Bill Clinton's oddly superficial presidency

WASHINGTON: Bill Clinton's eight ragged years as president included some significant accomplishments. But our overwhelming sense in looking back at them is one of disappointment at opportunities lost.

There are always many reasons for missed chances, and it is easy to exaggerate the importance of any one of them. Views of the Clinton presidency, as of every presidency, will change. But it seems to us that this was a president whose character betrayed his skills, and in the process betrayed his party and his politics as well.

A chance in the first term to reform the health care system was lost. Almost the entire second term was spent digging out from under massive personal self-indulgence in which the presidency was debased and bent out of shape in the service of a lie. The president said that an opening existed in the second term to put Social Security on a sound financial footing, but to do so would require politically risky if not painful steps from which in the end he flinched.

Clinton played a signal role in preparing the country for the expansion of trade and the knitting together of markets and national economies that has come to be called globalization, the development that may eventually be seen as the great event of the 1990s.

He backed several major trade agreements, including the North American Free Trade Agreement and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade creating the World Trade Organization that fueled the process and ensured that the American economy would fully reap its benefits.

His commitment seemed to falter at times, notably in the face of anti-trade demonstrations in Seattle. But his administration twice acted swiftly to head off crises in the global financial system, in Mexico in 1994 and in Asia in 1997, and did much to persuade countries like China and India to open their economies to free trade and free markets.

Clinton's domestic policies also helped the United States compete in this new economic world. His first budget put the country on a sounder fiscal course, in which the burden of deficits gave way to the opportunities of surpluses. The fiscal discipline led to an easing of interest rates; the lower rates helped generate new waves of investment in and by U.S. business. The stock market boomed, Silicon Valley soared and both unemployment and inflation dropped to their lowest levels in a generation.

Welfare reform, the other major restructuring of government on his watch, has been a success over four years in reducing the rolls and returning many people to work. It has yet to be tested by an economic downturn and we continue to fear that it will leave too many people vulnerable to hard times. But it, too, advanced the cause of a streamlined federal government that attacks social problems as much through a stronger private economy as through entitlement programs.

Some of Clinton's allies at home and in Europe came to see such policies as pioneering a "Third Way," a program tailored for the technology and trade-driven economies of the 21st century. Whether that slogan survives or proves to have been mere hype will be seen in the decade to come.

Apart from the economic, Clinton's foreign policy followed a steep and at times costly learning curve. He came to office promising to intervene in the Balkans, revoke China's trade privileges and admit refugees from Haiti, only to be dragged through painful reversals on all three issues.

He never did formulate a coherent policy toward post-Cold War Russia or China, veering between confrontation and an ill- conceived "strategic partnership" with Beijing, leaning heavily on a shaky Russian president, Boris Yeltsin, and playing down serious human rights abuses by both countries.

If the administration helped make parts of the world safer than they were eight years ago -- for example by encouraging peace in Northern Ireland and by persuading three former Soviet republics to give up their nuclear weapons -- it left other dangers more inflected. That seemed especially true in the Middle East, where Saddam Hussein remains in power and less fettered than before in his quest to rebuild his arsenal, and where Clinton's energetic peacemaking has left Israelis and Palestinians in the midst of violence.

Yet over time, and after serious mistakes in Somalia, the Balkans and Rwanda, Clinton absorbed a crucial lesson: As the world's only big power, the United States must actively engage in the world's trouble spots, if not with troops then with vigorous diplomacy, or risk larger diplomatic or military reverses.

By the end of his second term the president had demonstrated how American military intervention could protect vital interests in the Balkans, while active diplomacy could assuage problems in places from Ethiopia to East Timor.

Clinton was blessed in his principal adversaries -- Newt Gingrich, who so overreached after the stunning Republican victory in the 1994 elections, and Bob Dole, who underperformed in 1996. The complexity of his ambitious health care plan and its mostly deserved collapse in a nonperforming Democratic Congress helped bring about the Democratic defeat in 1994, but thereafter the president was regularly able to outmaneuver the congressional Republicans.

Clinton repositioned his party. The goal was to move it to the middle on a number of issues -- welfare, for example -- that had previously belonged to the Republicans, even while maintaining the traditional concerns for health care, aid to the elderly and the poor, add more. To what extent the partial blurring of differences worked to the Democrats' advantage is not clear. In 1993 both houses of Congress and the White House were in Democratic hands, now none will be.

Nor have politics become more civil. If anything, they are clearly less so than eight years ago. That is hardly entirely Clinton's fault, but he and his permanent war room of a White House clearly played a part. He likewise leaves the campaign finance system in far worse condition than he found it, he continues to claim to want nothing more than to reform it, but he has been the great perfecter of the abuses that he professes to abhor.

Clinton was a relative latecomer to the cause of environmental protection. It became politically useful to him after the 1994 election, when the Republicans' incautious positions on environmental issues helped him portray them as extremist. Some of his late accomplishments in conservation are significant. But on environmental as on other issues, his instinct was to take the commendable easier steps -- no more timbering in the still- roadless parts of the national forests -- while deferring the harder ones, like inducing the changes in behavior that will be required if the United States is to do its share in reducing global warming.

So, too, in defense. The tough structural questions of how to reconfigure U.S. forces were mainly left to his successors.

To what extent these shortfalls reflected a lack of will and courage, as opposed to the political reality of a blocking Congress, is one of the questions historians will debate.

Clinton is an extraordinarily gifted politician. He did not use those great gifts to achieve major change in American life. The record suggests to us that in the end he lacked the commitment to do so, that political considerations too often mattered more to him than substantive needs, and that his politics were self-absorbed.

The Democrats understood both his strengths and his weaknesses when they nominated him in 1992. The bet was that the gain would be worth the risk, and in some respects it was. He won the presidency twice, he regularly confounded the Republicans, and policy because of that was better than it would otherwise have been. But the long-term gain is much less clear. He repaired some inherited damage, and he can boast of some important accomplishments. But on balance, and for all the tumult that it caused, it was an oddly superficial presidency.

-- The Washington Post