INTERVIEW WITH NORM ORNSTEIN
RESIDENT SCHOLAR, AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE
© 1996 Hedrick Smith Productions, Inc.
Clinton: Learning the Presidency and Relations
with Congress
ORNSTEIN: There's a kind of natural hubris that develops and it was there
beyond any question for Bill Clinton as it had been before for Jimmy Carter,
for example. -- uh -- I saw this so clearly -- uh -- coming at the inaugural
festivities. -- uh -- there was a great big gala the night before the inaugural
for Bill Clinton at the Capital Center, big stadium. And as they started,
they put up a little videotape the Clinton inaugural committee had -- uh
-- compiled. Over several minutes, it showed all the visible Washington
pundits, Fred Barnes and Bob Novak and John McLaughlin, and a bunch of others,
at different times during the campaign cycle as they had said, "Clinton's
dead. Clinton's dead and buried."
And in the background was Frank Sinatra singing "Who's Got the Last
Laugh Now." And I thought, well, of course, they're right about people
making glib predictions, but there's an attitude here that basically said,
we won and whatever they tell us about how we can govern is wrong, we'll
do it our way and we'll turn the world upside down and suspend the natural
laws of checks and balances and governing in Washington. They obviously
came in believing that they could do everything they said they'd been able
to do and President Clinton came in believing he could dominate the American
Congress the way he dominated the Arkansas legislature, a part-time body
of 115 legislators where he never had to deal with more than 15 Republicans.
ORNSTEIN: In June of 1992 -- uh -- a month before Bill Clinton was going
to be nominated at his convention, I did a two hour television show with
him on ABC's GOOD MORNING AMERICA, with several other people, called "Breakfast
with Bill," and I asked the question, tell us what you do in your first
100 days... And what Bill Clinton said at the time was my first 100 days
are going to be a dramatic 100 days. I'm -- I'm going to make them like
Franklin Roosevelt's and I'm going to implement this program, the written
program that he'd had, what Bill Clinton said was I'm going to have a dramatic
first 100 days and...it's a plague that Presidents who have not been immersed
in this process have. It's a plague that candidates have because it's way
too easy to over promise. But we saw it reflected in the reality, once he
became President. There was not an understanding of how can actually control
and dominate the agenda and move Congress. And he paid a heavy price for
it.
HSMITH: Was Congress on Clinton's radar screen as he approached the White
House?
ORNSTEIN: I don't think the Congress was on Clinton's radar screen at all.
Now, he's a masterful political professional who had known a lot of members
of Congress, who interacted easily with them. But he didn't think of them
in terms of what Congress meant for his capacity to govern or what kind
of obstacles were there. And it was partly because while he spent time with
Congressional leaders, they were reassuring him, we've got the votes in
the House and the Senate, you don't need to worry about the Republicans.
We've been waiting for 12 years to have a Democratic President and I think
he believed that he could come in and dominate and say here's what I want
to do and they would say, thank God we have somebody who wants to do what
we want to do. So, Bill Clinton comes into this situation, the first Democratic
President in 12 years, but they've always been in the majority through the
Republican Presidents, runs into a little bit of trouble and says, help
me out here, we're in the same boat. And he found that their goals and objectives
were simply not the same as his. They weren't so desperate to get elected
to a majority that they would take risks for him. Quite the opposite. Their
majority might depend on stepping away from him if he went to take risks.
The political dynamics are different whenever you have a Congress that's
elected separately from a President, but in particular when the mindset
has changed and they don't see their electoral interests in common with
those of the President. And he was heading for trouble as Jimmy Carter had
had trouble -- uh -- many years earlier.
ORNSTEIN: Give the President credit. In the end when he needed votes on
NAFTA, which was a very tough decision, he was able to make it a bipartisan
one. On his budget he finally managed to pull out. It was humiliating. It
was difficult -- by a one vote margin in each House. He got that final Democratic
vote to actually win his victory. But on other occasions -- an embarrassing
setback on the crime bill, for example. And what he had to give up to get
his budget -- he couldn't get those votes. He had to backtrack on gays in
the military. And, instead of having a public with a sense that these guys
had their act together, he's in charge and they're going along with him.
The public sense was of a group of people who couldn't shoot straight, who
couldn't keep their act together. The bottom line legislative accomplishments
of Bill Clinton and the 103rd Congress were pretty respectable in the end.
They made significant numbers of things happen even if they weren't perfect
in terms of the policies that most people wanted. But the public perception
was they did nothing. It was of gridlock.
ORNSTEIN: Newt Gingrich is a remarkable figure and I think beyond any question
is the most dynamic and most powerful speaker in terms of how he's exercised
that power in 85 years. Not since Thomas Bracket Reed and Joe Cannon have
we seen a Speaker come in and dominate his House the way that Newt Gingrich
has dominated his house. Operating almost like a parliament, taking the
speakership and turning it almost into a prime ministership through the
early days, with the smallest majority a party's had in 40 years, building
an incredible discipline within his own party in a highly partisan polarized
House, to actually move it very quickly. The first 100 days of the 104th
House were remarkable. The only analogy we have really is the -- uh -- Roosevelt
House in 1933, And they believed that it was Newt Gingrich's vision that
had gotten them into the majority. It was Newt going out and recruiting
candidates, many of whom became a part of the 73 freshmen that were a full
third of the Republican members that made this new majority. And through
the contract with America, which probably didn't mean a whole lot in the
election, became the essential focus for governing, the promise that they
all collectively felt they had to keep or individually they would fail.
We saw a device that brought the individual political imperatives and the
collective together, so that they could actually believe that if they didn't
all hang together, they would hang separately.
Presidency: Power and Myth
HSMITH: Did Clinton have an exaggerated notion of the power of the Presidency?
ORNSTEIN: Small state governors almost always have an exaggerated view of
the power of the Presidency based on their own experience as governors.
HSMITH: Do you think the Presidency is a weaker institution than the politicians,
the press and even the public think?
ORNSTEIN: We have a President who gets an enormous amount of television
time, who is the chief of state -- uh -- the chief diplomat, as well as
being the chief politician in the country. We tend to invest far more of
a belief in what those Presidents can do than reality would suggest. I'm
not so sure that Presidents today are actually in formal powers weaker than
they've ever been, but it's harder to make things happen now. It's a much
more decentralized process, there are many more actors with significance
--
HSMITH: Is it harder because of independent financing, the press, PACs?
ORNSTEIN: Politics are so much more individualized. Every member of Congress
is an individual power center. And that power doesn't come from a President
or even from a political party. You reach your own campaign success without
a party, you raise your own money. You come to Congress and you get a staff
of 22 people, automatically, whatever you've done or whoever you are and
those things aren't taken away -- uh -- if a President challenges you or
a party threatens you.
Party Unity vs. Lone Rangers and Renegades
HSMITH: Party loyalty per se has got very limited pull?
ORNSTEIN: There is very little you can do with party loyalty per se and
then particularly little you can do when you have Democrats having won their
majorities without party being significant and...without Presidential support
or opposition having any impact or meaning whatsoever. And, indeed, where
underlying all of this is the sense on the part of many Democrats that when
there's a Republican President they're the top guys on the block, they're
the number one Democrats and they move down a notch when there's a Democratic
President.
HSMITH: How important is the fact that Clinton had only won by 43 percent
of the vote?
ORNSTEIN: ...If you come in without a landslide, you don't have that same
sense of political momentum or the respect that you need among members of
Congress at a great enough level for your political power that when you
say do this, they're going to be willing to listen. You have to build it
in other ways or you have to find another mechanism.
The New Republican Majority
ORNSTEIN: But the Republicans in the Senate did not have that same sense
of common destiny. They'd been in the majority before, they didn't have
any great impetus to move very quickly. They didn't feel the same revolutionary
fervor. And while Speaker Gingrich started out with a remarkable and almost
unprecedented success, the challenge to his leadership was going to come
not in the first 100 days or even in the first 10 months. Gingrich ended
up ironically with a problem, not too dissimilar from what Bill Clinton
had had which is getting unruly people in a body other than his own to go
along with his vision.
HSMITH: In recruiting the freshman class, did Gingrich create a Frankenstein?
ORNSTEIN: There is rich irony here in this entire process. If you look at
the 73 members strong freshman class of Republicans in this Congress, they
are Newt Gingrich progeny. He actively recruited many of them to run for
office. He went out and got money for them for their campaigns where they
were having trouble otherwise. He gave them their campaign themes, gave
them little cassettes they put in their cars as they drove along telling
them what to emphasize and what not -- what terms to use for hoe opposition,
what terms to use to characterize themselves. Many of them owe their election
and certainly their majority to Newt Gingrich, but they're all populists.
None of them got elected by saying, I will march in lock step with the leader.
They got elected by saying, I'm with the people and when the leaders are
with the people, I'm with the leaders, but when the leaders go against the
people, I'm with the people. Newt may be finding that your children, even
though they may owe their very existence to you, don't necessarily do everything
you say. And there is a followership problem that will come to the Speaker
of the House. He didn't have it in his first 100 days, for the remainder
of the Congress that will end up being a major headache for him.
© 1996 Hedrick Smith Productions, Inc.