Presidential Performance 

Most Americans evaluate their presidents according to their own ideological proclivities. Conservatives like conservative presidents; liberals like liberal presidents.

But a more satisfactory procedure for assessing presidential performance is to ask if the president is an effective leader in terms of his own views and goals. In this way we can effectively control for ideology.

The focus on governing to accomplish goals requires us to answer two central questions. Has the president accurately identified the possibilities in his environment for accomplishing his goals? Second, has he adopted an effective strategy to achieve these ends?

This approach to evaluating presidents can be illustrated by examining Bill Clinton's relations with Congress in his first four-year term of office, noting a change between the first and second halves of this term.

The First Two Years

In his first two years in office, President Clinton misjudged three aspects of his political environment. First, he overestimated the extent of change that a president elected with a minority of the vote - 43 percent - could make. He should not have expected to pass far-reaching social legislation - the Health Care Bill - without involving the other party, especially when the public was ambivalent and well-organised interest groups were fervently opposed. Clinton adopted a partisan approach in developing his health care plan - which was intended to be his administration's defining issue - and failed.

Second, Clinton did not recognise that the more policy changes a president proposes, the more opposition he is likely to encounter. The proposed health care reform entailed perhaps the most sweeping, complex prescriptions in American history for controlling the conduct of state governments, employers, drug manufacturers, doctors, hospitals, and individuals. In an era when a few opponents can tie up bills, the odds were clearly against the White House.

Third, Clinton's political environment lacked resources for policy initiatives. When resources are scarce, those proposing expensive new programmes, such as the Health Care Bill, have to regulate the private sector to get things done, which inevitably unleashes a backlash by commercial interests; the costs of action are more expensive politically. In health care, the complex and coercive mechanisms created to require employers to pay for health insurance and for controlling costs (managed competition) were designed to avoid government responsibility for paying. It should have come as no surprise, therefore, that those who would bear greater costs, face higher risks, or have their discretion constrained, would oppose change.

Clinton's most notable successes, including the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), family leave, and 'motor voter registration' had substantial support in Congress before he arrived in Washington. In the former case, for example, he was able to rely on Republican support for George Bush's policy initiative. He understood that he had to pursue a bipartisan strategy that had the additional advantage of entailing no direct budgetary implications. In the latter two cases the bills had been passed before (and been vetoed by Bush) and little leadership was required.

James David Barber has argued that all presidents must perform three political roles: rhetoric, personal relations, and homework. The habitual way of performing these roles he calls presidential style. Here we focus on the most important element of Clinton's style: rhetoric.

The Clinton presidency is the ultimate example of the Public Presidency - a presidency based on a perpetual campaign to obtain the public's support, and fed by public opinion polls, focus groups, and public relations memos. This is an administration that spent $18 million on advertisements in 1995, a non-election year! It also repeatedly interpreted its setbacks in terms of its failure to communicate rather than in terms of the quality of its initiatives or its strategy for governing. As Bill Clinton put it, 'the role of the President of the United States is message'.

To evaluate the success of this governing style, we can ask whether the president was able to: 1) set the country's policy agenda; 2) set the terms of debate over the issues on the agenda; and 3) increase public support for himself or his proposals.

A president's legislative strategy includes setting the agenda of Congress - which, in a Public Presidency, means setting the agenda of the public first. This requires the President to establish priorities among legislative proposals. From its first week in office, the Clinton administration did a poor job of this. Neither the legislation for improving the economy nor a comprehensive health care package was ready on time, creating a vacuum that was filled with controversies over lower priority issues such as gays in the military and public funding for abortion. These issues left an impression of ineptitude and alienated many in the public whose support the president would need for his priority legislation.

It was more than eight months after taking office before the president made a national address on health care reform, and even then his speech - made two months before the introduction of the bill - was out of step with the legislative timetable.

In the meantime, there were important distractions from the president's bill: eighteen American soldiers were killed on a peace-keeping mission in Somalia, and the USS Harlan County, carrying US troops as part of a United Nations plan to restore democracy to Haiti, was forced to leave by pro-military gunmen. In addition, the president had to devote his full attention and all the White House's resources to obtaining passage of NAFTA.

Part of the problem was the president himself: he rarely focused on any bill for more than a few days at a time. With his undisciplined personal style and over-full, badly-prioritised agenda, Clinton failed to focus the country's attention on priority issues.

Clinton also failed to set the terms of the debate. On health care reform, the White House was unable to keep the public's attention focused on the inadequacies of the health care system and the broad goals of reform. Instead of revolving around a central theme, public debate focused on the Clinton plan's pitfalls.

In short, during its first two years, the Clinton administration failed to prevent the Republicans from dominating the symbols of political discourse and setting the terms of the debate over policy. In the 1994 congressional elections, the Republicans framed the vote choice in national terms: they made taxes, social discipline, big government, and the Clinton presidency the dominant issues. Tying congressional Democrats to Clinton, a discredited government, and a deplorable status quo, they set the terms of the debate - and won.

Finally, Bill Clinton overestimated the extent to which the public was susceptible to his appeals for support. When the president's first major economic proposal, the fiscal stimulus plan, was introduced, it ran into strong Republican opposition. During the April 1993 congressional recess, Clinton stepped up his rhetoric on the bill, counting on a groundswell of public opinion to pressure moderate Republicans into ending the filibuster on the bill. The groundswell did not materialise and the bill never came to a vote in the Senate. Nor was the Clinton administration able to sustain public support for the president's 1993 budget proposal of the same year, the 1994 crime bill, and - most painful of all - his health care reform proposals. It did only a little better on NAFTA.

The president's own approval levels averaged less than 50 per cent for each of his first two years in office. In 1994, an association with Clinton decreased votes for Democratic candidates for Congress, and the election was widely seen as a repudiation of the president. It is difficult to conclude that the president had a successful governance style.

The Second Two Years

With the dramatic Republican congressional victory in the 1994, Clinton's programme was dead. But the election also gave him the opportunity to re-define his presidency. Fortunately for the president, the new Republican majorities overplayed their hands and refused to budge on their proposals to reverse the course of public policy, leading to government shutdowns and public perception of the culpability of the Republican Congress. Clinton was able to characterise the Republicans as 'radicals' and himself as a 'reasonable' alternative in opposition to change. At the same time, Clinton read his new strategic position as providing for a scaled-down presidency: he would use executive orders to promote his policy views and the veto to defend moderation.

Clinton's primary goal became to block the Republicans' most ambitious plans to reshape government. By so doing he was able to unify his party, which was frightened of staying in the minority, for two years following its devastating defeat in 1994. His defensive strategy met with substantial success; divided government matters.

The biggest payoff for the president was re-election in 1996. The 1994 congressional elections set the terms of the debate over public policy in America so that the election of 1996 was about the excesses of the Republican Party as much as about high taxes, big government, social decay, and intrusive public authority. This, along with a classic backdrop of peace and prosperity, enabled Clinton to win easily a second term.

Defensive Strategy

There are costs to the defensive strategy, however. Structuring the choice for voters and seeking public support as a more moderate version of the Republicans was good for campaigning and lifted the president in the public opinion polls. Yet while the president benefited from standing in counterpoint to the Republicans, he was forced to embrace some of their imagery in his rhetoric. He changed this rhetoric from programmes and dollars to inspiration and values. He defused a host of promising Republican cultural and values issues with his symbolic stands aimed at attracting anxious parents: V-chips in television sets, school uniforms, teenage curfews, restrictions on teenage smoking, limits on Internet pornography, school competency tests, Hollywood ratings system, and increased educational programming.

But Clinton not only expropriated the language of values from the Republicans, he also coopted many of their issues. As a result, he had much of his agenda determined by the opposition party. He declared the era of big government to be over and signed the Republican welfare reform bill. Most important, the Republicans forced the president to deal with the budget on their terms. The issue became, first, not whether to balance the budget but when and how - and, later, just how. After submitting a budget in early 1995 that envisioned $200 billion deficits for years to come, a few months later Clinton embraced the Republican orthodoxy of a balanced budget. Shortly thereafter he agreed to Newt Gingrich's timetable of balancing it within seven years.

Self-Inflicted Wounds

It is difficult for a president to evaluate a strategic position and fashion a strategy appropriate for governing in it. Yet the Clinton presidency has inflicted wounds on itself. In 1992, Clinton campaigned as an economically liberal and socially conservative populist, and as a 'New Democrat' who was cautious in domestic policy. Yet he governed in the first two years as an economic conservative, a social liberal, and an activist in domestic policy.

Clinton's governing style undercut his campaign style. He undermined his supportive coalition and thus his ability to govern or even to receive credit for his accomplishments. In the second half of his first term, he better understood his strategic position and rediscovered his roots as a Democratic centrist, supporting a balanced budget but fending off extreme cuts and emphasising social conservatism and family values.

By then, however, the president's strategic position was greatly weakened by the Republican victories in the congressional elections. In addition, because Clinton's new campaign style reflected a reactive agenda, it undermined his ability to govern. Although he could gain public support in opposition to the Republicans, he was not able to obtain public support for his own policy initiatives.

In Clinton's second term, as the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win reelection, the question remains whether he can align his campaigning and governing styles to leave his imprint on public policy

George C. Edwards III is Director and Distinguished Professor at the Center for the Study of the Presidency, Bush School of Government and Public Service, Texas A&M University. This is an edited version of a paper presented to the CSD Seminar in January 1998.