Is Bill Clinton For Real?

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The 1980 defeat also intensified a trait that is universally considered Clinton's greatest weakness. Even as a young teenager, he recalls, he often felt compelled to act as a peacemaker, trying to smooth over the violent quarrels at home. As a politician, he wants to be loved by everyone even more than most practitioners of his trade. Says Stephen Smith, a professor of communications at the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, and onetime Clinton aide: "He would really like to get 100% in an election." Clinton makes such extreme efforts to conciliate opponents that Arkansans jest that the way to get something you want desperately is to become an enemy of the Governor's.

Clinton's compromising bent also makes him appear at times to take both sides of a controversial issue. To cite the most prominent current example, he claims to be the only Democratic candidate to have backed George Bush early and unreservedly on the gulf war. But on Jan. 15, 1991, the war deadline, the Arkansas Gazette quoted him as saying that he agreed with the majority of Democrats in Congress who voted against the use of force and for longer reliance on sanctions.

Asked to explain, Clinton launches into a convoluted exposition: "The people who argued that sanctions should be given more time had some good arguments," but he thought and said it would be wrong to vote "to undermine the U.N. resolution" allowing the use of force; he did not trumpet that opinion because he was a Governor, not a member of Congress, and "I didn't want to give any extra grief to my two Senators and my Congressmen, who had a tough vote to cast"; looking back, though, it seems clear that "sanctions would not have worked to get Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait."

Such performances lead opponents to call Clinton "Slick Willie." In the partisan opinion of Sheffield Nelson, who lost the 1990 gubernatorial race to Clinton, "He'll be what the people want him to be. He'll do or say what it will take to get elected." Supporters retort that Clinton has merely learned the arts of building coalitions and crafting compromises between opposing views, as a Governor -- or President -- must. True, but a President also should be tough enough to knock heads together on occasion, and Clinton has given little evidence of that ability.

THE GOVERNOR. Clinton has shown a rare talent for sniffing out issues and acting on them at a state level before they become hot nationally. Early in his tenure, when some experts rated Arkansas' schools the worst in the nation, he pushed through a reform package combining increased spending with standards that all schools had to meet. Most famously, he instituted competency tests for teachers. The exams were not especially difficult; 93% of teachers passed the first time around and 97% passed the second time. But Clinton's supporters claim that many teachers were required to take new courses to improve their skills. In any case it is hard to argue with the results: the percentage of Arkansas high schoolers going on to college, which was only 39% a decade ago, has increased to almost 52%.