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 3 of 22)

Tom Rosenstiel of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Bury of ABC, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, and Joe Klein of Newsweek have all used this mosaic technique. And all have reached a similar conclusion--that Clinton is "in hiding" (Cohen); that Clinton is a multifaceted being without a unifying self (Klein); that he is whatever you happen to be looking at or, as Bury resignedly put it, "what you see is what you get." Dowd, the most literary, climaxed a fusillade of contradictions by saying, "In the end, the focus is the unfocusability." And Rosenstiel will be quoted below.

Not until Bob Woodward's The Agenda could one be certain of the original template for the mosaic technique. One finds it in the partly quoted, partly paraphrased views of George Stephanopoulos: "'You've got to always keep in mind,' Stephanopoulos said to one of his closest associates, that watching Clinton 'is like a kaleidoscope. What you see is where you stand and where you're looking at him. He will put one facet toward you, but that is only one facet.' Every time, the kaleidoscope would reflect the fragment of stone at the bottom in a unique way, showing a different facet; every person would see a different pattern. It was real, but it could change in an instant, as soon as Clinton turned."

Such descriptions are fascinating to read, but they leave one as baffled about Clinton after reading them as before. Other journalists have taken the next disturbing step: They've looked behind the self-contradictory mosaic and reached the grim conclusion that Clinton has no "self." In his book, Strange Bedfellows, which describes the coverage of the presidential campaign of 1992, Rosenstiel writes: "Like many politicians Bill Clinton is a man of unfinished and contradictory character--scholarly and shallow, outgoing and shy, principled and craven, the mood depending on the motive. He possesses extraordinary talent and a fierce thirst for knowledge and insight, but above all approval. One reporter who spent time with him in New Hampshire found him one of the most outwardly directed people she had ever met--as if he had little inner sense of self at all." (Emphasis added.)

When Rosenstiel speaks for himself he creates a mosaic, but when he quotes the reporter who dived beneath the mosaic he gives no name. If he did, Anonymous would never get into the White House again.

Journalists with names also have identified this absence of self in Clinton, but they are not dependent on the Washington media-political establishment. One is Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's. In the April 1993 issue Lapham described Clinton's response to a group of people: "[He] roamed across the sound stage like a starved animal, feeding on the questions from the audience as if they were the stuff of life and breath." And: "He defines himself as a man desperately eager to please, and the voraciousness of his appetite--for more friends, more speeches, more food and drink, more time on stage, more hands to shake, more hugs--suggests the emptiness of a soul that knows itself only by the names of what it seizes or consumes." (Emphasis added.)

Another description of the self-less Clinton comes from alternative journalist Sam Smith, author of Shadows of Hope and editor of Progressive Review: "It was the normal work of the politician, but with Clinton there seemed too much. Too many hands, too many friends, too many words, too many hours before he went to sleep, too many hours on C-SPAN solving the nation's problems with too many industrialists and economists--and in the end too little else. It was as though he were afraid that if he excused himself from the public eye he might no longer be real." (Emphasis added.)

Those who see Clinton as self-less are always struck by the deep dependence on others that is present in those who have a ravenous hunger for power over those others. Different journalists have sought to explain the intense response Clinton invokes, occasionally using their own reactions. Philip Martin, an Arkansas journalist, quotes his own words, written for a now-defunct alternative newspaper in Little Rock when he was young: "He is the Sun King. And if you look too long at him you will be blind, your senses flooded with his gold-spined brilliance. As e.e. cummings might have said of him, Jesus, he is a handsome man. Despite his too-big head and hands and feet and his roomy, rheumy allergy-ridden nose. There must be some elemental undercurrent here that generates envy in other men, not just the musk of power but something pheromonic. Since it is not polite to compare your governor to Mussolini or even Huey Long, then let's say one of those Kennedy boys, or that rare thing, a soulful politician."

Martin now considers those "the most embarrassing words of my career." But he quotes them because he knows they provide insight into others. Martin had quite unreservedly fallen in love, as millions of others have fallen in love with Bill Clinton.

Another journalistic worshiper, Phil McCombs, writing in The Washington Post, holds a mirror up to Clinton as he is absorbing that love: "To watch this president connect with people emotionally is an awesome thing. It's a raw, needy, palpable, electrifying thing that happens ... It's as if he's soaking up the people like he's soaking up the sun, with the warmth pouring deep and direct into his political soul and recharging him, refilling him somehow once again with his own humanity and some sense of his role in the destiny of his country."

This is an exceptionally good description of a charismatic politician feeding on the souls he has electrified. It was quoted in The New Republic under the sarcastic headline, "Clinton Suck-Up Watch." That was too limited an observation, although it is true that only a worshiper would use the language of McCombs. An unusually intense response to a charismatic politician should not be casually dismissed as a simple-minded form of complicity. And it also should not be described with conventional political formulae. We all have been told repeatedly that Clinton "connects" with crowds, or that he is in his "campaign mode." But such desiccated language deprives one of the politically important information that the emotion-laden language of Martin and McCombs provides.

Writing a decade and a half apart, both tell us in unmistakable terms that the South has thrown up yet another of its emotionally gifted demagogues--those eloquent politicians who intuitively exploit the hopes and fears of mobs, who win their love and legitimize their hatreds. The new eloquent southerner--his style adapted to the small screen, his charged emotions unfailingly politically correct--is sitting in the White House.

Clinton has true charisma. If you have not witnessed that quality first-hand--I myself have seen it only once--you don't quite know what it is. It is not just charm. It is a sudden blazing internal radiance which the possessor learns to produce volitionally and in full, conscious awareness of its seductive effect.

Clinton has the power to seduce others, to get them to submit to his will. And when they do, they give him in turn the vision he seeks. What Clinton sees in the faces of the adoring crowds is the reflected face of the Sun King. Only those adoring crowds can give this Narcissus the ineffable joy of adoring himself.

Have any journalists raised questions about the real political purposes of such a man? Yes, but only couched in terms of sincerity. The disappointed and angry left, the most radical of the environmentalists, the iconoclasts who inhabit the edges of the American political spectrum--all have raised the questions: Is Clinton really moved by a love of social justice? When he made his pledges to rescue the poor and the suffering, was he sincere? What does he stand for?

In Shadows of Hope, Sam Smith gives his reasons for doubting Clinton's sincerity: "Clinton often seems a political Don Juan, whose serial affairs with economic and social programs share only the transitory passion he exhibits on their behalf."