Looking for a Lift

Bill Clinton took a seat in the front row of the White House family theater last Tuesday night while a panel of historians, retired generals and combat veterans discussed the Normandy invasion. When the talk turned to Omaha Beach, the costliest battle on D-day, 1944, Clinton listened intently as his guests explained that the deadly Omaha landings had not gone according to plan. The predawn bombing raids had missed their targets; the undertow was so strong that many G.I.s lost or abandoned their weapons before reaching land; instead of one German battalion guarding the shore, the Americans arrived to find three, which immediately pinned down the invaders under murderous fire. Several participants reported later that Clinton seemed fascinated to learn that the most important feat of American arms in the 20th century had been riddled with so many errors.

The next morning, the Commander in Chief passed on the lesson to the graduating class at Annapolis. "Ultimately," said Clinton, "the test of leadership is not constant flawlessness. Rather, it is marked by a commitment to continue always to strive for the highest standards, to learn honestly when one falls short and to do the right thing when it happens."

No one expects flawlessness from the Clinton White House, but last week the Administration struggled through another round of disorder and distraction.

Clinton was thinking about reshuffling his foreign policy team even as he was forced to accept the resignation of yet another politically naive official from Arkansas who took a Marine helicopter ride to a golf course. Further disclosures about the First Lady's commodities trading competed for space in newspaper columns with questions about the President's legal strategy over a sexual-harassment suit. Congress missed the White House's Memorial Day deadline for marking up health-care-reform legislation. Several White House officials said the best reason for taking the week-long tour of Italy, Britain and France is simply to escape from Washington for a while. "This," sighed a West Wing aide, "is no way to live."

Clinton told a friend last week that he believes he has bottomed out, that the dark, five-month period where almost nothing went right is nearly over. But the President's aides acknowledge privately that his political condition is weak and likely to remain so. Much but not all of this despair is based on the curious lack of boost Clinton is getting from the economy. Though it has + been expanding for more than two years, only 31% of Americans believe that the recession has ended where they live, according to a TIME/CNN poll. If the President is not getting credit for an economy that is growing at 3%, the Clinton team fears, he will never recover if the economy slows down. Explained an Administration official: "He's 15 points behind where he should be when the economy is going well. What happens if you come out of this year without health care, without welfare reform and the economy growing at only 1%? What have you got? And we're not even figuring in anything that might go wrong on foreign policy. And there are a lot of prospects for that."