratospheric ratings in the polls.
And his wish has been granted. His job approval is still up there, almost above mortal levels. Yes, he was impeached. His power is gone, his name is a joke, his legacy stained. But look at those ratings! Why, he may be the most popular man ever to disgust the American people. Like Macbeth, Clinton has put his faith in certainties that may turn out not so certain. Birnam wood has come to Dunsinane, and the polls are still strong. But with two years to go, the curtain hasn’t fallen yet.
Noemie Emery, who has written frequently for THE WEEKLY STANDARD on the Clinton scandals, is a writer living in Alexandria, Va.
