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The White House would have dismissed such criticism in March, but Clinton is more solicitous now. Two days after Moynihan took his potshot, Clinton invited the Finance Committee chairman and Nebraska Senator Bob Kerrey to the Oval Office, where they urged him to level with Americans about the costs of his health-care plan. Americans must be told, Kerrey said, that they will have to pay more for better health care either in the way of higher premiums or in lost benefits. Otherwise Clinton would run the risk of overpromising and underdelivering. Clinton did not go as far as Kerrey wanted, but within hours he beefed up the section in the speech on "personal responsibility."
The White House is also going easy on Democrats who go astray on the North American Free Trade Agreement. Clinton's manifold agenda makes it impossible to do otherwise: the White House made no move to punish Senator Don Riegle, who opposes NAFTA and gave Ross Perot a platform to blast the President in Michigan, in part because he was marking up Clinton's community-development banking bill three days later. Though House majority leader Richard Gephardt and whip David Bonior have announced they will oppose Clinton on NAFTA, both supported the President on the budget, and will repeat the favor on health care. The day Gephardt's announcement appeared on page 17 of the Washington Post, Clinton joked privately that "the only thing good about Boris Yeltsin knocking national service off the front page was that it knocked Dick's speech off too."
Given Clinton's appetite for taking on policy challenges, White House officials say they have no choice but to build a separate coalition for each measure he sends to Congress and then work behind the scenes to minimize the conflicts of interest. "It isn't pretty," said a White House official, "but people are getting used to it.".
Looking back, top aides see the turning point in Clinton's effectiveness as his August vacation, when he decided to concentrate less on the day-to-day operation of the White House. For months Clinton had functioned more or less as his own chief of staff, insisting on seeing dozens of aides daily despite warnings that he needed a stronger doorkeeper. During his vacation on Martha's Vineyard, Clinton tried a new approach for two weeks: talking only to chief of staff Mack McLarty and, on occasion, Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen. Since then, said an aide, "he's just let go." Says a top aide: "He doesn't have to micromanage as he once did. He doesn't have to be the organizer-in-chief, the actuary-in-chief, the commentator-in-chief. That's not what they elected him to do."
It will take discipline to make the new discipline work. The Clinton White House can still resemble a continuous fire drill. The health-care speech was conceived amid the usual creative chaos that the Clintons call home. Disappointed by the initial draft, Clinton asked Deputy Assistant to the President David Dreyer to work on a new version with Jeremy Rosner, a National Security Council staff member with a background in health-care policy. With an outline all but dictated by Hillary Rodham Clinton, Dreyer and Rosner on Tuesday night turned in their draft, which concentrated on six principles: security, simplicity, savings, choice, quality and responsibility.