What We'll Remember

James MacGregor Burns
Presidential scholar
Clinton has been a superb "transactional" leader--that is, in making deals, navigating through the budget process, negotiating with opposition and allies. He's done this domestically, but also internationally, where he's been amazingly active and made an enormous commitment, just in terms of travel alone.

The problem comes when an issue arises above the everyday budgetmaking and the like, and big work has to be done. This is where the Clinton Administration has failed. In certain areas, he and his colleagues have not risen above the transactional level. They've done it rhetorically, in laying out great ideas and great dreams and hopes. But they haven't followed through strategically, or in terms of commitment and conviction, to even begin to solve these basic problems.

Take education. Clinton wanted to be the education President, but he simply did not make the consistent effort or advance the needed strategies and goals that would do something fundamentally about the state of public education in this country. In health care, he tried in 1993, then backed away from it quickly and unduly. It's a failure of moral conviction; a failure of imaginative, creative thinking about what has to be done, tested by moral values.

Edmund Morris
Ronald Reagan biographer
I remember a photograph from one of Clinton's first visits to the Oval Office after his first election. He was wearing a short-sleeved sport shirt and was sprawling at his desk. He was drinking a large mug of root beer, and he had his large white thumb projecting through the handle around the tankard. The waves of vulgarity this picture gave off made me have the strong instinct that he was going to vulgarize the office of the presidency.

Reagan believed the office symbolized the dignity of the presidency. And [Clinton] to me was a man bringing in truck-driver values. We have had vulgar Presidents before, and they have not been bad Presidents. Andrew Jackson was just as vulgar as Bill Clinton. There's something fleshly and uncontrolled, and defiantly vulgar, about Clinton, which I think has been characteristic of his presidency. I think the presidency has lost a large part of its dignity in his tenure.

Harvey Weinstein
Co-chairman, Miramax
I call it the underrated presidency. His brilliant handling of the economy is unparalleled in our time, and he was also impressive in foreign policy, like Kosovo. You felt like there was finally a President who understood the economy. I've been with the President in many social situations where I've seen him engage a brilliant economist. He can do it in a detailed way, and the great thing about the President is that he gets into a detailed level with anybody. I've seen him talk about records with David Geffen, where he can talk about an obscure 1950s bebop act, talk economics with investment bankers like Felix Rohatyn and Steven Rattner, talk movies with Steven Spielberg or Tom Hanks.

I remember talking to him about the movie Sling Blade and Billy Bob Thornton, whom he knew from Arkansas. He said to me there are two guys who understand this movie--him and Howell Raines [Alabama-born, editorial-page editor of the New York Times], who was blasting him all the time. And I called Howell Raines, and he said that yes, he did love the movie. So the critic in Clinton, even though he's getting pummeled every day, still had enough savvy to understand Raines' taste, and how this film related to Southerners. He's the most intelligent person I've ever met.

Roger Wilkins
Civil rights activist and professor at George Mason University
The story will be one of lost opportunities. His political values, except when he was in trouble, were good ones. They were humane; they were decent. He promised to give us a government that looked like America, and he did that. But around him, it was just a group of white guys. So when it got down to the nitty-gritty, the people in the room did not look like America; they looked like the Hoover Administration.

He obviously enjoys being around black people and has a real empathy for black people, more so than almost any other white politician I've ever seen. He's got the culture down; it's not phony. But sometimes his racial program was lousy. He's been very timid about appointing blacks to the federal bench. The race initiative, well intentioned as it was, was a dud. I still think welfare reform was unnecessarily brutal. In the end, his racial program came down to a mild defensive stance on affirmative action, the appointment of some high-profile people in the Cabinet and to lower federal jobs, being wonderful in black churches and playing golf with Vernon Jordan. But that was all window dressing, the easy stuff, and he never did much for poor black people. He signed a crime bill that made it very difficult for poor black guys who get caught in the maw. When the rubber hits the road, on stuff like welfare reform or crime bills, that guy is not on our side.