There's a whole lot of soaring going on at the White House these days. To get ready for next week's Inaugural Address, Bill Clinton has been flight-testing an array of lofty themes and presidential postures designed to make him look good in the history books. In his recent speeches, Clinton has styled himself as the National Unifier, a Reconciliation Man who will show America the way to the "vital center," where good things get done. Aides say he sees himself as T.R. with a drawl: just as Teddy Roosevelt used his bully pulpit to lead the country through a perilous transformation from agrarian to industrial society, so Clinton would use his to lead America from the industrial to the information age. And though Clinton and Congress will surely agree this year on a plan for fiscal balance by 2002, upon such quotidian concerns, the White House says, the President's legacy simply does not depend. "Clinton's chapter in the history books will not be 'Here's the guy who balanced the budget,'" says press secretary Mike McCurry. "It will be 'Here's the guy who awakened America to the leadership possibilities of the 21st century.'"
And how will Clinton go about doing this? "There will be a legacy war room," jokes a senior official who can't resist sending up the Permanent Campaigner's assault on history. "We'll bring in [presidential scholar] Michael Beschloss to spin the historians. If any of them has a question, [National Economic Council chief] Gene Sperling will fax him an answer. [Senior adviser] Rahm Emanuel has checked out every biography of a two-term President--and we're going to be bad-mouthing all of them. With the money left over from the '96 campaign, we'll run ads wherever there's a presidential library. We don't have to finish first, just ahead of Eisenhower."
Here's hoping Clinton returns to earth. All the visionary talk in the world won't count for much unless he nails it down with some real leadership, the kind that springs not from rhetoric but from old-fashioned deal making and what Teddy Roosevelt called the willingness "to dare mighty things." Clinton last week expressed the view that "great Presidents don't do great things. Great Presidents get a lot of other people to do great things." This is a tautology, since getting others to do great things--persuading Congress to pass campaign-finance reform, say--is itself doing something great. It is also just plain wrong. The most effective Presidents, as the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. wrote last month in the New York Times Magazine, put their own careers on the line. They "all took risks in pursuit of their ideals. They all provoked intense controversy. They all, except Washington, divided the nation before reuniting it on a new level of understanding."