WASHINGTON — No single lens looks wide enough to capture the perplexing panorama of Bill Clinton's presidency.
Clinton was the first Democratic president since Franklin D. Roosevelt to win reelection--and the first since Harry S. Truman to lose control of the House of Representatives. He produced the first balanced budget in 30 years, ended a 60-year federal entitlement to welfare and memorably declared that "the era of big government is over." But he also won billions of dollars in increased funding for education, launched a major new federal effort to provide health care for uninsured children and significantly enlarged government support for the working poor.
Clinton challenged Democratic orthodoxy on such issues as welfare, crime and federal spending, but he refused to confront the party's resistance to new approaches for Social Security, Medicare and affirmative action. He reshaped his party's agenda to reconnect it with mainstream moral values--and then flouted those values himself, driving away many of the same voters his policies hoped to attract.
The first baby boomer president, Clinton lacked nothing for ambition. His twin goals were to rebuild a political majority for the Democratic Party and to revive a public consensus for activist government. He didn't fully achieve either, but neither did he entirely fail. Following a generation in which Republicans dominated the White House, Clinton restored the Democrats' ability to compete for the presidency. And although many of his plans to expand Washington's role were frustrated, he fought off the Newt Gingrich-led drive to dramatically retrench government and forged a fragile consensus for limited public activism tempered by fiscal discipline. After declining for most of the previous 30 years, the share of Americans who said they trusted the federal government to do what's right had increased modestly, but measurably, during his two terms, polls showed.
With eerie symmetry, Clinton's critics on the left and the right saw a presidency of grand words and small gestures. As president, wrote conservative columnist George Will, Clinton was "like a person who walks across a field of snow and leaves no footprints." Writing in the Nation, liberal journalist Bill Greider concluded: "When Bill Clinton recites the big challenges, he reminds us of all he danced away from as president. . . . Clinton has taught Democrats to think small."
