Where Is 'My Center'?

By MARGARET CARLSON WASHINGTON

As he rode last week in a helicopter to a housing construction site in Frederick, Maryland, President Clinton pored over a marked-up, highlighted and dog-eared copy of the legal writings of Lani Guinier. It was far too late for him to emerge undamaged from her nomination to be Assistant Attorney General for civil rights, but he hoped to find that the views of his nominee had been misread. Gradually and reluctantly, he came to the conclusion that even if some of them had been, his beliefs and Guinier's could not be reconciled. When he huddled in late afternoon with top advisers, the question was no longer what to do but how to do it. Guinier, who had been working out of a fifth- floor office at the Justice Department, was summoned to arrive at the White House at 6:15 p.m.

As Clinton sat down at 7 p.m. in a yellow chair by the fireplace in the Oval Office for his first face-to-face meeting with Guinier since that happy day when he had announced her selection, the President looked more embattled than his nominee did. With deputy communications director Ricki Seidman as the only witness, the meeting turned out to be more emotional, painful and time- consuming than the staff had anticipated. Guinier urged Clinton to go ahead with her Senate hearings; she believed that Senators would judge her as a whole person, not just by her writings, and would confirm her. But Clinton told her that the hearings would be based largely on the writings, that he would need to support them and could not. He warned her that the weeks leading up to the Senate hearing would be "death by a thousand cuts." Later he added, "That would not be good for you; it would not be good for the country."

This went on for so long that after half an hour passed without the door opening, the President's newest aide, David Gergen, who had hinted to reporters that Clinton was dropping Guinier's nomination, told reporters phoning him on deadline that he could no longer say for sure what would happen.

The President never explicitly told Guinier to withdraw, says a source close to her. "He went around it 25 different ways, and she never volunteered anything." But the final moments of the conversation were awkward because it was clearly the end of the issue. The trio at last emerged from the 75-minute session with reddened eyes -- and 45 minutes later, the President mounted the podium in the press room to kill the nomination. Gripping the lectern and raising his fists, showing more emotion than he had expressed at any time since the dog days of New Hampshire, he said, "I cannot fight a battle I know is divisive, that is an uphill battle, that is distracting to the country, if I do not believe in the ground of the battle." He added, "This has nothing to do with the political center. This has to do with my center."

As if that soul baring was not enough, Clinton continued the confessional at a White House dinner. "It was the hardest decision I've had to make since I became President," he reportedly told guests. "I love her," he said of Guinier, a 20-year friend of the Clintons. "If she called me and told me she needed $5,000, I'd take it from my account and send it to her, no questions asked."

Meanwhile, across town at a private dinner studded with senior Republicans, the mood was much different. Clinton's latest humiliation had infused a sense of quiet pride in G.O.P. elders, who saw the Administration's breakdown as a vindication of Republican competence. More than that, Clinton's drafting of a former Republican operative, Gergen, to help bail out the White House image machinery was delicious irony. Joked one Republican lobbyist: "I'm telling a lot of my Democratic friends that if they need to get to Gergen, I'll be glad to help them."

Just when Clinton seems to be bottoming out, ready to dust himself off and get started again, he finds a new hole in the floor to fall through. With an approval rating of just 36%, a record low for a postwar President four months into his first term, Clinton could not afford the spectacle of last week's Lani Guinier mess. He has begun to stumble with a certain farcical rhythm, this being the third time (after Zoe Baird and Kimba Wood) he has dropped an esteemed female lawyer he had nominated or considered for a Justice Department post. This time the Administration's relative inaction in the face of opposition to the Guinier nomination allowed the controversy to bloom into full-scale melodrama.

Worst of all, the episode lent a cartoonish, surreal quality to Clinton's desperate scramble to reposition himself as a man of the middle rather than the tax-and-spend liberal that a majority of Americans now suspect him to be. While Clinton might have felt compelled to dump Guinier under any circumstances, the move, coming at a time of presidential image overhaul, looked like some kind of Faustian political bargain. Clinton not only dumped an old friend but in doing so also dismissed the views of his folk-hero Attorney General, Janet Reno, and in the same stroke managed to let minority groups believe their interests were secondary to other concerns.

The debacle broke new ground in the erosion of Clinton's popularity. He suffered simultaneous public mockery of both his competence (one headline writer dubbed him "Bumblin' Bill") and his conviction ("President Jell- O"). His downward spiral in popularity and his shift in positions are creating a sense of public vertigo. More than ever, Americans regard their new President with two nagging questions: Is he up to the job? and What does he stand for? Clinton must know that if he does not answer those questions soon, he may never be able to. One longtime friend who spoke with the President by telephone last week reported that he never sounded "so sad in his life."

In the postmortem assessment of the Guinier episode, many wondered how the Administration could have failed to learn from the Baird and Wood experiences. In the search for someone to blame, some pointed fingers at White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum, who cleared Guinier as well as the two previous failed candidates. A senior aide said there might have been an assumption that the Clintons were familiar with Guinier's record because she had been a friend of theirs since they had attended Yale Law School together.

As right-wing opposition to her nomination gathered force, the Administration tended to dismiss the criticism as no serious threat to confirmation. At that point, however, the White House would have needed to mount a concerted campaign to get Senate support for Guinier or cut her loose quickly. But the White House, distracted by troubles with its budget package, dithered. The Administration failed even to introduce Guinier to Senators, a job black lawyer and former Transportation Secretary William Coleman took upon himself to do. Such neglect hardened Guinier's resolve and sense of independence. By the time Clinton realized Guinier was in serious trouble, not just with conservatives but also with liberals like the Senate Judiciary Committee's Joseph Biden and Ted Kennedy, it was already too late to persuade her to slip quietly out of town.

The Administration sent two separate emissaries (Solicitor General Drew Days and legislative liaison Howard Paster) to suggest that she withdraw voluntarily, but she refused. Sensing she would never get her hearing before the Senate, she launched a media blitz that left the Clinton team stunned and ( angry with her for failing to be a team player. "Lani was not going to pull herself out," says an Administration official, adding pointedly, "It's the M.O. of the civil-rights movement that they are not satisfied until they can go out, declare defeat and say, 'We got screwed.' That's what they wanted. That's what they got."

The episode served to focus minority groups not only on Guinier but also, in a possibly more enduring way, on Clinton's move toward the middle. "The people who put Bill Clinton in the White House are angry. To some extent, they do feel betrayed," declared Representative Kweisi Mfume of Maryland, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, which has 40 members. In an implied threat of political retribution, he added that the caucus was "reassessing and re- evaluating its relationship with this Administration."

In dumping Guinier, Clinton was also forced to rebuff Reno, who supported the civil rights nominee. Reno had read Guinier's writings and found them to be merely "thought-provoking efforts on the part of a law professor to invigorate debate." Later she added, "I think if you look at her record, she'd be the best possible choice." At the White House, Reno was said to be deeply annoyed at the President's action, and the next day she gave Guinier the forum for a press conference at Justice to tell her side. In doing so, Reno was walking a thin line between asserting her independence and challenging the President. Giving Guinier a stage was certainly popular at Justice. Guinier's speech was greeted by loud applause afterward from the civil-rights attorneys, one of whom said, "We're very disappointed and very sad."

Guinier's demise was doubly demoralizing, coming on the heels of David Gergen's appointment, which horrified many of Clinton's eager young staff members. Gergen, back from a vacation in Bermuda that included a boat ride with Ross Perot, spent part of his first full day at work wandering the halls and hanging around the takeout window of the White House mess, greeting his colleagues like a maitre d'. In his first meeting with the communications staff, Gergen tried irony to defuse suspicion among the Young Turks, identifying nearby offices as the old haunts of former colleagues like William Safire and Pat Buchanan. "Are you trying to win us," one staff member asked him jokingly, "or to lose us?" It wasn't a bad question. In an interview with TIME afterward, Gergen said he understood that there might be resentment. "If I had worked my tail off during the campaign and some guy who had worked for Republicans came into my chain of command, I would be anxious," he admits. "And it's as big a surprise for me as it is for them. Some of them think this is a liver transplant and I'm the liver."

Gergen's arrival will bring turmoil in that key indicator of the White House pecking order: office assignments. "Now it really gets ugly," a staff member predicted. The joke was that the big tent going up on the South Lawn for the President's 25th Georgetown class reunion last week was actually a temporary shelter for homeless senior staff. On Saturday, chief of staff Thomas ("Mack") McLarty decreed that Gergen will move into the office of former communications director George Stephanopoulos, where the very fashionable shade of gray paint has barely had time to dry. Stephanopoulos, now a senior policy adviser to Clinton, is to move into an office next to the President's personal secretary.

The mission that Gergen undertakes, to help move Clinton toward the political center, began to take shape in late May, after the accumulated effect of issues ranging from gays in the military to Clinton's tax-increase package had persuaded Americans that the New Democrat they had elected was really an old-fashioned liberal. Even the moderates within the Administration were alarmed. Says a White House official: "The Bill Clinton I've seen over the past four months is not the man I voted for."

As part of the turnaround effort early last week, Clinton took to the heartland. In a speech in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, he mentioned the middle class no fewer than 10 times and later that day revived his campaign promise of a middle-class tax cut. With great ceremony, he was presented with a bowling ball and a shirt embroidered with his name. At a photo-op back in Washington, he demonstrated the power of volunteerism (read: no government spending) by helping to mow and clean up a park in a rundown neighborhood.

He has also finally reached out to embrace conservative members of his own party, among them Senators John Breaux and David Boren, whose warnings over his stimulus package he had blithely ignored two months ago, dooming it to defeat. Breaux has now become the President's ally in getting his economic plan through the Senate Finance Committee, where Democrats hold only 11 out of 20 seats. Just as liberals bemoan Clinton's new tack, the Louisiana Senator applauds it. At home last week, as he rode along in his white van toward a forum at H.L. Bourgeois High School in Gray, Louisiana, an electric razor in one hand and a phone in the other, Breaux declared his conviction that the President's acknowledgment of the New Democrats will get his budget through. "Bill Clinton's getting back to the middle, and it's the right thing to do. Thank goodness."

Demonstrating their team spirit, two of the most liberal Cabinet members made very centrist gestures last week. Health Secretary Donna Shalala announced that she would be embarking on reforms to fulfill candidate Clinton's promise to "end welfare as we know it," a subject on which she had been silent until now. Labor Secretary Robert Reich said Clinton's plan to raise the minimum wage, now $4.25 an hour, will be postponed to give small- business leaders a chance to let their fears be taken into account. Health- care reform was postponed last week as well, to calm those who were worried that it would bring a second wave of tax increases; it is expected to be off the agenda until late this summer, possibly next year. Meanwhile Clinton has indicated his willingness to compromise on gays in the military and gave further assurances, with last week's news of Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt as a potential Supreme Court nominee, that the next high-court Justice will be a moderate.

Despite such moves, some White House insiders think a counterrevolution may ensue. For one thing, the arrival of moderates in the Administration has not meant the departure of liberals, since Clinton brings in new players on top of the old, a process Bush practiced so faithfully it became known derisively as "composting." Moreover, liberals ranging all the way from twentysomething staff members to Hillary Rodham Clinton are unlikely to let Gergen steer the President too far into conservative country. "Gergen has mounted a coup," said a former Bush official, "but there are a lot of rebels at large who are armed and dangerous."

With all these advisers tugging in different directions, the unsettling issue is where Clinton really stands. Is he getting back to where he once belonged, or reinventing himself to suit the polls? The sometimes disappointed director of the Democratic Leadership Council, Al From, believes that the President has been at times overwhelmed by issues not of his own making, like gays in the military, and that the past week's moderate moves demonstrate who the real Clinton is. Says From: "I'm delighted that Clinton is returning to the New Democrat fold."

But while politicos may be happy to engage in serial reinterpretation of the Clinton Administration, the American people are not likely to be. The President's all too public search for political identity suggests a weakness of conviction, inviting the most unfortunate comparison of all: to George Bush. While Gergen was predicting last week that Clinton had got in touch with his inner President -- "reaching deep inside himself to find what he believed was right" -- in pulling the Guinier nomination, an invitation designed by artist Peter Max to a fund raiser was landing in the mailboxes of hundreds of Democratic givers around the country. The cover drawing shows a hundred faces of the President. The symbolism is eloquent and deadly, since what Clinton needs so desperately right now is to show Americans only one.

With reporting by Michael Duffy, Julie Johnson and Nancy Traver/Washington