Up In Smoke

(4 of 5)

No single domestic-policy issue has consumed so much of Clinton's public time and attention, though in the larger context of this turbulent season, that is not saying much. Since January there have been two White Houses: the one that handles scandal and the one that handles everything else. The only problem with that survival strategy, as last week's vote made clear, is that there isn't much else. For all his shiny approval ratings, Clinton has been foiled time and again in moving anything through Congress, from imf funding and voluntary national standards for student testing to campaign-finance reform and U.N. dues. A tobacco deal was supposed to show that Clinton was still in the game, while also funding programs for child care and education that he had laid out in January. That's why Clinton had been so willing to compromise on everything from tax cuts to liability limits.

Lott believes the President could have got a deal if he really wanted one. According to a source close to him, Lott began telling lobbyists last year that they had better get Clinton on board if they wanted a deal. "We're not gonna walk the plank alone," Lott told them. The two men spoke over the phone on occasion, but most of Lott's contact was with chief of staff Erskine Bowles--someone Lott "likes and trusts." The President remained disengaged, which surprised Lott as he watched Clinton's window of opportunity closing fast.

Now it's not just Republicans who have declared themselves in no mood to deal. Democrats on the Hill, who had acceded to Bowles' pleas to accept things they hated, like the marriage-penalty tax cut, found themselves burned when the Republicans walked out anyway. Their only hope for regaining their majority in November--and it's a slim one--is in getting voters riled against a Republican majority that happens to be enjoying some of its highest approval ratings ever. Democrats are relishing the prospect of labeling the Republicans in November as captives of Big Tobacco and a do-nothing bunch of laggards. Within 24 hours, their pollsters were arguing that the G.O.P. had badly misjudged public sentiment, that even if the ads had turned people against this bill, more than two-thirds of voters still want some bill. If the G.O.P. thinks the polls show the public won't punish them, says a White House political strategist, "they're getting snowed by the tobacco lobby."

In the first 48 hours after the deal collapsed, the President made guarded comments as if still looking for a deal. Fighting has always gone against Clinton's basic nature; which instincts usually had him looking for the third way, and if that doesn't work, the fourth, fifth and sixth. At this moment of simmering scandal, it also works against Clinton's survival instincts. As his former chief of staff Leon Panetta put it, the President is feeling particularly cautious now because "he's got to maintain a good relationship with the Congress that could ultimately be his judge" if Starr ends up handing it the whole Lewinsky investigation.