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 | | | | | Blast From the Past | | | How Bill Clinton’s ghost still haunts the Bush White House | |
| | | Nov. 27 — The
numbers just didn’t add up. For days leading up to George W. Bush’s trip
to Lithuania and Romania late last week, White House staffers were projecting
that huge crowds would turn out for the president’s visit. “The initial estimates
are between 50,000 and 100,000,” Press Secretary Ari Fleischer told us on
Air Force One. “In each place?” asked an incredulous reporter. “Yes.” | |
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WELL, ACTUALLY, no. Another top staffer, trying to tamp down the
hyperbole, nudged Fleischer to revise his estimates. “I stand corrected:
25,000 to 50,000 in Lithuania and 50,000 to 100,000 in Romania,” Fleischer
said. He was still off by nearly 100,000: about 10,000 turned out in the
Lithuanian capital of Vilnius and about 50,000 in cold and rainy Bucharest.
At first, I didn’t understand why White House staffers—always loath
to engage in “hypotheticals” of any sort—were talking up the hypothetical
turnout in the first place. The only answer I could come up with: Bill Clinton.
When the former president visited Bucharest five years ago, about 100,000
people packed the downtown square of the Romanian capital. Of course, the
people of Eastern Europe would turn out for any
American president, such is their love of the freedom we espouse. But whenever
Bush has had to follow Clinton anywhere—notably to the D-Day ceremonies at
Normandy last Memorial Day—his administration has been keenly aware of Clinton’s
shadow.
 Nov. 29: Our Readers Write on Bush's Connection to Clinton
This even carries over to the White House Web site. A friend who
recently went online to look up remarks by Clinton and former Secretary of
State Madeleine Albright on the 1998 embassy bombings in Africa easily found
the text of Albright’s four-year-old press statements on the State Department
site. But on the White House site, the only reference he could find to Clinton
was a standard biography. “I’ve checked out the ‘site map,” the ‘history’
section, the ‘current news’ etc,” quipped my friend. “It seems history began
on Jan 21 of last year.”
Bush has long been the un-Clinton. Some of that is a result of Bush’s
distinct personal style and some of it is by design. The state dinners are
smaller, the press conferences are shorter and the emoting less public. Back
in April 2001, when White House aides thought the crash of a U.S. EP3 spy
plane in China would be their toughest foreign policy test, Bush decided
not to fly to Washington state to greet the released crew. He thought that
injecting himself into such an emotional moment would be not only self-aggrandizing
but, of course, Clintonesque. Same thing when nine men were finally rescued
from a collapsed mine in Pennsylvania several months ago. Bush greeted the
men behind closed doors and then gave a subdued speech in their presence.
Much has been made of the differences between the two presidents.
One likes to spend Thanksgiving in Martha’s Vineyard with a thick stack of
books, one in rural Texas with a thicket of cedar. One governs by polls,
one by his gut—or so the story goes. But anyone who thinks that Bush isn’t
as susceptible—some would say attuned—as Clinton to public opinion need only
look at some of the legislation he’s been signing this Thanksgiving week.
Bush first opposed the creation of a Cabinet level Homeland Security
Department, but he signed into law Monday. Why the change of heart? Polls
showed the public thought it was a good common sense idea. His handlers thought
it was a great political issue (especially because it prompted a showdown
with Democrats over labor issues). And so Bush created the biggest bureaucracy
since FDR’s day. The “era of big government,” as Clinton used to say, isn’t
over after all.
The Bush administration has also come around on other popular—some
would say populist—ideas. The corporate reform bill, for example, which it
ended up championing. And then today-after pressure from victims’ families—Bush
signed an authorization for an independent commission to investigate the
9-11 attacks. The Bushies just want the commission to come out with its findings
well before 2004. And that’s a number everyone agrees on.
© 2002 Newsweek, Inc.
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