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 7 of 23)

The rambling speech that Clinton made to the talk-show host is a template both for Clinton's endlessly reiterated lament that he does "too much, too fast" and for the chaotic mental processes that wander off in meaningless directions and culminate in paralysis. To describe what it might feel like to be engaged in both kinds of mental activities, one must conjure up an impossibility. It would be like driving at full speed with one's feet jammed hard on powerful brakes. Clinton's mind races perpetually while it simultaneously maneuvers itself into a catatonic motionlessness.

Clinton has a short phrase to describe only the speeded-up process: It is doing "too much, too fast." He has no descriptive phrase for the blocking process, so I'll give him one: It's "I can't move."

He presses his speeded-up problem on everyone he talks to at any length, so it is widely known. He allows others to discover the blockage problem all by themselves. But, of course, that problem is widely known too. The press discovered it soon after he was elected president. In fact, to a considerable degree, Clinton's relationship with reporters has been an attempt to seduce them by stressing "I do too much, too fast" while they hav e tormented him by chasing angrily after his "I can't move." To visit Clinton's mind, one must take these aspects of his mental processes one at a time.

"Too Much, Too Fast"

Clinton began to complain publicly that he tries to do "too much, too fast" when he lost the governor's race in 1980 after one term in office. In his first interview after this defeat, he named the problem as a cause.

But when one reads Meredith Oakley's biography On the Make, one discovers that Clinton had the "too much, too fast" problem long before the traumatic expulsion. Oakley places no significance whatsoever on this fact. But it is clearly important.

Right after he was elected governor for the first time and before he had even moved into his office, says Oakley, Clinton made a curious pledge to the electorate. It was reported by the Associated Press and she summarizes it as follows: "He said he planned to take a judicious approach to governing and to try not to do everything at once."

Neither the AP nor Oakley thought to ask Clinton why the impossible notion of doing everything at once had even occurred to him and why he would "try" not to do this impossible thing. Would the impossible thing happen anyway if he did not "try"?

On the surface, the new governor of Arkansas never kept his pledge. The biographies record that he always governed in Arkansas with all flags flying and an agenda as long as his arm. But the primary purpose of the enormous agenda was to create the illusion of immense achievement through nonstop activity. Clinton scheduled matters, says Oakley, so that he could launch one initiative a week and keep his name in the headlines. Many, if not most, of those achievements never materialized, or they were drastically altered by the Arkansas legislature.

After Clinton was defeated, he made such a big issue out of "too much, too fast" and apologized so humbly to the people of Arkansas for his mistake that, when years later he ran for the presidency, the phrase was still on people's lips. David Gallen, researching Bill Clinton: As They Know Him, heard it frequently. Brownie Ledbetter, a prominent activist in Arkansas reform politics, told Gallen about the warning that Betsey Wright had delivered to Clinton. Wright, who organized Clinton's campaign for reelection to the governorship, told Clinton, "You will pick three things and that's it. You're not going to do a hundred and fifty things. And you've got to be focused."

When Clinton ran for the presidency he again set out with great brio to do "too much, too fast." He hit Americans hard with a 49-point plan for economic revival--adding 10 new planks to a platform he filched from Dukakis.

And, once elected, Clinton not only wanted to show Americans that he could do everything at once--he wanted to show them that he could think about everything at once. He held the famous economic "summit" where, surrounded by television cameras and legions of properly respectful economists, policy specialists, and business executives, Clinton demonstrated that he knew as much about each of their specializations as they did. He had learned and spat out a fragment of each. The public was impressed. The press was impressed. Hillary was impressed. She took notes.

And there began the regime of Clinton I, which was for many months thereafter to lurch around in drunken confusion, because the man who could do everything at once and could know everything at once had just arrived from a tiny, almost-feudal state that he could govern with a Rolodex of 100 names, and had no idea what it meant to be president of the United States of America.

Throughout all the lurching and crises and embarrassments, however, Clinton kept proliferating proposed programs and issues and trying to do "too much, too fast." Finally, a clever journalist noticed that the issues were a cave in which Clinton was hiding. In Newsweek, February 15, 1993, Eleanor Clift observed:

"As the political hurricanes raged around him, Bill Clinton sought safety in substance. Let the media talk about Kimba and Zoa and gays in the military.Clinton was busy with issues, at least one a day. That is his way of changing the subject ... But the issues may not provide safe haven for long. Now he must turn his attention to the thorniest issue of all, [the economy,] where he faces seemingly contradictory goals."

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