Edith Efron's Psycho-analysis of Clinton

With the Lewinski scandals and the "definition of is" statement, most people began to realize that Slick Clinton had serious kinds of psychiatric issues. What most still have not learned is that this had become apparent to people working in and around the whitehouse as early as summer of 93. Edith Efron's now famous Reason Magazine article from 94 notes that the presidency had, by that time,



The problem is, of course, that they should have been trying to rescue the country, and not the Clinton presidency.


Can the President Think?
The chaos and paralysis of the Clinton presidency reflect the chaos and paralysis of Bill Clinton's mind--and he is not going to change.

By Edith Efron

On June 7, 1993, after Bill Clinton had been in office five months, a very peculiar "media conference" was held at George Washington University and filmed for C-SPAN viewers. It was peculiar because of its theme and because it was thoroughly exasperating.

The theme was "The Politics of Illness in High Office." Among its participants were such journalistic eminences as Richard Harwood of The Washington Post, Marianne Means of King Features Syndicate, and Charles Bierbauer of CNN. These are smart and experienced people who under ordinary circumstances would not be dull either singly or collectively. But on this occasion, they all seemed to be wearing baskets on their heads.

Here's roughly how it went:

Q: Does the public have a right to know whether a president has physical illnesses, such as medical emergencies or chronic degenerative diseases?

A: Sure. The public does. The days of covering up the diseases of presidents such as FDR and JFK are over.

Q: How about mental illness, psychological or emotional disorders?

Q: Does the public have a right to know if a president suffers from a mental disorder?

A: Yes, but only if it affects his work as president.

Q: Will future presidential candidates and presidents be required to reveal their medical and psychiatric records if any?

A: Probably, possibly, yes, no, mumble.

And? And nothing. Just that, exasperating. A brand new president was staggering around in Washington, falling repeatedly on his face. Nobody but that staggering, lurching president was on everybody's mind. And it was that president whose medical records were sealed. Did the panelists want to know what was in them? They didn't say. Were they thinking, perhaps, that Clinton might be suffering from a psychological or emotional disorder? They didn't say. Was it possible that psychological difficulties might be related to his political difficulties? They didn't say.

To stress what was not discussed at this conference in early June 1993 implies that there was information about the psychology of the new president that should have been or could have been discussed. Was there?

Of course there was. Since the primaries, the press coverage of Clinton had been bristling with reports on his psychological attributes, although the word psychology was never used. For more than a year, reporters had been in a competition to discover interesting details about Clinton's mental processes and his emotional and behavioral patterns--which is to say, about his psychology.

By the time Clinton had been in office for five months--when the conference was held--the psychological details gathered by journalists had already coagulated into little clusters, or patterns, which demanded explanation. By the time Clinton had been in office for a year, when the conference was already a faded memory, he had been besieged by so many political and personal problems--some contemporary, some relevant to his past--that his psychology was a staple of conversation in the political and media worlds. And by the time Clinton had been in office for two years, he had become a human puzzle that journalists and academic students of the presidency were trying to solve.

Today, psychiatric terms, diagnostic categories, are sprinkled about like salt and pepper, seasoning the political prose written about Clinton. Headlines have appeared containing psychiatric jokes and puns. At least two psychiatrists and a clinical psychologist have expressed their opinions about Clinton in The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times. Yet other psychiatrists have opined about Clinton in the pages of Time. Clinton's psyc hology is discussed in political science journals devoted to studies of the presidency. And in the first crop of commercial books about the Clintons one finds the same phenomenon: Save for Clinton's mother, in her autobiography Leading with My Heart, all the authors are concerned with Clinton's psychology.

It is an odd fact that this epidemic of long-distance "psychoanalyzing"--not seen in this country since the '60s and '70s--has been going on even as various journalists and social scientists have been trying to declare the issue of Clinton's "character" outside the boundaries of respectable journalism. It is, of course, Clinton's character which has caused the wave of psychological thinking.

There is precedent for such attention: As political scientist Michael Beschloss has observed in The New Yorker, it was the characters of John F. Kennedy, Edward Kennedy, and Richard Nixon which led to the long-distance analysis of presidents and presidential candidates by psychiatrists, the explosion of political psycho-biography in the 1970s, and the now-standard inquiries into presidents' psychologies by students of the presidency.

Clinton is the first president since that stormy period to display character flaws and neurotic qualities so significant that the impulse to conduct psychological excavations has arisen anew. And this time, journalists are not waiting for the historians. There is no reason why they should, since historians get much of their information from the press. The academic monopoly on telling us what is wrong with our presidents after they are all dead and we can do nothing about it is broken.

Freed from that academic monopoly, journalists are floundering around trying to test the limits of their freedom, and the task is particularly difficult, given the nature of our current president.

Some journalists realize they are lacking an analytical tool when they write about Clinton; they just don't quite know what it is. For an article about press coverage of Clinton's "decision-making style," David Shaw of the Los Angeles Times interviewed Jeffrey H. Birnbaum of The Wall Street Journal, who has covered both the Clinton campaign and the White House. Birnbaum had this to say about Clinton: "You almost have to come up with a new language to describe how he operates."

Psychology provides such language, above all when it is psychological language Clinton has used about himself. Using it can help journalists and citizens who have been struggling to integrate the information they already have about a seemingly unintegrated man. In this article, relying only on published or televised information, I have attempted such an integration. The result is a psychological profile of Bill Clinton.

I should say a word about the propriety of this enterprise. If Clinton's psychological problems were of an entirely private nature and had no influence or impact whatsoever on his work as president, discussing them would be a manifestation of what Sidney Blumenthal has criticized as "psychological reductionism." This, says Blumenthal in The New Yorker (June 20, 1994), is the assumption that "the true self is a hidden self--that the public self is merely a deceptive mask."

By "psychological reductionism," Blumenthal really means sexual reductionism. His article, "The Friends of Paula Jones," deals solely with the exploitation by individuals and groups in the religious right of Clinton's real or alleged sexual behavior.

Blumenthal's point, however, remains valid. The "true self" cannot be reduced to a "hidden self," and the "public self" of a political figure, above all of a president, is immensely significant. Clinton's psychological problems are important precisely because of their impact on Bill Clinton's "public self." They could scarcely be more public.

In this article, the subject is not Clinton's sex life but his mind--as it has been reported on by journalists and authors of books. And what one discovers from their reports on Clinton's mind is of overwhelmingly greater public significance than any details about his sex life.

To follow Bill Clinton's lead and explore the psychological issues he himself has talked about, and to see how the press has been incessantly preoccupied by his psychology, is to acquire great insight into Bill Clinton, his presidency, his conflicts with the press, and the political events of the past two years.

It is also to understand, however, that psychological problems must be analyzed in psychological terms and that political reductionism is also an error. Psychological problems cannot be explained in political terms. I refer to specific political events occasionally in this article but only to provide a temporal framework for the analysis. The purpose of this article is to present a close-up view of Clinton's mind, not of his policies.

The Questions

Throughout most of Clinton's term in office, there has scarcely been a political development that has not generated questions about his psychology. Many have pertained to trivial matters. Many have been expressions of heightened conservative hostility to Clinton. But a surprising number of other questions have addressed psychological fundamentals and revealed that many serious liberals no longer feel they understand the man for whom they voted. Who is Clinton really? Does he have a "self"? What kind of a politician is he--why does he pursue power? What is the nature of the strong response to him? Is he a sincere advocate of social justice? What kind of mind, what kind of an intellect, does he have?

Those who ask the question, Who is Clinton really?, are usually journalists preoccupied by Clinton's self-contradictory nature. They tend to explore it with a similar technique. The writers offer little bursts of contradictory phrases, little vignettes of contradictory actions, little insights into contradictory emotions, and arrange them deftly to form an unintelligible mosaic called "Clinton."

Tom Rosenstiel of the Los Angeles Times, Chris Bury of ABC, Maureen Dowd of The New York Times, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, and Joe Klein of Newsweek have all used this mosaic technique. And all have reached a similar conclusion--that Clinton is "in hiding" (Cohen); that Clinton is a multifaceted being without a unifying self (Klein); that he is whatever you happen to be looking at or, as Bury resignedly put it, "what you see is what you get." Dowd, the most literary, climaxed a fusillade of contradictions by saying, "In the end, the focus is the unfocusability." And Rosenstiel will be quoted below.

Not until Bob Woodward's The Agenda could one be certain of the original template for the mosaic technique. One finds it in the partly quoted, partly paraphrased views of George Stephanopoulos: "'You've got to always keep in mind,' Stephanopoulos said to one of his closest associates, that watching Clinton 'is like a kaleidoscope. 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.' Every time, the kaleidoscope would reflect the fragment of stone at the bottom in a unique way, showing a different facet; every person would see a different pattern. It was real, but it could change in an instant, as soon as Clinton turned."

Such descriptions are fascinating to read, but they leave one as baffled about Clinton after reading them as before. Other journalists have taken the next disturbing step: They've looked behind the self-contradictory mosaic and reached the grim conclusion that Clinton has no "self." In his book, Strange Bedfellows, which describes the coverage of the presidential campaign of 1992, Rosenstiel writes: "Like many politicians Bill Clinton is a man of unfinished and contradictory character--scholarly and shallow, outgoing and shy, principled and craven, the mood depending on the motive. He possesses extraordinary talent and a fierce thirst for knowledge and insight, but above all approval. One reporter who spent time with himŠin New Hampshire found him one of the most outwardly directed people she had ever met--as if he had little inner sense of self at all." (Emphasis added.)

When Rosenstiel speaks for himself he creates a mosaic, but when he quotes the reporter who dived beneath the mosaic he gives no name. If he did, Anonymous would never get into the White House again.

Journalists with names also have identified this absence of self in Clinton, but they are not dependent on the Washington media-political establishment. One is Lewis Lapham, editor of Harper's. In the April 1993 issue Lapham described Clinton's response to a group of people: "[He] roamed across the sound stage like a starved animal, feeding on the questions from the audience as if they were the stuff of life and breath." And: "He defines himself as a man desperately eager to please, and the voraciousness of his appetite--for more friends, more speeches, more food and drink, more time on stage, more hands to shake, more hugs--suggests the emptiness of a soul that knows itself only by the names of what it seizes or consumes." (Emphasis added.)

Another description of the self-less Clinton comes from alternative journalist Sam Smith, author of Shadows of Hope and editor of Progressive Review: "It was the normal work of the politician, but with Clinton there seemed too much. Too many hands, too many friends, too many words, too many hours before he went to sleep, too many hours on C-SPAN solving the nation's problems with too many industrialists and economists--and in the end too little else. It was as though he were afraid that if he excused himself from the public eye he might no longer be real." (Emphasis added.)

Those who see Clinton as self-less are always struck by the deep dependence on others that is present in those who have a ravenous hunger for power over those others. Different journalists have sought to explain the intense response Clinton invokes, occasionally using their own reactions. Philip Martin, an Arkansas journalist, quotes his own words, written for a now-defunct alternative newspaper in Little Rock when he was young: "He is the Sun King. And if you look too long at him you will be blind, your senses flooded with his gold-spined brilliance. As e.e. cummings might have said of him, Jesus, he is a handsome man. Despite his too-big head and hands and feet and his roomy, rheumy allergy-ridden nose. There must be some elemental undercurrent here that generates envy in other men, not just the musk of power but something pheromonic. Since it is not polite to compare your governor to Mussolini or even Huey Long, then let's say one of those Kennedy boys, or that rare thing, a soulful politician."

Martin now considers those "the most embarrassing words of my career." But he quotes them because he knows they provide insight into others. Martin had quite unreservedly fallen in love, as millions of others have fallen in love with Bill Clinton.

Another journalistic worshiper, Phil McCombs, writing in The Washington Post, holds a mirror up to Clinton as he is absorbing that love: "To watch this president connect with people emotionally is an awesome thing. It's a raw, needy, palpable, electrifying thing that happens ... It's as if he's soaking up the people like he's soaking up the sun, with the warmth pouring deep and direct into his political soul and recharging him, refilling him somehow once again with his own humanity and some sense of his role in the destiny of his country."

This is an exceptionally good description of a charismatic politician feeding on the souls he has electrified. It was quoted in The New Republic under the sarcastic headline, "Clinton Suck-Up Watch." That was too limited an observation, although it is true that only a worshiper would use the language of McCombs. An unusually intense response to a charismatic politician should not be casually dismissed as a simple-minded form of complicity. And it also should not be described with conventional political formulae. We all have been told repeatedly that Clinton "connects" with crowds, or that he is in his "campaign mode." But such desiccated language deprives one of the politically important information that the emotion-laden language of Martin and McCombs provides.

Writing a decade and a half apart, both tell us in unmistakable terms that the South has thrown up yet another of its emotionally gifted demagogues--those eloquent politicians who intuitively exploit the hopes and fears of mobs, who win their love and legitimize their hatreds. The new eloquent southerner--his style adapted to the small screen, his charged emotions unfailingly politically correct--is sitting in the White House.

Clinton has true charisma. If you have not witnessed that quality first-hand--I myself have seen it only once--you don't quite know what it is. It is not just charm. It is a sudden blazing internal radiance which the possessor learns to produce volitionally and in full, conscious awareness of its seductive effect.

Clinton has the power to seduce others, to get them to submit to his will. And when they do, they give him in turn the vision he seeks. What Clinton sees in the faces of the adoring crowds is the reflected face of the Sun King. Only those adoring crowds can give this Narcissus the ineffable joy of adoring himself.

Have any journalists raised questions about the real political purposes of such a man? Yes, but only couched in terms of sincerity. The disappointed and angry left, the most radical of the environmentalists, the iconoclasts who inhabit the edges of the American political spectrum--all have raised the questions: Is Clinton really moved by a love of social justice? When he made his pledges to rescue the poor and the suffering, was he sincere? What does he stand for?

In Shadows of Hope, Sam Smith gives his reasons for doubting Clinton's sincerity: "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."

Smith is right. The programs, the "issues," are America's obligatory means of political courtship. But for a Sun King, these are means to his end. And his only real end is seduction. That is what Clinton stands for.

Sam Smith's language tells the reader that he is aware of this. Newsweek's Joe Klein, in "The Politics of Promiscuity," (May 9, 1994) seems for an instant to have suspected it. Christopher Hitchens of The Nation has been in a cold rage about it. These men have strikingly different political views. The realization that Clinton is most fundamentally a political seduction machine is not dependent on ideology but on sensibility, and on the intelligence to look past his liberal-altruistic language and to question Clinton's personal values.

Finally, also raising questions about Clinton's psychology are the pillars of establishment journalism and the academic students of the presidency. These are extremely intelligent and judicious people who acknowledge no signs of a Sun King's presence and who judge Clinton by the standards set by the great American presidents. They are concerned with psychological issues pertaining to Clinton's mind, above all to his cognitive competence.

A few examples will do: At the end of Clinton's first year in office, David Broder of The Washington Post was worrying about Clinton's habit of launching too many policy initiatives at once, many more than he could handle, and his tendency to go rushing around in all directions. Hedrick Smith of PBS was disturbed by a related issue--Clinton's inability to set priorities. And Fred I. Greenstein, professor of politics at Princeton University and author of two classic books on the American presidency, was praising Clinton's "verbal intelligence" but wanted to know whether Clinton had an "analytical intelligence." This was an unusual question. The Princeton scholar was actually saying, Clinton can talk, but can he think?

However different all the questions above may seem to be--from "Does he have a self?" to "Can he think?"--their similarities are greater than their differences. All the questions are psychological in nature and all the questioners are staring fixedly at Clinton's consciousness. Most of the people quoted above have expressed admiration for Clinton, and most probably voted for him. But all have clearly worried about one or another aspect of Clinton's mind.

There is a good deal to worry about.

Thinking

On June 7, 1994, Bob Woodward was interviewed on C-SPAN about The Agenda. The discussion moved to Hillary Clinton, and Woodward said in emphatic tones, "I'd go so far as to say she's a part of Bill Clinton's brain."

That is both the most extreme and the most accurate description of Hillary Clinton that anyone has yet offered. It is the only reason for which Hillary Clinton is a significant American figure. She has been flattered by the feminist movement, which, like New York Times columnist Anna Quindlen, imagines her to have a "great mind." She has been abused by certain conservatives who, like Richard Nixon, believe that such an intelligent, self-assertive woman turns her husband into a "wimp." Both those characterizations miss the mark. Hillary is a bright woman lawyer of the kind one sees by the dozens on CNN and C-SPAN, only they have earned their positions while she has married hers. Her actual importance lies in one realm alone. She is known to be a prop to her husband's mind, and her husband is president of the United States.

To an inordinate degree Hillary Clinton thinks for Bill Clinton.

Specifically, she is Bill Clinton's access to the laws of logic, without which no thinking is possible. Leon Wieseltier of The New Republic has discussed Clinton's blindness to logic on a number of occasions. On February 1, 1993, he wrote, "The most disturbing quality about ClintonŠis his indifference to contradiction. Not excluding the political middle by not excluding the logical middle, that appears to be Clinton's strategy. And so he can hold in his mind simultaneously, and sincerely, notions that cannot really be held together." And, again in the July 19-26, 1993 issue: "He lives without the law of contradiction."

Hillary Clinton provides Clinton with certain narrow logical skills of which he is singularly bereft. This does not imply that she is Aristotle, any more than a seeing-eye dog is a cartographer. It implies only that as compared to Clinton, the blazing Bubba, Mrs. Clinton is on speaking terms with logic, and he cannot function without her.

Some White House reporters have gradually discovered this dependence. Initially they saw Hillary as a helpful adjunct to presidential decision making. Just after the election, Eleanor Clift and Mark Miller said in Newsweek, "Hillary is Bill's Daytimer, the gentle lash who keeps him focused, who doesn't mind making decisions and refereeing disputes when Clinton would rather stall." This description is a bit too soft. Take out the "gentle" and the "doesn't mind," and you have a clearer picture of a Hillary who keeps Bill's mind focused, who makes his decisions, and who resolves his conflicts.

Six months later, in late June 1993, at the peak of the Clintons' bizarre succession of political catastrophes, Eleanor Clift returned to Hillary to answer the question, "Has health care kept her from helping Bill?" Clift's answer was an unequivocal yes: "[Many staffers] blame Clinton's inability to make up his mind on any number of issues--from Bosnia to the BTU tax--on Hillary's distance from the Oval Office. Clinton's decision to delegate health care to his wife disrupted the delicate balance between the couple. Because Hillary has a real job, she cannot devote the time she once did to her husband's problems. And he has suffered as a result."

And nine months later, in March 1994 as the sex and money scandals were exploding over the Clintons' heads, Time published an article called "The Trials of Hillary." It was written by Nancy Gibbs, and all impulse to soften Hillary had vanished. Rather, with the first lady under fire, it was necessary to make her importance clear. Gibbs cited people close to the Clintons as the source for a crisp description of the essence of Bill Clinton's dependency on Hillary: "Their friends observed that he needs her brains, her logic, her focusŠ"

That is undoubtedly true. But it cannot be the whole truth. One can readily purchase brains, logic, and focus in the marketplace. One does not have to marry them. For Clinton, a wife with brains, logic, and focus serves a deeper need. In a particular and important way, Bill Clinton is cognitively disabled.

There is nothing obvious about that disability, although its superficial manifestations strike many people immediately: If one concentrates on what Clinton says, not on his facial expressions and the motions of his poetic hands, one discovers that he is a phenomenal bore. He is so monumentally boring that thoughtful people feel compelled to discuss it.

That is the clue to Clinton's cognitive disability. There is only one thing that will produce this detail-saturated effect, enlivened by no thinking or creative impulse, and that is the memorization one frantically engages in before an exam if one is the bright kind who studies for As.

Is Clinton a memorizer? Yes, indeed he is. And a very unusual one, the type who could get a job in the circus as a Hans the Talking Horse. He has a photographic memory, and witnesses to that skill come from every period of his life. When David Gallen, armed with a tape recorder, interviewed a few dozen Arkansas journalists, politicians, and friends and associates of Bill, they all talked their heads off about his amazing memory for the faces, names, family members, and illnesses of what seems to be half of Arkansas.

And, apparently, he forgets nothing. In January 1994 David Maraniss of The Washington Post wrote: "Clinton has a nearly photographic memory--he recently stunned a friend visiting the White House by saying, 'Let's call your parents!' and then recited a number he hadn't dialed in more than a decade."

Before he was elected president, Clinton himself liked to show off his remarkable memory. According to Charles Allen and Jonathan Portis in The Comeback Kid, Clinton recited 100 lines from Macbeth that he had learned in high school to a high school class in the small town of Vilonia, Arkansas: "I hadn't [recited] it in 20-something years," Clinton said. "And I started reeling it off, and these kids, their eyes got as big as dollars. I recited the whole soliloquy."

But this skill is more than a complicated parlor trick. It has played an important role in Clinton's intellectual life. Clinton has always been extremely bright, a good student and a voracious reader. But his memory has greatly supplemented, amplified, and very often substituted for an intellectual life. His memory is a theme that runs throughout people's conversations about him.

Arkansas journalist Meredith Oakley, who repeatedly refers to Clinton's photographic memory throughout her book On the Make: The Rise of Bill Clinton, says of Clinton, "He was not studious by nature and though he made exceptional grades--he eventually won a Phi Beta Kappa key--he did so by routinely cramming for exams and relying on a photographic memory."

Clinton's classmate at Yale, William P. Coleman, calls Clinton "the classic quick study." He studied little, went to few classes. Then before exams he borrowed the class notes of others and memorized.

Clinton's high school friend David Leopoulos visited Clinton when he was at Oxford and found that Clinton had suddenly become a fount of information about painting. Leopoulos told a reporter, "He is interested in everything and wants to consume everything. He is almost a fanatic about information. He gathers and retains it better than anyone I've ever known."

Joel Achenbach of The Washington Post jokes, "That's Clinton: well-versed in every subject, has memorized the leading economic indicators for every quarter since the '20s, knows how to say 'fungibility' in Farsi."

Finally, Charles Allen and Jonathan Portis in The Comeback Kid describe the Clinton of the presidential campaign: "Clinton became known as a 'policy wonk,' a politician who could spout data and statistics nonstop, a man with a quick answer for every question. Members of the national press were amazed at his ability to formulate answers to complicated questions, seemingly without thinking."

It is not "seemingly" without thinking. Very often, it is actually without thinking. Clinton can memorize as he breathes. But he finds thinking--analysis, evaluation, reaching conclusions--intensely difficult.

And that is the essence of Bill Clinton's cognitive disability, and the reason for his dependence on his wife.

In The Agenda, Woodward shows that dependence in action. He describes Clinton as candidate, surrounded by high powered advisers. "Everyone," writes Woodward, "was throwing ideas at the candidate, who had no system to evaluate or decide among them." It was Hillary who rescued Clinton, and in doing so, explained what he actually did with the information being hurled at him. He had to "come to it in his own way," she said. Woodward continued: "Hillary insisted he had to 'internalize' the message and the ideas. He needed in-depth exposure to the alternatives and lively debate, pushed even to the point of confusion. 'He has to come to this in his own way,' she repeated." What Clinton needed, she said, was the time to rest and "internalize."

In effect, Clinton dumps everything into his subconscious, engulfs it, digests it, and waits to see what will happen. Many people do this at certain stages of creative work, which is dependent on subconscious operations. But at some point, the mental superstructure must take control and process the results with logic.

It is the stage that requires the conscious use of logic that Clinton finds difficult, or impossible, to reach.

To an extraordinary degree, Clinton functions directly from his subconscious. It is his almost-photographic memory that allows him to do so. But he pays a terrible penalty. When ideas are "thrown" at him, which happens ceaselessly, he "has no system to evaluate or decide among them." He is paralyzed--until his subconscious finally processes them in one way or another, and tells him what to think. And if it doesn't, his wife does. That one cannot buy in the marketplace.

It is true that Hillary Clinton helps Bill Clinton in his presidential decision-making process. It is true that he needs her brains, her logic, and her focus. But any formulation that makes her sound like hired help fails to reckon with the frequency with which Clinton is incapacitated. Hillary Clinton compensates for that helpless state. She is to Clinton's mind what a pacemaker is to a heart. She is, as Woodward says, a part of Bill Clinton's brain. And she has been so for every millisecond of his political life.

THE FIRST CONFLICT

"Even now, after all these years, I still sometimes work hard instead of smart. I'm a workaholic, I'm always churning and doing things, and sometimes I lose the forest for the trees. Sometimes you can do so many things that you don't do enough Š[P]eople may not know exactly what I want to do as president, because I've got so many ideas.

"My mind is always churning, you know, and I think I need to learn to focus my comments better so I can learn to communicate with people who don't know me very well. And I need to always learn that you have so little time, there is so precious little time, that you have to really be like a laser beam with your words and your actions. You've got to really focus and have that kind of mental discipline that sometimes my workaholic tendencies don't permit me to have ...

"I think sometimes I always think that everything can be worked out, too, you know. Sometimes you can't work everything out. You've just got to cut it. And you've got to know when to cut it and when to work things out. That's something I've done a lot of work on, trying to make sure I overcome that weakness."

--Bill Clinton to Arsenio Hall, June 1992

For some 15 years Clinton has been saying, over and over again, to people who have repeated it over and over again, that his problem is that he does "too much, too fast." Simultaneously, he has been ceaselessly reported to be an astoundingly slow worker who takes months to make a decision. Both cannot be true. And both are not true. But it takes a long time to understand the gross contradiction between what Clinton says of himself and what the press has reported, because the answer is buried in a mysterious conflict deep inside Clinton's mind.

Above, you will see a long and unfocused description by candidate Clinton of the workings of his own mind. He offered this information to talk-show host Arsenio Hall, who had inquired whether Clinton had any flaws.

A small part of Clinton's incoherent description pertains to his doing "too much, too fast." The rest, if one strips away the murky verbiage, is an earnest description of Clinton's difficulty in thinking. His mind races, ideas rush in on him with great speed; he fails to distinguish between having an idea and taking an action, between thinking and doing; he gets lost in details, so he cannot retain his abstract purposes; and he has great difficulty in reaching conclusions or making decisions. He even avoids using such terms: He talks of "cutting it" or of "working things out." This is not the analysis of a thinker or of one who thinks about thinking. It is the Clinton subconscious blurting out his difficulties as he experiences them from within.

Woodward's Agenda--this book is to date the greatest psychological study of Bill Clinton--portrays Clinton's helpless, conflicted muddle over and over again. But in one part, there is a short, efficient description. Political consultant Stan Greenberg traveled to Arkansas to meet the young governor who might seek the Democratic party's nomination for president. He found Clinton torn by conflict over announcing his candidacy:

"[Clinton] set August as a personal deadline for a final decision, but the deadline slipped ... He appeared locked in a perpetual debate and argument with himself and with dozens of friends and advisors. His thinking never seemed to go in a straight line. He was unable to bring his deliberations to any resolution. Greenberg was horrified at the process. It bordered on chaos."

Greenberg is clearly describing from the outside what Bill Clinton described to Arsenio Hall from the inside.

The rambling speech that Clinton made to the talk-show host is a template both for Clinton's endlessly reiterated lament that he does "too much, too fast" and for the chaotic mental processes that wander off in meaningless directions and culminate in paralysis. To describe what it might feel like to be engaged in both kinds of mental activities, one must conjure up an impossibility. It would be like driving at full speed with one's feet jammed hard on powerful brakes. Clinton's mind races perpetually while it simultaneously maneuvers itself into a catatonic motionlessness.

Clinton has a short phrase to describe only the speeded-up process: It is doing "too much, too fast." He has no descriptive phrase for the blocking process, so I'll give him one: It's "I can't move."

He presses his speeded-up problem on everyone he talks to at any length, so it is widely known. He allows others to discover the blockage problem all by themselves. But, of course, that problem is widely known too. The press discovered it soon after he was elected president. In fact, to a considerable degree, Clinton's relationship with reporters has been an attempt to seduce them by stressing "I do too much, too fast" while they hav e tormented him by chasing angrily after his "I can't move." To visit Clinton's mind, one must take these aspects of his mental processes one at a time.

"Too Much, Too Fast"

Clinton began to complain publicly that he tries to do "too much, too fast" when he lost the governor's race in 1980 after one term in office. In his first interview after this defeat, he named the problem as a cause.

But when one reads Meredith Oakley's biography On the Make, one discovers that Clinton had the "too much, too fast" problem long before the traumatic expulsion. Oakley places no significance whatsoever on this fact. But it is clearly important.

Right after he was elected governor for the first time and before he had even moved into his office, says Oakley, Clinton made a curious pledge to the electorate. It was reported by the Associated Press and she summarizes it as follows: "He said he planned to take a judicious approach to governing and to try not to do everything at once."

Neither the AP nor Oakley thought to ask Clinton why the impossible notion of doing everything at once had even occurred to him and why he would "try" not to do this impossible thing. Would the impossible thing happen anyway if he did not "try"?

On the surface, the new governor of Arkansas never kept his pledge. The biographies record that he always governed in Arkansas with all flags flying and an agenda as long as his arm. But the primary purpose of the enormous agenda was to create the illusion of immense achievement through nonstop activity. Clinton scheduled matters, says Oakley, so that he could launch one initiative a week and keep his name in the headlines. Many, if not most, of those achievements never materialized, or they were drastically altered by the Arkansas legislature.

After Clinton was defeated, he made such a big issue out of "too much, too fast" and apologized so humbly to the people of Arkansas for his mistake that, when years later he ran for the presidency, the phrase was still on people's lips. David Gallen, researching Bill Clinton: As They Know Him, heard it frequently. Brownie Ledbetter, a prominent activist in Arkansas reform politics, told Gallen about the warning that Betsey Wright had delivered to Clinton. Wright, who organized Clinton's campaign for reelection to the governorship, told Clinton, "You will pick three things and that's it. You're not going to do a hundred and fifty things. And you've got to be focused."

When Clinton ran for the presidency he again set out with great brio to do "too much, too fast." He hit Americans hard with a 49-point plan for economic revival--adding 10 new planks to a platform he filched from Dukakis.

And, once elected, Clinton not only wanted to show Americans that he could do everything at once--he wanted to show them that he could think about everything at once. He held the famous economic "summit" where, surrounded by television cameras and legions of properly respectful economists, policy specialists, and business executives, Clinton demonstrated that he knew as much about each of their specializations as they did. He had learned and spat out a fragment of each. The public was impressed. The press was impressed. Hillary was impressed. She took notes.

And there began the regime of Clinton I, which was for many months thereafter to lurch around in drunken confusion, because the man who could do everything at once and could know everything at once had just arrived from a tiny, almost-feudal state that he could govern with a Rolodex of 100 names, and had no idea what it meant to be president of the United States of America.

Throughout all the lurching and crises and embarrassments, however, Clinton kept proliferating proposed programs and issues and trying to do "too much, too fast." Finally, a clever journalist noticed that the issues were a cave in which Clinton was hiding. In Newsweek, February 15, 1993, Eleanor Clift observed:

"As the political hurricanes raged around him, Bill Clinton sought safety in substance. Let the media talk about Kimba and Zoë and gays in the military.Clinton was busy with issues, at least one a day. That is his way of changing the subject ... But the issues may not provide safe haven for long. Now he must turn his attention to the thorniest issue of all, [the economy,] where he faces seemingly contradictory goals."

In fact, Clinton's relentless multiplying of issues began to seem comical to some. A few months later, The Washington Post Weekly published a Margulies cartoon on that theme. It was drawn in two boxes. Box 1 showed Clinton seated in front of a desk piled with documents, saying, "Maybe I have been trying to do too muchŠ" Box 2 showed Clinton saying, "So I'm appointing a 60-member commission to hold six months of hearings and issue a 12-volume report on rescuing my presidency."

Now here you can stop for a moment, because Clinton stopped for a moment. For some months, all the issues came in great baskets called the budget and NAFTA and Japanese trade and so on. Since politics is an epiphenomenon in this article, we will skip over what was a reasonably pleasant period in which a newly hired Republican spinmeister, David Gergen, who had helped to create and peddle the New Nixon, was now creating and peddling the New Clinton.

At the end of 1993, it came time for leading journalists to ponder the year's events and to ask Clinton to ponder the year's events. An interview with Clinton was conducted by Eleanor Clift, Bob Cohn, and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek and published December 13, 1993. About that same time, David Broder in The Washington Post (December 12, 1993) reported on a group interview with Clinton assembled at Blair House by Godfrey Sperling Jr. of the Christian Science Monitor. These able and sophisticated journalists were genuinely interested in finding out what Clinton--the New Clinton--had learned during the year.

The group interview published in Newsweek occupied a full page. Nine questions were published, three of which asked Clinton to comment on declining public support and on criticisms of his character, his temper, and his performance. He evaded the criticisms. Instead, he defensively introduced and elaborated on these ideas:

* "[W]e were trying to move very quickly to push the agenda of change."

* "I tried to do so many things at once that I didn't take time to do one of the President's most important jobs, and that is to consistently explain to the American people what we were doing and why."

* "What upsets me is when I think we're not doing the best we can for the country. When I lose my temper it's mostly because I think we all have an obligation to make every day count."

The sympathetic headline printed along the top of the Newsweek page was: "I tried to do so many things."

Broder devoted his complete Post column to what Clinton had told the journalistic group at Blair House. Under the triumphant title "Clinton Finds His Voice," Broder wrote: "In a recent interview in which I participated, Clinton said that because the nation is now 'awash in news,' he must work harder at this task than presidents of the previous generation had to do. That means, he said, that he must figure out what are the 'five or six things or two or three things the American people have to know and feel' and 'not do or say things that get in your way' in communicating on those topics. And it means that he must be willing to return to those topics time and again, until he hits the moment when 'You can break through. When you can register on people.'"

Broder was impressed. He said, "For a president who is as hyperactive as Clinton, this is a remarkably disciplined set of self-instructions ... [T]he lesson of this first year--which Clinton seems to have absorbed--is that you cannot do everything at once."

The New Clinton was the Old Clinton. The two sets of interviewers had all been listening to the same strange recording in Clinton's head, unreeling slowly, slowly, upon demand, producing the same verbal patterns that had been emerging from Clinton's mouth for at least 15 years.

Any idea that a human being feels compelled to repeat robotically for at least 15years means something important to that person. But what "too much, too fast" means is not what Clinton says it means. And there is no evidence that he knows what it means. It is clearly a defense of some kind. But a defense against what?

It may become clearer if we turn now to the Clinton who cannot resolve conflicts, the Clinton who is blocked, the Clinton who gets paralyzed while trying to think. What the racing, speeding Clinton cannot tell us, perhaps the paralyzed Clinton will.

"I Can't Move"

The Clinton who "can't move" is, of course, Clinton the potential Democratic party nominee who revealed to political consultant Stan Greenberg that he couldn't "think in a straight line," and couldn't resolve conflicts or reach conclusions. It is Clinton the presidential candidate who told Arsenio Hall that he had these strange thinking problems he was "working on"--that he often couldn't "see the forest for the trees"; that he often didn't know when to "cut it" and when to go on trying to "work things out"; and who revealed to Arsenio that he didn't differentiate between thinking, saying, and doing "things."

Why there was no uproar among American journalists after Clinton's confession to Arsenio Hall, I do not know, since I personally fell off the couch when I heard it. But it is only fair to say that it was difficult to understand on the fly. Clinton's use of language reveals a determination to conceal the operations of his mind in a cloud of squid ink. By his fifth month in office, however, there was widespread awareness that something was the matter with Clinton's decision-making process. The New York Times developed a fixation on his lack of "focus." Harper's Editor Lewis Lapham, who counts things that annoy him, reported that in the month of May the words Clinton and focus appeared in The New York Times 102 times.

In the May 31, 1993 issue, The New Republic published an analysis of Clinton's decision making. The editors were trying to account for Clinton's paralysis and, interestingly, contradicted Clinton's claim that it was due to "too much, too fast":

"The incorrigible Eugene McCarthy put it best, in a recent trip to these offices. The Clinton administration is turning out to be all gerunds; there are no nouns or verbs. Everything is process: happening, formulating, consulting, negotiating, evolving ... [T]he only moment when the president actually seemed to do something that had a beginning, a middle, and an end was his signing of the executive orders liberalizing abortion. And what a long time ago that seems ...

"It is not that he has tried to do too much, as he [has] somewhat lamely claimed. Far from it ... It is that he has failed to find a distinction between constructing a policy and implementing it. It is one long, seamless process of negotiation--intellectual and political--in which there seems to be no firm stopping place."

The New Republic had discovered that Clinton could not distinguish between thinking and doing and could not resolve his deliberations.

It was not, however, until one year later, in the publications I read regularly, that someone almost reached Stan Greenberg's horrifying conclusion. On May 17, 1994, Richard Cohen wrote in The Washington Post that Clinton left "the unmistakable impression of a president who cannot state a goal and then simply march to it." Cohen was still a bit unsure of his own discovery that Clinton could not think purposefully.

In the year in between, journalists zeroed in on Clinton's inability to reach a final decision--his last-minute "flip-flopping." And they trumpeted their observations to the skies. This criticism produced a dramatic and informative clash between Clinton and the press. On June 14, 1993, after three months of changing his mind about a Supreme Court nominee, Clinton finally succumbed to the forces advocating Ruth Bader Ginsburg and presented her to guests and press in a televised ceremony in the Rose Garden. Clinton spoke. Judge Ginsburg spoke. Clinton then turned to the press. Brit Hume of ABC rose to his feet and asked a question: What had caused the protracted "zigzag quality" in the nomination process? Hume knew, the press knew, Clinton knew, and an untold number of citizens knew, that Hume was actually asking Clinton a personal question: Why are you so indecisive? Clinton displayed a cold, controlled anger, chastised the press for being more interested in "political process" than in "substance," and abruptly terminated the press conference, leaving Hume standing there, six feet tall and bright red.

The next day, the country was informed that the president had more to say. Wolf Blitzer, CNN's White House reporter, told his worldwide audience that the president was going to hold a press conference at which he would discuss his achievements to show that he'd been "decisive and in control." The press conference began. Clinton appeared. He listed some legislation and announced to the nation--in the hearing of the world--that his had been "the most decisive presidency you've had in a very long time, on all the big issues that matter."

The reporters of course knew that this was a lie, whether they said so or not. It was not clear that they had understood the important truth that Clinton was telling them by lying--that he could not endure any mention of his indecisiveness.

It seems unlikely that they understood that truth, because there was no muting of the crescendo of criticism of Clinton's indecisiveness. During May, June, and July 1993, the criticism came from voices at every point on the establishment spectrum--from such journalistic luminaries as Cokie Roberts, Elizabeth Drew, Anthony Lewis, Hobart Rowen, and Judy Woodruff. Even The Washington Post's E.J. Dionne, who normally would not notice if Clinton turned into a werewolf, conceded in the 16th paragraph of a 17-paragraph column that Clinton was indecisive.

On September 17, 1993, David Shaw, media critic for the Los Angeles Times, criticized the press for unfairly berating Clinton for his indecisiveness. Nevertheless, Shaw himself described that indecisiveness with disdainful accuracy: "Decision making is an excruciating process for Clinton. He almost invariably seems determined to delay a final decision for as long as possible. He likes to ponder publicly all his options, consult people, make a decision, consult anew, change his mind, then change it again. He's a veritable symphony of equivocation."

America's leading journalists were agitated by the very idea of an indecisive president. Since deciding things is nine-tenths of what an American president is supposed to do, their agitation was comprehensible.

A few people, however, thought the president's indecisiveness was funny. They were politically mismatched. One was Jeffrey Klein, editor in chief of the leftist Mother Jones and a Clinton supporter. He erupted in a fit of charming giggles when, invited by C-SPAN to comment on Clinton, he heard himself saying that "Clinton never makes up his mind." Another was Paul Greenberg, conservative editorial page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and the creator of the sobriquet Slick Willie. Greenberg was not a giggler, but he was consumed by dry humor. He, too, appeared on C-SPAN to twinkle his eye and to state enigmatically that he had not expected "it" to happen so soon.

He explained what he meant in a column which appeared in The Washington Times titled "Déjà Vu All Over Again." Greenberg discussed the astonishment and indignation of both Democratic congressmen and journalists over "the Clinton two-step." It was "still a novelty in Washington," he said, but was quite familiar to anyone who had spent the last two decades in Arkansas. "They don't understand," he said. "This may be the first time they've seen Bill Clinton step out boldly, then fade away while explaining how decisive he's been."

And somewhere in Arkansas there was a horse laugh, possibly attributable to former Gazette columnist John Brummett, who had said during the campaign that Bill Clinton was not presidential timber, that he was "timid, indecisive, wishy-washy, and a chameleon who tries too hard to get everyone to love him."

There is no evidence that the liberal establishment press learned from their Arkansas colleagues that Clinton's indecisiveness was a problem of at least 20 years' duration. Had they learned that, their question would have been, "Why?" not "What?" But they chased diligently after the what. Newsweek's White House correspondents, writing in different combinations, took turns describing the phenomenon:

* In May 1993, Clinton was described as a "policy wonk" who wallows in details. The writers added, "Clinton will revisit a decision so often that at times he seems like a gardener who uproots his plants to see how they are growing."

* In early June, Newsweek writers referred, with a mixture of friendliness and harshness, to Clinton's "love of detail and obsessive inability to make final decisions."

* At the end of June, Bob Cohn devoted an entire article to the subject. It was called "Decisions, Decisions." In it, Cohn summed up Newsweek's now-clear dislike of the phenomenon: "No one can undecide a decision quite as often as Bill Clinton ... Clinton has had to abandon his grand ideas because he lacks the discipline to make hard choices. The president's three-month search for a Supreme Court justice typifies his tendency towards vacillation. It is more than yet another bungled appointment, it is a case study of the overreaching and dithering that has left Clinton's friends dangling and disappointed his followers."

Newsweek, of course, was not unique. The entire country was being deluged with journalistic criticism of Clinton's indecisiveness. As June turned into July, various polls revealed that, as Bill Schneider of CNN put it, "Clinton's image was wavering and indecisive."

Just as it had become universally known that Clinton tried to do "too much, too fast," so did it become universally known that Clinton was indecisive.

Deja Vu All Over Again

And what happened when everyone in the country knew this? Everyone in the country forgot it. Just as "too much, too fast" vanished at this time, so did indecisiveness vanish. The New, ostensibly decisive, Clinton had arrived. Frightened to death by the possibility of rejection, Clinton begged and bribed Democrats shamelessly to pass his budget. When it passed by one vote in the Senate he declared: "The margin was close but the mandate is clear." He wrapped himself in a protective cloak woven of living presidents and, rejected by a majority of liberals, passed NAFTA with the help of Republicans. How much more decisive could a liberal president be?

A lot more, it turned out. By the end of the year everyone rediscovered Clinton's indecisiveness. His new spinmeister David Gergen apparently leaked the fact that a new, ingenious way of solving Clinton's indecisiveness problem had been found. The December 13, 1993 issue of Newsweek reported dryly, "Most of the requests for private time with Clinton will not be granted, says a top aide, for fear that the president might reverse himself."

Then it was time out for frenetic coverage of Clinton's sex and money scandals before the issue of decisiveness returned. In May 1994, the press discovered to its astonishment that it was observing essentially the same phenomenon it had observed in May 1993.

* On May 14, 1994, when Clinton seemed incapable of nominating another Supreme Court justice, Al Hunt of The Wall Street Journal declared irritably on CNN, "Clinton has known for 134 days that he had to replace Blackmun." And Hunt sounded off about Clinton's "vacillation, indecisiveness."

* On May 23, Newsweek portrayed the absurdity of Clinton's "waffling" in greater detail than ever before. It gave the readers a three-day scenario: "On Wednesday the president had been about to nominate Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt when he suddenly changed his mind. On Thursday, his choice had been an old Arkansas friend, Judge Richard Arnold, but by Friday, Arnold was out and [Judge Stephen] Breyer was in. 'Let's go,' Clinton announced after yet another last minute phone call, and his staff, stung by a rash of media stories about White House dithering, rushed to carry out the presidential command. But before they could get out the door, Clinton hesitated. Maybe, he mused, he should put Maryland Sen. Paul Sarbanes on the court. That way he could elevate Baltimore's promising young black mayor, Kurt Schmoke, to the Senate." This, Newsweek reported, caused the president's legal counselor, Lloyd Cutler, to grow "exasperated" and to insist that Clinton decide there and then. And thus did Breyer emerge triumphant from Clinton's "maddening" decision-making process.

* In early June, Clinton again felt impelled to defend himself from the charge of indecisiveness. But this time he got someone else to do it for him. Who better than legal counselor Lloyd Cutler? So there was Cutler, who had been privately "exasperated" by Clinton's indecisiveness, explaining publicly in a long op-ed piece in The Washington Post that the president had not been indecisive at all, that, on the contrary, he had been wonderfully decisive.

And again a whole raft of foreign-policy issues provoked the same press charges of Clinton's indecisiveness: Bosnia had turned into Somalia had turned into Haiti, with Clinton changing his mind every hour on the hour.

Now the national press, too, realized that it was deja vu all over again.

In June 1994, Woodward's Agenda appeared with a shocking passage in it. Leon Panetta, writes Woodward, had been told by campaign aides that Clinton was "deadly slow to make decisions." And then George Stephanopoulos told Panetta something far more troubling: "The worst thing about him," said Stephanopoulos, "is that he never makes a decision." Never? There it sits on page 86 of The Agenda. Never.

Finally, in July 1994, Michael Kelly in The New York Times Magazine wrote: "t is no longer surprising to hear the president spoken of with open and dismissive contempt. In mainstream journalism, and even more so in popular entertainment, President Clinton is routinely depicted in the most unflattering terms: a liar, a fraud, a chronically indecisive man ... " Kelly considers some of this vicious and unfair, but he does not challenge Clinton's indecisiveness. By now, not only every journalist and comic in America knows that Clinton is indecisive but dogs know it; cats know it; the readers of this magazine know it.

So why am I telling you what you already know? Because you don't already know it. You know a concept, "indecisive." And you know a false implication, that indecisiveness is a self-contained phenomenon, that it is like an epileptic seizure--a powerful but limited mental event which suddenly knocks Clinton out at the end of the decision-making process. But it doesn't start at the end, it starts at the beginning. And it is not a decision-making process, it is a decision-killing process. It has six component parts. At one time or another every one of them has been described, but only Woodward has integrated most of them, and that was not his primary purpose. I'll list them, elaborating on components described only by Woodward:

1. Clinton possesses a perfectionism that interferes with the completion of his projects because his standards are never met. According to Woodward, Clinton always wants to produce a solid piece of work. The sight of aides knocking out a document at high speed frightens Clinton because he knows it will not produce intellectually serious work. He wants each aspect of a project to be checked, he wants to consult people he deems to be authoritative sources, and he wants to consider a very broad range of opinion and debate.

Clinton is never satisfied with the work at any stage. Woodward describes Stephanopoulos's reaction to Clinton's unending demands: "He had seen Clinton act like this before, disliking, discarding, or wanting to change what he read. His initial reaction was always to resist, to say no, to force more discussion and debate." What is most irritating to his political advisers is his responsiveness to arguments he has not considered or to which insufficient attention has been paid. He will always want to incorporate them into his project even if they come from a political opponent.

No scholar could object to such standards. But in practice Clinton's standards are never met. The passages in The Agenda that portray Clinton's standards are reported by Lloyd Bentsen and by Stephanopoulos, both of whom see Clinton's unrealizable perfectionism as an expression of what Bentsen calls his intellectual "doubt."

2. Clinton is preoccupied with details to the extent that the major point of his activity is lost. This is precisely what Clinton means when he says he often can't "see the forest for the trees." It is what everyone means when he uses that expression. It means he cannot arrive at or retain the abstract purpose of a project because he is so immersed in the details.

So long as reporters admired Clinton's grasp of details, so long as they described him as "loving" the details, they did not recognize that his preoccupation with details is an epistemologically morbid attribute and assumed that the paralysis comes later on. But it is often, perhaps always, at the very beginning of a project that Clinton loses contact with his abstract purpose.

Of the writers I have read, only Woodward seems to understand clearly that Clinton cannot hold on to the connections between his abstract purposes and the concrete details which are his daily preoccupation. One of the most dramatic sections in The Agenda illustrates the severity of this problem. Almost all reviewers relayed the political story without paying attention to Woodward's accompanying epistemological analysis. To put it simply, Clinton was so preoccupied with the details of the deficit-cutting aspect of his budget that he forgot the rigorous caps that Congress had placed on the "social investment" part of his budget. It was a budget resolution which, says Woodward, the president dealt with every day, but he "didn't grasp what had happened." An aide had to tell him: "Slamming his fist down on the end of his chair, Clinton let loose a torrent of rage and frustration ... Why hadn't they ever had a serious discussion about the caps? Day after day, in dozens of hours in the Roosevelt Room going over the smallest programs and most trivial details, there had been no meeting, no discussion of the caps? The president turned red in the face. Why didn't they tell me? he asked. This is what I was elected for, he said. This is why I am here."

Much later, when Clinton had calmed down, he realized that he bore some responsibility in the matter: "Clinton indicated that he had never quite connected the earlier discussions of that seeming abstraction, 'caps on discretionary spending,' with their impact on his investments. He had never really fully grasped the relationship."

The "investments" were Clinton's most important purpose. He had let that abstraction float away while he was preoccupied with the "most trivial details." Clinton had been paralyzed by the harsh caps on discretionary spending, but the paralysis started the instant, the millisecond, that he severed his abstract purpose from the concrete details in which he immersed himself.

3. Clinton is unable to set priorities among his projects. Indeed, journalists and scholars have clamored incessantly that Clinton cannot set priorities. Asked Princeton scholar Fred Greenstein in Political Science Quarterly, "Why does an intelligent, politically aware leader who knows in his heart that he should 'focus like a laser' begin his presidency in a fashion more reminiscent of a cluster bomb?" Or, as Judy Woodruff put it anxiously to Vice President Al Gore, "Why can't he prioritize?"

This is actually the same problem as the one above but writ large. To know one's priorities, one must know their relationship to one's abstract and overarching purposes. In the case of President Clinton, he would have to know the relationship of his multiplicity of projects--all of them--to the overarching purposes and themes of his presidency. But he forgets them, too.

Woodward shows how it was Clinton's political consultants who realized that "Clinton's presidency was off the tracks in a fundamental way." Stan Greenberg grasped it firs