Clinton's Last Campaign

In his early days as President, when it seemed as though great things were still possible, Bill Clinton steeped himself in the histories of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Abraham Lincoln. But as he prepares for his sixth State of the Union speech next week, this President, so publicly fixated on the 21st century, is spending his private hours pondering the quiescent, almost forgotten stretches of the 19th, the times Clinton calls "fallow periods." The biographies he has devoured lately include those of such unimpressive Chief Executives as Rutherford B. Hayes and Ulysses S. Grant. He even had adviser Sidney Blumenthal dig up a copy of what passed for a State of the Union address when the hapless John Quincy Adams sought to steady his presidency.

Clinton seems to be searching for the periods most like our own, forged less in crisis than in change. The President says he is trying to understand the seemingly contradictory forces roiling political debate in America today: prosperity and anxiety. It's partly a teaching exercise. Clinton hopes his interpretation of this moment will help him guide Americans through it. But it is also an attempt to give meaning to his presidency. Clinton, who lives to campaign, is embarking on his last one: the campaign to put his own headline on the story of his presidency, to get ahead of historians before they get ahead of him. "I think the American people intuitively understand this is a big and different time," he said last week in an interview with TIME. "I'd like to try to explain it a little more."

This might have been Clinton's easiest State of the Union yet. As the Republicans drift, he is riding a wave of popularity that is beginning to look permanent. Last week's TIME/CNN poll showed his approval rating at 59%, and it has not dipped below 50% in the past two years. He has quieted talk about his being disengaged (and having a golf fixation) by rolling out a string of popular new proposals, even as he promises to produce a balanced budget three years ahead of schedule. The speech is his chance to transcend Paula Jones, independent counsels and campaign fund raising.

Yet Clinton's very struggle to define his presidency may be the best evidence that it eludes the coherence he so desperately wants to give it. Would Ronald Reagan ever have needed to explain his significance to historians? In the TIME/CNN poll, 52% of the respondents ranked Reagan among the good or great Presidents, but only 34% felt that way about Clinton. The largest share, 48%, rated him average. They say this even while a 64% majority acknowledge that Clinton has accomplished at least as much for the country as Reagan did, or more. Critics of Clinton will undoubtedly say that a President with flexible beliefs, who once polled voters to decide where he should go on vacation, deserves history's inattention. Which is why with the end of his presidency in sight and the realization that a lame duck's influence drops precipitously after his sixth year, Clinton and his advisers are feeling the shadow of Reagan and urgently pondering the question, What is Clintonism? "We've been out there moving the ship in a very good direction, but we haven't had any navigational charts," concedes White House spokesman Mike McCurry.