Obama girds for 1994 II

Arguably the most revealing passage in Peter Baker's long interview with Obama is the very last sentence:

Well, I’m actually looking at “The Clinton Tapes,” which is Taylor Branch’s chronicle of certain conversations he had with Clinton. It is fascinating.

Those "certain conversations" occurred throughout Clinton's presidency -- they represent Clinton's attempt to get a real-time record while memory was fresh.  (Clinton kept the tapes, but after each session, Branch recorded what he could recall while driving home).   When Branch published The Clinton Tapes in 2009, striking parallels in the Republican response to a moderate Democratic president were already coming into focus.  Awareness of the parallels doubtless shaped Branch's presentation somewhat. But the raw material is Clinton's contemporaneous recollection.

The fulcrum of Clinton's story is the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. By that point, Clinton was as proud of his legislative record as Obama is now. Here he is on Nov. 10, 1994:

What a great start for a presidency-with five million new jobs, peace initiatives around the world, headed into a third year of unprecedented deficit reduction--until the crash in Tuesday's election.

It was in the middle term -- after Clinton successfully staved off the Gingrich Congress's atempt to radically cut Medicaid and Medicare and once perception of rip-roaring economic recovery caught up with reality -- that those accomplishments bore fruit for Clinton.  And Obama plainly has that political rhythm in mind:

On whether the experiences of past presidents offer him any lessons.
Look, history never precisely repeats itself. But there is a pattern in American presidencies — at least modern presidencies. You come in with excitement and fanfare. The other party initially, having been beaten, says it wants to cooperate with you. You start implementing your program as you promised during the campaign.

The other party pushes back very hard. It causes a lot of consternation and drama in Washington.

People who are already cynical and skeptical about Washington generally look at it and say, This is the same old mess as we’ve seen before. The president’s poll numbers drop. And you have to then sort of wrestle back the confidence of the people as the programs that you’ve put in place start bearing fruit and people can suddenly start seeing, Hey, you know what, this health care bill means my kid isn’t losing her health insurance once she leaves college even though she doesn’t have a job yet. Or you know what, the credit-card company can’t jack up my interest rate suddenly, and this is actually saving me some money. Or I’m a small business, and lo and behold, I don’t have to pay capital gains on my start-up, and I can plow that money back into my business.

And what you hope is that over time, despite all the rhetoric, people start seeing concrete benefits from what you’re doing and what was a valley goes back into a peak.

Now what you also hope is that sort of the ups and downs, the highs and lows start evening out a little bit so that people don’t have unrealistic expectations about how quickly we can move on big issues in a democracy but people don’t also plunge into despair when it takes more than six months to transform the world.

Strange indeed is the psychodrama with Bill Clinton in which Obama finds himself enmeshed. Recall that during the 2008 campaign, Obama gave Bill Clinton "tremendous credit" for balancing the budget, while velvet glove-punching him (and by extension Hillary) for not being able to put through a legislative agenda:

The Supreme Court opens markets

E.J. Dionne, lamenting the escalated corruption of our politics triggered by the Citizens United decision, begins by implicitly questioning why Wall Street and so many business interests are gunning for Obama:

The 2010 election is turning into a class war. The wealthy and the powerful started it.

This is a strange development. President Obama, after all, has been working overtime to save capitalism. Wall Street is doing just fine and the rich are getting richer again. The financial reform bill passed by Congress was moderate, not radical.

Nonetheless, corporations and affluent individuals are pouring tens of millions of dollars into attack ads aimed almost exclusively at Democrats.

Dionne doesn't bother to ask why -- he focuses on the how, i.e. the new freedom to anonymously donate unlimited amounts of cash to groups deploying political ads. But as to why, as noted here once before, Bill Clinton explained succinctly to Taylor Branch in 1995:

Beating the Bushes for START

Another flashback from The Clinton Tapes: when Clinton found himself 20 votes short for NAFTA passage in the House,

he shifted back to presidential chemistry at the kickoff event for NAFTA. Carter and Bush had stayed with him overnight...Gerald Ford joined them for dinner on the night of the Middle East ceremony, and then again for a private breakfast before the NAFTA presentation. Clinton's staff found no prior record of so many presidents eating meals together at the White House (pp 50-51)

Four presidents for NAFTA...could Obama -- or Gates -- not call on George H.W. Bush to counter the ignorant demagoguery of Mitt Romney and other Republican "leaders" posturing against ratification of the  START arms reduction treaty with Russia?  And, for that matter, on the Prodigal Son, not to say Bill Clinton himself? 

Incidentally, The Clinton Tapes has got to be the worst-indexed book I've ever encountered.

The long view from China

One disturbing moment that resonates now in Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes is Clinton's short-range reminiscence about his first meeting in 1993 with Chinese president Jiang Zemin. The stage is set with an account of the lack of personal connection or real dialogue (quite unusual for Clinton):

What stuck with him from Seattle was a tough private talk with the Chinese president, Jiang Zemin. Clinton said he and Jiang had sat across from each other at a small table about the size of the card table between us now, with only a translator on each side, as Jiang read a speech to him about the glorious history of China and the folly of attempts to influence her internal affairs. It went on so long that Clinton said he finally felt obliged to interrupt. Speaking in direct sentences, with all the charm he could muster, he invited the Chinese leader to get down to business. He told Jiang he didn't want to change China's political institutions. Nor did he object to prisons. In fact, America had lots of people in prison, and Clinton wanted to put away even more. But he did care about basic human rights, and, even if he didn't, he had a Congress that did. To improve relations, Jiang needed only to do a few things already permissible within Chinese standards and law. Clinton named four, including an effective ban on export goods made by prison labor. When he finished, however, Jiang simply resumed his speech.
 
The president said he and Jiang talked persistently past one another in disconnected monologues, and stiff formality further inhibited conversation  (87-88).

Then, recalling a later session, Branch tacks back to the upshot of Jiang's long-range view and its sobering effect on Clinton.  The passage segues from discussion of Russia:

Bill Clinton, Happy Warrior

Perhaps it's silly to record reactions to a book while you're still reading it, particularly early on. But what's a blog for? I want to flag an early snapshot of Bill Clinton from Taylor Branch's The Clinton Tapes that in one sense runs counter my general impression of the 42nd President -- though I suspect that it captures a complementary, not contradictory aspect of his personality and presidency.

My snapshot memory of the Clinton years is of a couple careening from crisis to crisis, with Clinton generally on the ropes and often red-faced with rage against his multifarious tormentors, from the media to the "vast right wing conspiracy" to the Gingrich Congress (the last is where my error may lie).  I sometimes think of him in concert with the Phillies' closer of the early nineties, Mitch Williams, a.k.a. "Wild Thing," who would generally struggle through his inning with lots of walks, hits and other fireworks but usually get the job done (until he didn't; his two blown saves cost the Phillies the '93 World Series).  On the other hand, there was the post-impeachment dictum, "If Bill Clinton were the Titanic, the iceberg would have sunk."  By the end of his tenure the loathesome Gingrich was down, and his scummy successor as Speaker Bob Livingston was down, and Dole was down, and the deficit was down, and crime was down, and income inequality was briefly down, and it really was, briefly, a kindler, gentler America than in the Reagan years. But still it was a wild ride.

No doubt Clinton can nurse a grudge with the best, and one generally doesn't think of him as a Zen master of detachment. But this, from Branch's earliest discussions with the new President in 1993, also rings true -- and explains much of Clinton's success: