The Clinton Principle

CLINTON IS AT MIDCOURSE. WILL THERE BE A MIDCOURSE CORRECTION? A thing must first have a shape for the shape to be correctable. How does one ''correct'' a chaos? In last fall's election, though Clinton won 49 percent of the vote, according to a Time/CNN poll only 14 percent of those voting said they agreed with his positions -- and one wonders how even those few divined what those positions are. In the last half of his first term, Clinton's pliability was traced to Dick Morris, who called his strategy ''triangulation,'' a metaphor from sailing, where you tack with the wind given you, deviating from a course in order to angle back toward it. But Clinton needed no lessons in shiftiness. How do you teach a cat to twist as it falls?

I am haunted by a story Lew Manilow told me. Manilow is a Clinton friend and financial backer. ''Joe Klein came up to me and poked his finger in my chest'' -- Manilow pointed his own finger at his chest, then lowered it to his belly button. (''Joe is even shorter than I am.'') Klein said: ''He turned on me, Lew. And he'll turn on you, too. Just wait and see.'' Klein had been de-Flowered, an ideological Gennifer. But while Flowers took her grievance to a tabloid for peanuts, Klein took his to Random House for millions.

Klein was the first to make a serious case for a politics of Clinton's jilted lovers. In his Newsweek column, he located sexual and ideological licentiousness, with suitable qualifications, on a single spectrum. Others have taken up the theme. Sam Smith, the editor of Progressive Review, wrote: ''Clinton often seems a political Don Juan whose serial affairs with economic and social programs share only the transitory passion he exhibits on their behalf.'' A cartoon on the cover of The New Republic presents Clinton as the seducer of the Statue of Liberty. David Brock, the author of ''The Seduction of Hillary Rodham,'' says that Clinton continues to seduce his own wife -- away from her principles, toward his amoralism.

The jilted-lovers' chorus in Clinton's first term swelled by the year. Ben Wattenberg returned to his old party in the 1992 election, on the grounds that Clinton was a ''new Democrat'' like Al From, president of the Democratic Leadership Council. But Wattenberg quickly concluded that ''the D.L.C. got stiffed'' once Clinton was in office. Conservatives complained that Clinton ran to the right but governed from the left -- a view that leftists considered ludicrous. True, Clinton raised taxes on the rich -- but then told the rich he agreed with their complaint that he had raised them too high. True, he reserved more Government posts for women -- only to dump Lani Guinier and Joycelyn Elders when they became embarrassments. True, he aimed at universal health care -- while rejecting the single-payer option favored by the left. True, he asked the military to recognize gay rights (a matter not high on some gay agenda) -- but he opposed gay marriage (a principal goal of prominent gay spokesmen like Andrew Sullivan). Clinton's own most prominent gay friend, the political activist David Mixner, concluded that he could not count on the President ''whenever principle comes up against political advantage.'' Mixner did not blame the President when security personnel wore surgical gloves to receive gay officeholders at the White House -- but he noted ruefully that ''none of the guards felt that their behavior would cause any risk to their jobs.''

Mixner's sadness was widely shared. Even when some constituents made gains, they had been courted with such lavish overpromising that they felt cheated. Clinton seemed, if not quite an omnidirectional betrayer, at least an equal-opportunity disappointer of the most disparate groups. Michael Lewis concluded, in The New Republic, that it was riskier being on Clinton's friends list than on Nixon's enemies list.

Clinton is so temperamentally adjustable that his mind, dragged along on the emotional roller-coaster ride, can veer into purest dither. What kind of world had he tacked and triangulated himself into when he said, ''I understand more about agriculture than any former President''? The American Presidency was largely shaped by plantation owners: George Washington of Mount Vernon (inventor of a new threshing barn), Thomas Jefferson of Monticello (inventor of a new plow), James Madison of Montpelier, James Monroe of Oak Hill, Andrew Jackson of the Hermitage. Men as different as Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson grew up on farms. Richard Nixon worked in his father's country store, dealing almost exclusively with citrus farmers. Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer. Whom is Clinton kidding?

He is kidding Clinton, of course. But why? When he said he understood farming, he really meant that he understood farmers. When Alice Rivlin, Clinton's deputy budget director, suggested cuts in agricultural ''welfare,'' he snapped back: ''Spoken like a true city dweller. Farmers are good people. I know we have to do these things. We're going to make these cuts. But we don't have to feel good about it.'' He feels for farmers, so he understands agriculture. He feels for the rich, even when he taxes them. He is a virtuoso empathizer, running the White House -- as Maureen Dowd and others have remarked -- like a kind of ''Oprah Winfrey Show'' on Pennsylvania Avenue. His wildest or most improbable claims are based on what he grasps as an emotional truth. When I asked him what book had influenced him most, he named the ''Meditations'' of Marcus Aurelius, as if to show that this Southern Elvis with strong appetites could achieve empathy even with an austere and anti-sexual Stoic. A virtuoso endeavor. But ''most influential''?

THE NATURAL QUESTION THAT ARISES is: Does Clinton really believe in anything? Even his ferocious defender, James Carville, called back to defend the President during his first term, posed the problem to his comrades in damage control by drawing a square on paper and asking: ''Where is the hallowed ground? Where does he stand?'' George Stephanopoulos told Bob Woodward: ''What you see is where you stand and where you're looking at him. He will put one facet toward you, but that is only one facet.''

What does he stand for? (It is no answer to say that he believes in one thing, maneuver.) David Brock maintains that Clinton has put whatever principles he had into a receivership administered by his wife. Apart from her, Clinton would be ''perhaps the weakest President since Warren Harding.'' Yet Clinton has turned to others as well as to Hillary -- to Dick Morris or David Gergen or Tony Coelho -- when he feels in need of personal retooling. Clinton ran a campaign based on reinventing government. He seems to have spent more time reinventing Clinton.

Perhaps his hardest-line foes come closer to the truth than do his advocates. The right wing says that Clinton believes in big government. That is almost right. To make it fully right, just remove the adjective. He has never believed in big government -- he is from Arkansas, after all, which has barely had government at all. When he said in 1996 that ''the era of big government is over,'' he was not just recognizing the results of the 1994 election or of the constricting deficit or of an anti-government mood. He was voicing what he has experienced all his life. Arkansas was anti-government long before being anti-government was cool. Its very Constitution is an assault on government, a repudiation of the post-Civil War rule by Republican ''carpetbaggers.''

That Arkansas Constitution already had many of the features the Republican revolution of 1994 wanted to bring to the Federal level. It is so opposed to professional politicians that it mandates only 60-day legislative sessions every other year and underpays the legislators to discourage them from holding special sessions, which draw them away from their real jobs in the private sector. It demands a hypermajority (three-quarters) to raise income tax. It gives a simple majority the override on a governor's vetoes. Its government was so small when Clinton took office that its state and local taxes were the lowest in 50 states while its property tax was only 41 percent of the national average -- a fact reflected in the poor condition of its schools, roads, health clinics and ecology measures.

Dealing with this vestigial government made Clinton realize that some government is necessary and beneficial. Not big government. That was out of the question in any event. Clinton was no Michael Dukakis, a man who never met a program he couldn't improve and use. Clinton told the story, while he was still Governor, of coaching Dukakis for his last debate with George Bush. He asked what reason Dukakis would give for supporting teachers who do not recite the pledge of allegiance to the flag. ''My state court tells me that I must support them,'' was the answer. Clinton whooped derisively: ''Man, where I come from, that's a reason not to support them.'' Like any good Southerner, Clinton told Dukakis to play the patriotic card, to say something like ''I didn't fight in Korea so that religious freedom could be diminished at home.'' (Was Clinton aware of the irony -- advising another to use the military record he lacked?)

Yet Clinton believes, bone deep, in the need for government -- a belief that cannot be taken for granted anymore, not even in people elected to the government. Some of them run for office by attacking the office they want to hold. Jean Bethke Elshtain, a professor of ethics at the University of Chicago, claims that Hillary Rodham Clinton is an elitist too eager to have the state meddle in parents' treatment of their children. But Ms. Clinton's husband needed no preachments from Yale to know that children can need protection. When he called the cops because his stepfather was beating his mother, he wanted the cops to come, and he went to the authorities to give evidence against that stepfather. When Arkansas children were being mistreated because they tried to enter a Little Rock high school, an entry guaranteed them by Federal law, they called the cops and the cops did not come: Gov. Orval Faubus withheld protection from those children. President Eisenhower had to send cops from a paratrooper base -- an act that made a deep impression on the 11-year-old Bill Clinton.

As a high-school senior, attending Boys Nation in Washington, Clinton was part of the group that produced a document saying that ''racial discrimination is a cancerous disease and must be eliminated.'' This is the trip on which Clinton shook President Kennedy's hand and met Senator J. William Fulbright of Arkansas, for whom he would work during his college years and who would help him get a Rhodes scholarship.

Orval Faubus, who had begun his career as a New Dealer and racial moderate, ended up as a segregationist, but he also knew that his poor state needed outside investment. So he put Winthrop Rockefeller in charge of a new state agency, the Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, which under Rockefeller's administration brought to the state 600 new factories and 90,000 jobs. Using this business base and his own personal wealth, Rockefeller broke the Democratic stranglehold on the state's political process and became a reformist Republican Governor, enforcing minimum-wage laws as good for business.

Clinton as Governor wanted to run Arkansas in the Rockefeller tradition, but without as heavy a dependence on business. Once again, this would not lead to big government but to minimal government where there had been only the subminimal.

* ROADS Roads are especially important in a thinly populated agrarian state like Arkansas. But the state's poor roads were beat up by heavy trucks getting chickens and other produce to markets. Clinton tried to refinance the roads by taxing the trucks, but the chicken industry defeated him. He had to raise license fees on all vehicles, which infuriated ordinary car owners.

* THE ENVIRONMENT In his inaugural address as Governor, Clinton said: ''For as long as I can remember, I have loved the land, air and water of Arkansas.'' One of the state's attractions for outside business was its environment, he stressed. To jeopardize its health would be suicidal for both business and the state. But when Clinton took on the timber industry's policy of ''clear cutting,'' Weyerhauser and other interests poured money into his opponent's coffers.

* RURAL HEALTH CLINICS These are necessary for a state so poor, and here Hillary Rodham (as she was then) ran up against opposition from country doctors and county hospitals, an experience that shaped her strategy in later health battles.

* SCHOOLS The state was undereducated, a fact that was sealing its economic fate. But the state Constitution made raising income taxes almost impossible; Clinton would have to use a regressive sales tax to finance school improvement.

* ENERGY Arkansas was at the mercy of its electricity providers, who had successfully deflected attempts to bring T.V.A. energy to the state in the 30's. Clinton earned the opposition of electricity providers by making them return $8.5 million they had overcharged their customers.

Even to promote such minimal changes, Martin Walker notes in ''The President We Deserve,'' ''Clinton had taken on every big lobby in the state.'' Besides, the Ivy League style of his wife and friends offended Arkansans, who felt they were being reformed by outsiders. After his defeat at the end of one term as Governor, Clinton had to convince the state's citizens all over again that he was one of them, not snooty and too intellectual. His wife cooperated in symbolic ways (like taking his last name as hers). The Clintons had to demonstrate their empathy with Arkansas, be ostentatious about it. What was already a temperamental inclination for Clinton became a political imperative.

In his later term as Governor, economic necessity forced on Clinton the Winthrop Rockefeller formula. Reform was only possible with the help, not the opposition, of business interests. A powerful advocate of those interests was Clinton's boyhood friend Mack McLarty, the C.E.O. of Arkla (the natural gas company) and later Clinton's chief of staff. To get any of the reforms he first aimed at, Clinton had to deal with the McLartys of his state, had to ask for a regressive sales tax when he could not get an income tax, had to maneuver and trim his sails -- had, in fact, to ''triangulate.''

DESPITE ALL THIS chastening experience, Clinton's first term as President was distressingly similar to his first as Governor. His 1992 election team had forged for him a populist activism, as a kind of booster rocket to elevate him up above the murk of personal scandal (the draft, marijuana and erupting bimbos). He came into office exhilarated by an apparent liberation from the shackles of the Arkansas Constitution and could take on new challenges -- even take on the Pentagon.

But that window shut on him abruptly. The nation began to look more like Arkansas every day. The Perot campaign had created tremendous popular pressure for reduction of the deficit. Republicans meant to use that for cutting government. Alan Greenspan, at the Federal Reserve, urged the President to bring down long-term interest rates by deficit reduction. If Clinton did not raise taxes, the only way of lowering the deficit was the Republicans' -- dismantle the social programs they never liked in the first place. (Dick Armey compared Lyndon Johnson's Great Society programs to Chinese and Russian socialism.)

Under these pressures, Clinton put off some plans (welfare reform) and surrendered on others (the middle-class tax cut). Certain measures were defeated by Congress, either quickly (his economic stimulus package) or gradually (a B.T.U. energy tax). Clinton hated the economic straitjacket being fitted to him. He griped that he had been turned into an accountant for bond traders.

The fate of the B.T.U. tax, a favorite project of the Vice President, was typical. It was, like the Arkansas effort against clear-cutting, good for the environment, for business and for citizens -- but only in the long run. The Arkansas timber bill, though aimed at big companies like Weyerhauser, hurt ordinary people working for the timber companies or hoping to sell land to them. Besides, any tax was now an albatross around Democratic necks -- and Clinton's income-tax increase would be hard enough to get through without the B.T.U. item. Out of loyalty to Vice President Gore, Clinton fought the B.T.U. tax through the House only to abandon it in the Senate, angering House Democrats who had gone out on a limb for the President and confirming his image as a flip-flopper.

When Clinton passed his tax program, the Republicans felt they had been given a godsend -- ''the biggest tax increase in history,'' they said, neglecting the inflation factor, which was the only thing that made it surpass President Reagan's tax increase, steered through Congress by Bob Dole. Though most of the burden in Clinton's plan fell on the rich, whose rate Clinton raised after Reagan had slashed it, advisers like Mack McLarty and Treasury Secretary Robert Rubin said Clinton must mute that fact, so as not to frighten the all-important bond traders. Clinton was as dependent on business as he had been when Wal-Mart and Tyson's, the chicken giant, needed placating in Little Rock. In order to govern, he had to submit to government by others. His own campaign team of populists -- James Carville, Paul Begala, Mandy Grunwald and Stan Greenberg -- said that Clinton was betraying those who elected him, giving up on his campaign promises.

One thing he would not give up on. He told his advisers, ''If I don't get health care done, I'll wish I didn't run for President.'' Polls showed that universal health care was popular. So, at the time, was the person Clinton put in charge of formulating his plan. The choice of his wife was a pledge of his own seriousness about the issue. This, surely, he would not back away from.

Newt Gingrich was counting on it. Juicy as the tax raise looked as a Republican issue, what Gingrich fairly hungered and thirsted for was a health proposal from the President. Taxes come and go, but a social program affecting a 14th of the economy (opponents exaggerated it into a 7th) would be as undislodgeable, once put in place, as Social Security has been. Gingrich did not mean to let it be enacted. This, he felt, was the issue that would break the Democratic Party, giving Republicans the Congress in 1994 and the Presidency in 1996. He secretly alerted a core of organizers that they must do whatever was necessary to defeat any health plan Clinton came up with. He told them: ''You want to clot everybody you can away from Clinton. I don't care what you clot onto, just don't let it be Clinton.'' In proposing such a scheme at such a time, the Clintons ''were going against the entire tide of Western history. I mean, centralized, command bureaucracies are dying. This is the end of that era, not the beginning of it.'' Gingrich mobilized a hit team of lobbyists, businessmen and politicians to coordinate their efforts. Groups with no apparent connection to health care -- like the Christian Coalition -- joined in, convinced that this was the issue that would bring government itself to its knees.

Clinton rejected ''single payer'' insurance by the government itself because he agreed with Gingrich that the era of big government was over. His plan for ''managed competition'' had been generally favored by the Democratic Leadership Council and by the authors of ''Reinventing Government.'' Even Senators like Edward Kennedy had created pay-or-play schemes because they knew, from past history, what the doctors, insurers and pharmaceutical companies could do to anything they might label ''socialized medicine.'' One problem, however, was that managed competition did not come up with the important savings that Clinton had promised during the campaign -- not even when he put spending caps on costs (alienating some of the free-market advocates of managed competition).

The profits left to insurers in the Clinton plan explain the support of the big insurers (like Blue Cross and Blue Shield) for managed competition. It was the small insurers, who feared they would be squeezed out of the action, who pooled their resources and came up with the famous ''Harry and Louise'' ads that claimed the Clinton plan would sever people's relations with the family doctor. Similar charges were made in two long New Republic articles, written by Betsy McCaughey Ross, articles full of errors that the media -- according to James Fallows, now the editor of U.S. News and World Report -- was too lazy to identify. The article became what Gingrich called ''the first decisive break point'' in the opposition to Clinton.

The real faults of the Clinton plan -- its complexity, its clumsy attempt to combine private insurance and doctors' and hospitals' own organizations with governmental supervision -- came from the fact that it was not a ''big government'' solution. Clinton only made things worse. There was a surreal aspect to the struggle over a health plan. Vulnerable anyway, the President fatally wounded himself by thinking his approach was based on opposition to big government. He tried to bypass the normal processes of policy formation in such a way that his task force got into legal problems. He cut out key Senators and important parts of his own Administration (like the Department of Health and Human Services, where the plan would normally have been gestated).

Ira Magaziner, in charge of the plan's formulation, presided over frantic activity that was a caricature of the policy-formation process. The infamous ''tollgate'' meetings, meant to mark the passage from one aspect of the process to another, were described by Jacob Hacker in his book on the health care struggle, ''Road to Nowhere'':

''Held in the majestic Indian Treaty Room of the Old Executive Office Building, the meetings routinely included well over 100 people. The acoustics of the high-ceilinged room were terrible, and the members of the working groups had to strain to hear the presentations. The meetings could drag on for days, with some sessions starting close to midnight.''

This process was a reflection of Clinton's own intense but undisciplined style of sifting policy options in ''all-nighters'' of hurry-up-and-wait urgency, the kind that demand immediate action and then bury the demand under consideration of all options. As Lloyd Bentsen said of policy formation outside Magaziner's sphere: Clinton ''is the meetingest fellow I know.''

No wonder the resulting health plan was vulnerable, hard to sell, easy to misrepresent and impossible to imagine as functioning smoothly. In seeking minimal government involvement, Clinton had produced the maximum feasible complication.

Yet the important thing to remember is that even this plan of minimal government was too much for the Gingrich forces, which persisted in whipping up anti-government feeling. They made it a symbol of government run wild and the need for a Republican revolution to tame it. Gingrich thought, beforehand, that health care would be a godsend in his timetable for Republican victories in the 1994 and 1996 elections. But the bungling in the White House made the plan an almost giddily easy target. Even the choice of Hillary Clinton as the chief salesperson of the plan proved a blunder. Her supposed ideological leanings made it easier to brand the bill a ''leftist'' power grab by ''big government.'' Rush Limbaugh went into full cry. Gingrich, after the plan's defeat, knew that this portended more trouble ahead for the Democrats: the battle ''totally exhausted them, their elites. . . . People like Mitchell and Gephardt were just devoured. They've never recovered the energy level they had prior to the fight.''

The coalition formed for the health care battle went directly into the 1994 election, slaughtered the Democrats and swept into the heady atmosphere of the Gingrich Hundred Days, along with the lobbyists -- veterans of the health care struggle writing their own laws for their own industries. Clinton was as crushed as he had been in 1980, defeated once again after just two years in office. And in both cases, his very attempt at minimal government had laid him open to enmities roused against any government at all.

Clinton had become such a lame duck in his first term that the passage of items from the Contract With America in the House resembled a Presidential Hundred Days, recalling Roosevelt's -- and implicitly mocking Clinton's own attempt at a Rooseveltian Hundred Days in 1993, an attempt that entirely misfired when Dole defeated what few plans emerged from Clinton's thrashing and lunging efforts at policy formation. By contrast, Gingrich seemed a model of focus, discipline and efficiency. He held presidential press conferences and made an exploratory trip to New Hampshire, the first primary state. The powerful Republican pundit Bill Kristol toasted the end of the Gingrich Hundred Days with the proposal that ''we can all begin planning for an even busier second honeymoon, during the first 100 days of a Republican Presidency.''

But within a year of his triumphal march through the Hundred Days, Gingrich the giant had turned into a joke. Not since Joe McCarthy's precipitate demise in 1954 had a national leader in Congress fallen so far so fast -- and McCarthy was a souse who had no disciplined cadre of legislators on his side, no legislative record, no clear-eyed plan for the future. The end of McCarthy signaled the passing of an intense but diffuse national mood. The fall of Gingrich was the breakup of an organized movement. Gingrich, despite some intemperate outbursts, was defeated by his own plans, by the very ambition of his reach and his ruthlessness in execution.

THE REPUBLICAN REVOLUTION CAME and went so fast that it is hard, even now, so soon after its collapse, to remember just how radical it was. It was revolutionary. Faint echoes of the explosion lingered on into the Republican platform of 1996, which called for six constitutional amendments and the elimination of four governmental departments along with four agencies -- and this was in the days of waning hope. In the heyday of the revolution, its initial flush of victory, the urge to dismantle government was so strong that it outran even Gingrich's animus. The health plan had been attacked as a power grab, a government takeover. The Republicans were now responding with a government take-back. The tactics were the same as in the fight over health care, which had proved so successful. No compromise. Clot onto anything that will oppose the President. When the President tried to bargain and temporize over deep cuts in the proposed budget, freshmen and their allies in Congress held Dole's feet to the fire -- and, eventually, Newt's feet. If the government shuts down, isn't that a step in the right direction? Wasn't the bane of government the whole point?

Indeed it was. And here Clinton got a godsend even greater than Gingrich had been given in the health plan. Formulating the matter as ''government (no matter how small) versus no government'' put the fight at the center of Clinton's own bedrock experience and beliefs. He was back in Arkansas, a problem-ridden state still ready to castigate government as the problem, refusing to treat it as a tool for solving problems. He said the Republicans were reckless in their eagerness to dismantle programs, scuttle departments, leave everything to the market.

It is commonly held that Clinton veered right after the 1994 election, under pressure from Congress and in response to Dick Morris's amoralism. But the interesting thing is that the ''rightward'' moves were ways of stressing a beneficial role for government. ''Pro-family'' positions like favoring the V-chip for television, city curfews, school uniforms and family leave were meant to convince Clinton's fellow baby boomers that government, at the Federal or state or local level, can still be necessary and useful. These moves meshed perfectly with his ''left'' invocation of government against handguns or tobacco pushers. When Clinton says that he is not ideological -- a claim that infuriates liberals while not convincing conservatives -- there is this truth to his words: government can be put to uses favored by the left or by the right. What Clinton defends, at the most basic level, is some role for government. That is no longer a superfluous effort.

When it is said that Clinton ''demagogued Medicare'' (a phrase that was a brilliant Republican invention, parroted endlessly), what people mean is that he put off the problem of facing entrenched entitlements, played up the minor differences between him and the Republicans' pay schedules and called a cut in Medicare increases a cut tout court. But it should be remembered that the Republican proposal came in the context of a large-scale assault on government itself. Fighting for marginal and popular government functions may have been the most important and constructive thing Clinton could do in turning back the Republican revolution. It did not collapse all on its own. Clinton stopped in its tracks a young and confident revolution.

IT IS MUCH HARDER TO SAY a good word for the welfare bill Clinton signed. In this case, he dismantled part of the government himself. After fighting for middle-class entitlements, he took away from the poor the basic entitlement of guaranteed subsistence. His health plan would have provided doctors' care for everyone, yet by removing welfare guarantees he has endangered the nutrition and housing on which the very possibility of health is based. If Clinton wants to show that government is useful to people with real problems, then who has greater problems than the innocent children suffering from poverty, broken families and homelessness?

Nonetheless, even if Clinton is wrong in this, he cannot be accused of inconsistency. It's one matter on which he hasn't flip-flopped. He campaigned with a promise to end ''welfare as we know it.'' His D.N.C. and ''inventing government'' friends had long been advocates of moving people from welfare to work, and so had he. He knows the difficulties involved and granted waivers to 43 states to experiment with different approaches even while they were receiving all the guarantees of the old system. The policy wonk in Clinton loves to test and compare such plans. The states themselves were clamoring for control of their own welfare problems -- even though early experiments showed that it will cost far more money to get work for people than to keep them on the dole.

Welfare, as its opponents paint it, is simply a matter of laziness, unwillingness to work or a culture of dependency. Actually, it is the byproduct of multiple factors not working in synch -- of demography, family breakdown, technology, outmoded or absent training and world trade. Welfare recipients are mainly the dependents of people unequipped for the jobs available (if any), and they are falling even further behind in their preparedness for the kinds of jobs that will soon become available. Welfare was a comparatively cheap way of avoiding confrontation with such issues. Every year makes the problem more complex. Even if we can find work for the unemployed, and fit them to it, it is most often subsistence-level labor with few or no benefits. The states have taken on the task of providing training for jobs, then finding (or creating) the jobs; handling day care for the children left at home when single mothers go to work, and underwriting medical costs not provided to transient workers. If worker training does not succeed, all the old costs of the dole will continue, with the new failed outlays added. It is a daunting prospect for the states, and one they could try to solve by creating far greater problems: cutting off welfare at the end of the time limit even if no jobs have been achieved, bidding each other down to make ''undesirables'' leave their jurisdiction, leaving the problem to overstrained private charities -- all of which can lead to greater homelessness and crime, to resentment in the poor and repression by the better-off.

The reason Clinton delayed welfare reform in his first two years was precisely the cost, the fact that it is more expensive to end welfare, even under the best circumstances (which may not be present), than to continue it, endlessly deferring the problem. But the priority of deficit reduction made him continue the deferring for three years, and his signature on the Republican bill deferred it by devolving it -- to the states. He promised to ''fix'' the bill later. It will be the ultimate flip if he fails to make good on that promise -- and he may very well be unable to. In that case, his whole case for government flops.

The bill cannot be fixed just by restoring some of the Federal funds cut by it -- more money for food stamps and aid to legal immigrants are the ones most often mentioned. The bill is about jobs, and unless the Federal Government leads in the effort to achieve this, the bill's central but most difficult mandate, complaints about inequities in the states will mount -- just as complaints about unregulated H.M.O.'s have. Yet the thing that recommended the plan to some -- the ability to use states as laboratories for experiment -- will make it harder, perhaps impossible, for the Federal Government to prioritize the different states' problems and to respond appropriately to the specific failures in widely varying schemes.

Other government problems have run up against the time-consuming and costly problem of adjudicating different claims on their individual merits -- industrial safety cases and civil rights violations are prominent examples. To cut through the complexities of case-by-case investigation, probabilities based on numbers were used in these areas, an anti-bureaucratic measure attacked as using ''quotas.'' But the problem of dozens of different statewide systems of welfare will be far more complex than the issue of safety in one plant or the hiring provisions in one institution. The new plan may be inefficient and still not create the necessary jobs! The probability is that the states will call for more intervention by Washington as their problems mount.

But when they ''call the cops,'' will the cops come? In an ideal world, Clinton could use the states' difficulties to advance programs he is fond of and has promised. National service could be diverted into job training. Work projects to create new jobs could rebuild America's crumbling infrastructure of bridges and roads.

But fiscal restraints promise to be as strict in Clinton's second term as in his first -- not because they are needed as much, with the deficit more than halved, but because they worked so well for him. As Steven Rattner of Lazard Freres wrote last July on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, the Clinton tax increase to cut the deficit gave him the steady economic progress that was the basis for his re-election. Even with the collapse of the radical Gingrich revolution, a moderate Dole anti-tax campaign could have defeated Clinton but for the rise of employment and our current low inflation, creating the lowest ''misery index'' (combined unemployment and inflation) since 1968. James Carville and his colleagues, who attacked Clinton's reliance on market advisers like Robert Rubin, were unwittingly fighting against their own earlier slogan: It was ''the economy, stupid'' that re-elected Clinton in 1996.

The reappointment of Rubin as Secretary of the Treasury indicates that Clinton is not going to bite the hand that fed him -- which severely contracts his ability to feed the poor left at the mercy of the states by the welfare bill. In the case of great suffering, will Clinton live up to his own basic belief in the need for a government solution? I think there is reason to hope for that. Though he is dithering and professorial when facing problems in the abstract or the future, he is a counterpuncher of nerve and concentration when set back, as he has proved over and over, and the personal commitment to solving pressing problems is there. The means may be lacking, but -- one hopes -- not the will.

IT HAS BEEN SUGGESTED that Presidents in their second term look to their ''place in history'' by turning to foreign affairs. That may have been true in the cold war, though it is doubtful even there. Truman and Nixon made their historic foreign policy moves (the Marshall Plan and the China opening) in their first terms. Only Reagan turned to arms talks in the second term after neglecting diplomacy in his first four years.

Clinton has been no promise breaker in this area, since he kept his foreign policy promises vague and infrequent. He has been a foreign policy minimalist, doing as little as possible as late as possible in place after place -- in Haiti, in Bosnia, with China. There is much to be said for some degree of disengagement at this point -- which is not the same as isolationism. As Representative Barney Frank has argued, our troops in Europe serve little purpose but to boost economies there and drain ours here. After half a century of cold war, when the whole world's freedom seemed to be at stake in every trouble spot, the impulse to have America keep proving it is ''a great power'' (the hallowed phrase) by responding to any challenge is, at the very least, wasteful. For one thing, we shall never get our defense spending wrestled back under control if the Pentagon is able to use mission after mission to create new demands on a compliant Congress. Humanitarian aid should be clearly identified as such, and we should cooperate with multilateral peace-keeping instead of tearing down the basis for it at the United Nations. For these purposes the appointment of Madeleine Albright may be misguided -- for the very reasons given by those who praise her toughness. She seems to yearn back toward cold-war certitudes and swagger.

The thing that seems to interest Clinton most in foreign dealings is world trade, and a good thing, too. As the government's basic credibility had to be restored at home by deficit reduction, the basis for stable influence in the world will, of necessity, be economic influence rather than military power. The problem with Clinton's policy is not its aims but his desultory or inadequate explanation of its potential and perils. He fought through GATT and Nafta but did not defend them by recognizing the need for measures to counter their domestic impact, which diminishes or dislocates local industries. A vision of the benefits of trade has not been formulated for the American people. Perhaps Clinton should read ''Worldly Goods,'' by Lisa Jardine, which explains how trade ties reached across ideological and ethnic ties in the Renaissance, creating some elements of a common culture at odds with divisive local causes. The historian William McNeill has pointed to this Renaissance parallel for our post-cold-war world.

Perhaps Clinton will have little leisure for reading, or even policy, if investigations continue to nag at and discredit him -- not least because of his evasive and feckless resistance to demands for information. It would be fitting, perhaps, but tragic if the man who believes so deeply in government is undone by the cops coming for him. But apart from the entirely unproved allegations of illegality, Republicans will gravely miscalculate if they think their path to power lies in the personal vilification of the President and his wife. That has been tried and failed.

Many people wonder why it has failed. Why, despite the public's recognition of grave character flaws, did it not reject Clinton in its ballots for 1992 or 1996? William Powers, in a long article in The New Republic, blames the national press for not building fires of ardent indignation. But, even if that were the task of the media, why should they have succeeded where Senator Alfonse D'Amato failed in his Congressional hearings and talk radio has failed despite its drumbeat of heated, even hysterical accusations?

Martin Walker, the British journalist, answers with an argument that Clinton is ''the President we deserve'' precisely because he typifies (when he does not anticipate) the hesitations, ambiguities and still undisclosed purpose of his own generation. It is hard for the rest of us to get indignant about his tries at marijuana when few of us can say our families have no members who have experimented with drugs. Newt Gingrich is a lame excoriator of Clinton's lack of military service.

Nor is it easy to dismiss Clinton as an unfaithful husband, as Senator Dole realized when he pointedly declined to exploit that charge (knowing that an account of his own adultery during his first marriage hung over him like the sword of Damocles, to be dropped if he dared bring up the subject). Changed mores, and changed attitudes toward candor about those mores, give the censorious little ground to stand on. This is not the fault of coverage by the political media. Things formally hushed up are now regularly brought to light in areas far away from electoral politics -- in churches, universities, the business and entertainment worlds.

When I was a college student, it was considered scandalous for a faculty member to divorce. Now everyone knows who is sleeping with whom. In fact, Clinton, with his obvious affection and support for Chelsea and his wife, is to be commended for the effort he has given to making a troubled marriage work. A recent cartoon playing on the popular movie ''First Wives Club'' had a circle of political first wives looking fierce -- the first Mrs. Dole, Mrs. Gingrich, Mrs. Limbaugh, Mrs. Gramm, Mrs. Armey. A long list could be compiled of our prominent wife-dumpers' dumpees -- the first Mrs. Kasich et al.

Clinton's attitude toward marriage is very like his attitude toward government. Both institutions are strained and under assault. Rather than give up on either, Clinton has tried, however imperfectly, to keep them both working. Perhaps that is as much as we can expect in a time of shifting moral winds and divided opinion about the basic values of our society. Does he believe in anything? There is more coherence than may at first appear, both in his private and his public life. Joe Klein's qualified private-public spectrum -- false in one, false in the other -- may even be read backward, as it were, and with similar qualification: True in one, true in the other.