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Reinventing America
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11690 |
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CURRENT ISSUES
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| Issue
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2 / 1994 |
2,417 Words |
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Robert Royal
Robert Royal is a vice president at the Center for Ethics and
Public Policy. |
In some ways you have to feel sorry for Bill Clinton. He is an intelligent, energetic, and personally engaging man. Had he become president at a different time, while some large common vision still animated the nation or the Democratic Party, he might have been an effective leader. But fate has dealt him a weak hand. He possesses few steady or deep convictions. In the currently unsettled domestic and foreign policy environment, his habit of charging ahead then backtracking has confused his supporters almost as much as his critics.
Clinton has shown himself to be someone with a weakness for talking about grand visions and ambitious projects, who, when push comes to shove, will compromise on virtually everything in order to create the impression of vigorous activity. His most consistent trait to date seems to be a passionate desire to become an epoch-making president.
Much energy has been wasted trying to identify the ideological and the personal elements in the Clinton psyche. The exercise ends in contradictions because one of the strands in his character that seems to be emerging most forcefully is a need to do something great with little regard for the costs in money or constitutional niceties.
The pragmatism that results can be used to argue that he is a moderate or a radical or something we have yet to discover. But the golden thread that runs through all of these positions can be simply stated: Clinton wants to become for the 1990s what Jack Kennedy was (or is believed to have been) for the early 1960s.
A year after Clinton's inauguration and the deliberate invocation of the Kennedy precedents, America finds itself in no new golden age. In fact, if the 30th anniversary of Kennedy's death last November showed anything, it showed that we still have a nostalgia for that old, lost America. But it is an America that looks more distant than the mere lapse of time would indicate, largely owing to vast changes, mostly for the worse, in American society. In the Clinton vocabulary, words like new, forward looking, innovative bulk large. Yet for many people weary of the growing tide of incivility in America, the old limited republic and its virtues look further off than ever precisely because of clever political innovations.
Is America very different after a year of President Clinton? In some significant ways, yes. For all of Clinton's efforts to flee the liberal label, his administration has shown itself to be well to the left by
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