Can the President Think?

The chaos and paralysis of the Clinton presidency reflect the chaos and paralysis of Bill Clinton's mind--and he is not going to change.

Edith Efron from the November 1994 issue

(Page 19 of 23)

After his first six chaotic months in office, during which Clinton lurched from one self-made crisis to another and the public opinion polls dropped like stones, a rumor sped from the White House to the press. Frightened aides were whispering to reporters: "He's lost his confidence."

Margaret Carlson in Time reported, "His downward spiral in popularity and his shift in positions are creating a sense of public vertigo. More than ever, Americans regard their new president with two nagging questions: Is he up to the job? And, What does he stand for? One long-time friend who spoke with the president by telephone last week reported that he never sounded 'so sad in his life.'"

And then, after the president named Gergen as his adviser, the story changed. Dan Balz and Ann Devroy of The Washington Post wrote, "The impact on Clinton [of Gergen's appointment] has been noticeable to his advisers: 'He had become so uncertain thatall the political surefootedness that he used to be known for was gone,' says one. 'That is starting to turn around.'"

This is the same period when the New Clinton had suddenly become decisive and had suddenly stopped doing "too much, too fast." Now he had suddenly become self-confident. The reporters had no idea just how fragile was the president's self- esteem.

But the Gergen solution didn't last. By August 1994, Clinton's administration was again in a chaotic state, again facing a hostile Congress, again in danger of losing on its major initiatives. The polls again crashed, this time to their lowest level to date. And reports of black emotions again began to leak from the White House. Again, Clinton confronted the possibility of political death, and again it hit him "deep in the psyche."

Jack Nelson and John M. Broder of the Los Angeles Times (August 26, 1994) said the president and first lady were describing the political hostility they encountered as a "surreal nightmare." Depicting "an intensely frustrated Clinton," Ann Devroy and Dan Balz reported (Washington Post, August 14, 1994): "Associates describe Clinton as having struggled through a period of intense anger and bitterness, combined with a belief that no other president had been as mistreated by the news media and by partisan opponents."

One "associate" said Clinton has compared the situation to his loss in Arkansas--the loss that left him, in Gail Sheehy's paraphrase of his words, "haunted by a sense of imminent death."

We cannot know his present state. All we know is that a panic-stricken Clinton, who will do anything not to lose, has for the first time agreed to delegate authority. He has ceded unprecedented power to his new chief of staff, Leon Panetta.

Clinton has also communicated his despair with an analogy. Nelson and Broder report that he has been "comparing himself to Ahab, locked in a death embrace with Moby Dick in the form of an unruly Congress. The beast keeps dragging him under and he can barely catch his breath before another dive carries him down again."

"Hurry"

When a well-known person tells a preposterous lie about himself--the kind of lie that everyone who knows him or who has worked with him or for him or has read about him knows to be untrue--there is always a strong possibility that he does not know he is lying and that he is denying something about himself that he cannot endure to allow into consciousness. There is something about Clinton's "hurry"--his "hurry to do things" because he might die young--that caused him to tell such a lie.

In the same long interview with Charles Allen on March 15, 1991, in which Clinton communicated his incoherent and childish "hurry" problem, he also gave an adult name to that problem. He described himself as "compulsively overactive."

He told Allen proudly that he was the kind of person "who just likes to organize every minute of the day," immediately observing that he is "compulsively overactive."

Clinton's portrayal of himself as superlatively organized was a staggering untruth. Clinton has always been supremely disorganized. He has always functioned in chaos. He has never adhered to a schedule. And his chronic lateness is measured by intervals of half hours and hours, not minutes.

In making that statement to Allen, Clinton was violently denying some of his most obvious and politically damaging characteristics.

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