Clinton’s irritated now about the attention Colin Powell is getting for the Summit, but it’s his own fault. Kicking off the event in February, the president gave a nice speech telling CEOs to come to Philadelphia with “commitments in hand.” But since then, he has crossed paths with plenty of CEOs and–unlike Powell–he hasn’t personally buttonholed them to commit their companies to helping kids. Not long before the Summit, for example, the president sat with Bud Selig, acting baseball commissioner, at the Jackie Robinson anniversary game and never asked Selig, or Major League Baseball, to pony up. Now we’re hearing more inspiring speeches. But then what? If Clinton were half as solicitous of corporate commitments as he was of campaign contributions, the Summit organizers would be hundreds of millions of volunteer hours ahead of where they are now.
Clinton’s problems with focus are widely misunderstood. He doesn’t lack thematic consistency; in fact, his speeches today are remarkably similar to the ones he has given all the way back to 1991. (Doubtful? Look ’em up.) And his fleeting attention span is partly in the nature of the modern presidency, which is largely reactive. If you had to deal in the same afternoon with the subtleties of the Middle East, floods, chemical weapons and whether Trent Lott was having a good hair day, you might have some trouble sticking to a subject, too.
But it’s been obvious since at least the 1994 health-care debacle that Clinton doesn’t have the stomach for any fight he could lose. His working definition of leadership is to tiptoe out only a few millimeters ahead of where the country might be ready to go. In Robert Reich’s witty and insightful new book, his old friend the president comes across as peculiarly passive, as if for all his love of the office he’s a bit dazed by the hand that history has dealt him. My own theory is that his time horizons are warped. In the abstract, Clinton understands that he must take the long view if he wants to win the approval of historians, which is his top goal now. But every Clinton instinct has been conditioned by a quarter century of running for office almost every two years. So far, those short-term instincts are still prevailing inside the president’s head. He knows he should throw long, but he can’t break his habit of trying to pick up a measly two or three yards on a quarterback sneak.
Again, the Summit is a good example. Clinton wanted it to focus blandly on service; it was Powell and the other organizers who insisted the whole event revolve around the country’s true crisis –at-risk kids. Clinton’s own youth agenda has some worthy elements (especially the emphasis on national educational standards), but it is entirely inadequate to meet the challenge, and he knows it.
Consider one of the Summit’s major goals: to “provide safe and structured after-school activities.” This is a huge national problem, affecting 80 percent of kids. “It used to be “It’s 10 p.m. Do you know where your children are?’ " says Richard Murphy, a former youth-services commissioner in New York. “Now the line should be “It’s 4 p.m. Do you know where your children are?’ " Unlike mentoring, which is best done by volunteers, extending after-school hours can’t be done without the government. Clinton has talked about the problem often over the years: he knows that nearly 50 percent of all juvenile crime (not to mention much of the sex that leads to teen pregnancy) occurs between the hours of 3 and 7 p.m.; he knows that sending mothers to work under welfare reform will only increase the number of those kids who must now fend for themselves on the streets after school. The president’s solution? To throw a few million dollars of chicken feed into his budget for a pilot program to keep a tiny percentage of public schools open longer.
Clinton’s argument is that he tried to expand after-school activities in the 1994 crime bill, and got massacred by Republicans wielding “midnight basketball.” But under a Democratic Congress the only way to fund such programs was as a pork pie for Democratic mayors. Today’s politics offers some alternatives, even under the strictures of a balanced budget. What if instead of giving college-bound students better grants and tax credits, Clinton amended his plan to make the money contingent on service, especially supervising after-school activities? What if he said to teachers’ unions: “Everyone else in America works until at least 5 o’clock, and from now on you must do so, too–if not teaching, then grading papers and supervising recreation”?
As he waits for his leg to heal, Clinton spends hours fretting about his place in history. He has apparently settled on a Kerner-style commission to report back on American racial problems. That’s fine, but it won’t be enough to secure his reputation. Nor will deficit reduction and a buoyant economy. This president needs to take one more big whack at the underlying social mess he knows so well. And remember to whack again the next day.
