Rating Bill Clinton's Presidency

This column from The Weekly Standard was written by Fred Barnes.

Clinton is not a failed president, only an insignificant one. In his interview with Rather to plug My Life, he claims two great accomplishments. One is "the creation of 22 million jobs." The other is the toppling of Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in the Balkan war. So Clinton takes credit, above all, for high job growth and a positive outcome in a relatively minor foreign policy crisis. One qualification: On jobs, while Clinton deserves credit, presidents merely make jobs a bit easier or harder for the economy to create. They don't create jobs themselves, except by expanding government. In sum, Clinton's twin achievements match Coolidge's almost exactly. The highlights of Coolidge's term were a flourishing economy and triumph in three minor foreign ventures.

Clinton had three major successes in Congress during his eight years in office, but it's no surprise he downplays them. They reflect his weakness as a president. The first was passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993. This measure was proposed by President Reagan, negotiated and signed by the first President Bush, and ratified with Republican votes as congressional Democrats abandoned Clinton in droves. The second was welfare reform that reduced the rolls dramatically. He signed this Republican bill reluctantly in 1996 only after his political adviser, Dick Morris, told him his reelection would be jeopardized if he didn't. The third Clinton success was the arrival of a balanced budget, again a goal Clinton had warily endorsed but not expected to achieve so soon.

Now consider these achievements for a moment. Do they remind you of anyone's agenda? The answer is Reagan's. All three were longstanding aims of Reagan, not of Clinton or Democrats. Yes, Clinton campaigned in 1992 on changing the welfare system "as we know it." But the bill he was forced to sign cut far more deeply into welfare rolls than Clinton wanted and was fiercely opposed by liberal Democrats. The point is that the Clinton presidency was, in effect, an extension of the Reagan presidency, though Clinton would be loath to admit this. Completing the Reagan agenda was not his intention.

There are three primary methods of assessing, then ranking, a president. None helps Clinton. The first, most-often-applied test, goes like this: Did the president face an unprecedented challenge, did he respond boldly, and was he successful? Because they passed this test so impressively, George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Franklin Roosevelt are rated by historians as the top three presidents. Clinton faced no great challenge to which he could respond boldly and successfully. He was president during the period Charles Krauthammer has dubbed a "holiday from history." In fact, Clinton has complained he had no major war or crisis to confront.

The second way to judge a leader comes from the philosopher Sidney Hook. In The Hero in History, Hook distinguishes between eventful and event-making leaders. "The eventful man is a creature of events," Hook wrote. The event-making man causes events. "Both the eventful man and the event-making man appear at the forking points of history," Hook wrote. "The event-making man . . . finds a fork in the historical road, but he also helps, so to speak, to create it." Clinton was clearly not an event-making president. And it's a stretch to label him eventful. The two forks he encountered -- Medicare and terrorism -- he dealt with tentatively.

The third method comes from Fred I. Greenstein, a political scientist at Princeton widely admired for his writings on the presidency. In The Presidential Difference, he proposes six measures for appraising the "leadership style" of presidents: public communication, organizational capacity, political skill, vision, cognitive style, and emotional intelligence. Clinton is strong on communication, political skill, and cognitive style (absorbing and using information). On the other three, he falls short. His White House and his personal decision-making style were chaotic. Despite the talk of a "third way" in public policy, he was hardly a visionary. And he stumbled badly on emotional intelligence, which Greenstein describes as "the president's ability to manage his emotions and turn them to constructive purposes, rather than being dominated by them, and allowing them to diminish his leadership." To Greenstein, emotional intelligence is the most important trait of a president. Clinton, he says, "provided a reminder that in the absence of emotional intelligence, the presidency is a defective instrument of democratic governance."

When Clinton encountered two forks in the road, on terrorism and Medicare, he balked. Given the circumstances, that was understandable. But hesitation is not an act of bold leadership. On terrorism, he passed on the opportunity to capture or kill Osama bin Laden as he flew from Sudan to Afghanistan. True, that occurred at a time, before the 9/11 attacks, when the enormity of the threat posed by bin Laden was not yet known. On Medicare, Clinton backed away from a chance to restructure the program and save it for decades to come. But he was beset by impeachment and chose to side with his liberal backers who opposed Medicare reform and were crucial to his staying in office. Thus the decision made political sense. By balking, however, he reinforced the verdict that no book can erase. Clinton was a president of little consequence.

Fred Barnes is executive editor of The Weekly Standard.

By Fred Barnes
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