ON THE BASIS OF WHAT President Clinton has revealed so far, his second term won’t add much to his reputation. His top priority is a balanced budget, a goal he embraced reluctantly and only because Republicans insisted. Second, he’s pushing a costly education package. But even if the whole thing passes, it won’t have more than a marginal impact on the public schools. Still, Clinton broods about his place in history. In Behind the Oval Office, political adviser Dick Morris tells of a conversation last August with Clinton about his rank in the hierarchy of presidential greatness. ” Borderline third tier,” Morris informed him. George Stephanopoulos, the just- departed White House aide, says Clinton often ponders “what his special role is.” Now, he may have found the answer. If all goes well in the early months of his second term, he’ll try to become the president who saved Social Security, from both bankruptcy and Republican privatizers.
For the moment, Clinton is not letting on. In his State of the Union address on February 4, he dismissed the issue with a fleeting reference to favoring “a bipartisan process to preserve Social Security and reform Medicare for the long run.” A week earlier at a White House press conference, he was even less forthright. He said he favors “modest changes” that would prolong the solvency of Social Security “a little bit.” Asked about the recent report of his administration’s Advisory Council on Social Security, he declined to discuss any of its three competing recommendations for partial privatization, though he likes one of them.
