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From mistakes, Clinton has learned, adjusted

She stresses her experience, especially as first lady, as her chief qualification to be president. Her career includes both accomplishments and missteps.

By Linda Feldmann | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor

from the April 16, 2008 edition

Page 1 of 3

Washington - Sen. Lindsey Graham, a conservative Republican from South Carolina and longtime backer of John McCain, has called Hillary Rodham Clinton "a smart, prepared, serious senator" with an ability to "build unusual political alliances on a variety of issues."

Former Sen. Rick Santorum (R) of Pennsylvania, another conservative who collaborated with Senator Clinton on legislation, calls her "much more of a uniter" in the Senate than her rival for the Democratic nomination, Sen. Barack Obama of Illinois.

Senator McCain himself, the presumptive GOP nominee, gets along famously with Clinton. Clinton's husband, the former president, likes to joke that if they're the nominees, the campaign would be so civilized "they'd put the voters to sleep."

Whether Clinton will go head to head against McCain in November remains an open question, as she seeks to overtake Senator Obama, the Democratic frontrunner. But she and her surrogates persist in touting her experience as her top qualification for the presidency.

The kind words of current and former GOP Senate colleagues may not do her much good, though, in a primary contest where "change" has trumped "experience." The campaign doesn't much play up her success in becoming "one of the boys" in the world's most exclusive club. "Too much inside baseball," says a campaign strategist. The irony for Clinton is that, of the three major-party candidates left in the race, voters see her as most divisive and Obama as most able to unite the country.

Clinton's image as "polarizing" goes back to her days as first lady of Arkansas, when she worked as a partner at the Rose Law Firm and raised eyebrows by keeping her maiden name. Arkansans – and the American public, in general, she would learn – were accustomed to more traditional first ladies who tended to focus on noncontroversial causes and hostessing duties.

But the reality is more complicated. Interviews with people who have worked with Clinton throughout her career – from her days as chairman of the board of the Children's Defense Fund to her two terms as first lady of the United States to her seven-plus years in the Senate – reveal a woman who has evolved from an advocate to a politician, learned from her mistakes, and had experiences unlike any other presidential candidate in US history.

Central to Clinton's argument that she should be the next president is her experience as first lady of the United States, a role that the Clintons treated as a top advisory position – equal, especially early on, to the vice president.

David Gergen, a veteran of Republican administrations and an early adviser in the Clinton White House, refers to their governing arrangement as a "copresidency." Clinton herself speaks of having had "a front-row seat on history." Bill Galston, another senior Clinton White House adviser, says neither characterization works; copresident is "obviously hyperbole," while merely having a ringside seat "goes too far in the other direction."

The travails of healthcare reform

Clinton as first lady is most famous for her ill-fated attempt to reform America's healthcare system, an assignment she and her husband unveiled amid great fanfare and that, ultimately, came to symbolize the disastrous first quarter of the Clinton administration – and contributed to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994. In their effort to restructure one-seventh of the American economy, Clinton and her team had formulated a complex plan that tried to "do too much, too fast," Clinton writes in her memoirs.

The list of miscalculations is long: The Clintons misjudged the values of the country, the president's political strength, the Congress, and interest groups, Mr. Gergen writes in his book "Eyewitness to Power." They eschewed compromise, allowing the perfect to become the enemy of the good. Still, Gergen – who had his differences with the first lady – describes her as "brilliant and articulate."

"But to assign her primary responsibility for designing the program and navigating its passage through Congress was to place upon her more of a burden than any first lady could bear, even Mrs. Clinton," he concludes.

After the failure of health reform, Clinton scaled back her public profile, as her recently released White House schedules demonstrate. But it would take until early 1997 for her unfavorable ratings in the Gallup poll to sink below 40 percent, even there, a high number for a first lady. Clinton's role in various controversies – beginning with the firing of the White House travel office staff in 1993 and on through various aspects of the Whitewater scandal, including the missing Rose Law Firm billing records that turned up in the White House residence after almost two years of searches and subpoenas – contributed to her high negatives. To this day, she suffers from a perceived "honesty gap" when compared with both Obama and McCain. In mid-March, Gallup found 44 percent of the public sees her as "honest and trustworthy" versus 63 percent for Obama and 67 percent for McCain.

But through it all, she never lost her focus on healthcare.

Former White House Chief of Staff Leon Panetta recalls how, within a few months of the demise of the Health Security Act, she took on the health issues of Vietnam veterans. "It was her initiative," says Mr. Panetta. "We had some good meetings; she led the discussion."

Behind the scenes, Clinton also threw her weight behind a plan to provide health coverage for children of working parents who did not qualify for Medicaid but could not afford private insurance. The program now known as S-CHIP – the State Children's Health Insurance Program – was signed into law by Bill Clinton in 1997 and today covers 10 million children.

In her presidential bid, Clinton has touted S-CHIP as one of her signal achievements as first lady, though not without pushback. After it was discovered that she had embellished a story about a visit to Bosnia in 1996, the veracity of all her campaign claims has been called into question. In the case of S-CHIP, Clinton came out on top, despite recent press comments by Sen. Edward Kennedy (D) of Massachusetts, an Obama supporter, and other senators that she had little to do with the legislation. Curiously, in her own memoirs, S-CHIP merits only two sentences. But on balance, concludes the nonpartisan Factcheck.org, Clinton "deserves plenty of credit, both for the passage of the S-CHIP legislation and for pushing outreach efforts to translate the law into reality."

Chris Jennings, health policy coordinator for the Clinton White House, says Clinton was by far the strongest advocate within the administration on children's health policy, and that it took a lot of people – the first lady, Senator Kennedy, other members of Congress – to get the reform through.

"She was sensitive to the political dynamics" post-healthcare reform, says Mr. Jennings, now an informal adviser to her campaign. "She cared more about outcomes than about credit."

Learning the price of compromise

By the end of Bill Clinton's first term, Hillary had learned a second important lesson about life in Washington: The compromises required in passing major legislation can turn an idealist into a pragmatist – and exact a big personal cost. The issue was welfare reform, and for the first lady, more than two decades of advocacy for children ran into the political reality that the new system could allow some children to fall through the cracks.

By the 1990s, the nation was ready for change. The old welfare system from the 1930s had evolved into one that encouraged government dependence. The question was, would the new system and its five-year lifetime limit provide enough supports to help people – typically, low-skilled single mothers – move successfully from welfare to work?

In her memoirs, Clinton calls the legislation "far from perfect" but justifies backing her husband's decision to sign it by citing "pragmatic politics." The year was 1996, and President Clinton faced a Republican-controlled Congress with an activist House speaker, Newt Gingrich, at the helm. The president had vetoed the first two versions of reform, and if he vetoed the third, the first lady felt he would be handing the Republicans a "potential political windfall."

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