This is the week, then,, that President Clinton is supposed to get his first report card. Sitting in judgment on the stuff he has shown so far-as if he were a rookie pitcher on his maiden swing around the circuit in the bigs-the media are having a field day gauging his successes and failures. Particularly, they are focusing on his so far edgy relations with Congress,
This chorus of nitpicking is not only unfair to the president, but also it reveals ignorance of presidential history. Until recently presidents did not come into office with a “program” and, even better, they were not expected to have one. Some of the highest-ranked presidents, including Washington, Jackson and Wilson, had, by today’s artificial standard, unexceptional beginnings. Their historical reputations rest on firmer ground than on how well they pushed Congress to pass their legislative proposals, which, by the way, were very few indeed. Lyndon Johnson, who muscled his Great Society program through Congress in record time, found the electorate generally unimpressed by his accomplishment. Today his standing in history is based on vastly different criteria.
No president has had a more productive First Hundred Days than Lincoln. When he came to power on March 4, 1861, he was already in the toils of the country’s gravest political crisis. Without Congress to hector him or egg him on (in those days, Congress wasn’t even in session when a new president took the oath), he recruited an army and waged war to save the Union. But the nation, not given to counting presidential days, regarded the period simply as the Long Doleful Spring that had followed the Terrible Secession Winter.
FDR’s circumstances were unique. He had inherited from Herbert Hoover the most intractable domestic predicament since the Civil War. With business executives weeping on his hand while imploring him to save capitalism for them, the president had all the cards. Reform and recovery proposals were transformed into law by a compliant Congress almost exactly the way the White House sent them to the Hill.
We cannot equate present day society with Lincoln’s or FDR’s or Johnson’s. For good or ill, it is more eruptive, more skeptical of political leadership and, fed a daily diet of print and electronic commentary, it is better informed and more fragmented than ever in the past. Significantly, society is also less trusting of governmental authority–or any other authority. The democratic right to criticize has metamorphosed into the need to criticize-incessantly and angrily. Executives in every walk of life bear daily witness that the head that wears the crown has seldom lain as uneasy as now. Bill Clinton’s historical fate is to aim to lead in such an atmosphere.
The president has largely ignored the mystique of the First Hundred Days as it might apply to him. In making his appointments painstakingly and at his own pace, he has surely not been racing against the calendar to get his entourage in place. When the controversy over homosexuals in the armed forces blindsided him early on, he gave the Pentagon until July 15 to come up with a plan-176 days after his Inauguration. When he appointed Hillary Rodham Clinton to be in charge of health-care reform and set May for the unveiling of the administration’s proposals, he was patently looking past the magic benchmark. In offering Congress his double-barreled attack on unemployment and the deficit, he understood that a hundred days might not yield a finishing point.
So the time is not right yet for a report card. Still, Bill Clinton has offered some tokens of what a report card at midterm might show. He admirably segued his presidential campaign into his presidency, even as he discovered that his immediate predecessors were not the village idiots. He has recognized powerfully that the White House is a two-person job and that historians will one day label his presidency “the time of the Clintons.” He has translated boyish exuberance into a refreshing kind of presidential dignity not seen since Theodore Roosevelt’s day. He has demonstrated a notable willingness to listen as well as talk. When he talks he has skillfully exploited new ways to find audiences he seeks to reach. He has shown himself ready to compromise on consequential questions without caving in on principles. As a student of history and government, he has shown he knows that what the people want and what is good for them cannot always coincide. Like FDR, he understands that bold experimentation will eventually yield some losers as well as winners, but that the people forgive the mistakes of those who try. Above all, he rides a tide of change powered by the sure knowledge he shares with the whole nation that when all the naysayers’ sniping and caterwauling are over and done with, he is traveling face-forward in the van of history itself.
