What is the Clinton legacy?

"Everything that [Bill] Clinton does is so tiresomely Clintonian." -The New Republic April 8, 1999.

Of course, the term "Clintonian" has widely divergent meanings to different people - in this context, Wieseltier was expressing his utter disgust for the President's Balkan policies - but still it somehow remains perfectly descriptive. President Clinton was, and remains, a larger-than-life, almost incomprehensibly paradoxical figure, and it is only right that the adjective that best describes him is one that is derived in his name.

To be Clintonian is to be extraordinarily deft at the art of politics; it is to be exceptionally astute at recognizing and connecting with the emotions of a crowd, or an individual; it is the ability to synthesize and comprehend arcane policy matters; it is the act of recognizing and caring for people who are often ignored by society at large.

To be Clintonian is also, however, to possess an almost complete lack of self-critique and, even more so, self-control; it is the ability, in Sen. Bob Kerrey's (D-Neb.) memorable phrase, to be a "shockingly good liar"; furthermore, it is to exhibit few qualms at sacrificing others for your own self gain.

To someone who is Clintonian, words mean everything - and words mean nothing. To be Clintonian is to Put People First - but it is also to put yourself first. It is to be both noble and ignoble. In short, it is the manifestation of the complexities that are at the very heart of Bill Clinton.

Fatigue becomes nostalgia...

In less than two weeks Clinton will no longer be president and, in a real sense, he will belong to history. No one suspects, however, he will fade away. He will undoubtedly add another meaning to the phrase Clintonian - it will come to describe ex-presidents who remain active (if not hyperactive) on the national political scene. Still, before Clinton enters the next phase of his life, it is worth reflecting upon his eight years in the White House, while the memory is still fresh.

I was 20 years old when Bill Clinton was elected president, and I have spent much of the last eight years - my formative ones as a writer and political observer -- trying to understand and analyze the man. There have been periods where I have derided him, and others where I have greatly admired his abilities. Only now, as he leaves office, do I think I've finally formed a lasting assessment of him -- and it, like everything else surrounding him, is somewhat ambiguous.

In 2000, pundits of all stripes came to rely on the term "Clinton fatigue" in describing the American people's feeling toward the president. In 2001, there will be a different phrase: Call it "Clinton nostalgia." As the economy heads to a perhaps not-so-soft landing, and President-elect George W. Bush enters the White House with all of his false Texas swagger and his propensity toward malaprops, the Clinton years are likely to be viewed, at least in the short term, as the good old days.

Some of those fond memories will undoubtedly be connected specifically to Clinton the man. Meanwhile down in Arkansas, (or out in California, or up in New York ...) Clinton and his allies will be working at a PR effort to buff up the president's place in history. The end result is likely to be similar to what has happened to Ronald Reagan's image. A decade from now, Bill Clinton will be better thought of -- at least among his own party -- than he ever was while in office. Whether that will be deserved or not is a different question.

The good and the bad

There is quite a bit to applaud Clinton for during his eight years in office.Some of this admirable part of his legacy came directly as a result of White House policy, but other achievements were the result of fruitful, if uneasy, dealings between a Democratic White House and a Republican Congress.

One of the most important accomplishments of the Clinton years was his administration's ability to see the Information Revolution coming, and get out of the way. There are plenty of regulatory, economic or fiscal policies that the White House could have advocated during the last eight years that would have slowed the pace of technology growth and gummed up innovation. Largely, however, Clinton resisted techno-meddling. He is also to be applauded for bringing a more modern approach to defining America's national interests as they pertained to U.S. foreign policy.

Global trade was emphasized just as much as global defense by the Clinton team, and instead of withdrawing off the international stage the United States remained a steady advocate of promoting peace, albeit somewhat haphazardly, around the world. Clinton recognized that the idealist-realist divide in conducting a foreign policy was a false one, and that today's America must be a little of both. For this he deserves some credit.

On welfare reform and balanced budgets, Clinton recognized the needs to advocate and advance both causes once he decided -- perhaps belatedly -- to embrace them. Both have significantly changed the American landscape for the better. Clinton was a consistent advocate of creating a more family-friendly workplace and understood the importance of symbols and rhetoric promoting gender, race and sexual orientation equality.

And, perhaps most significantly, he proved to be incredibly adroit at playing political defense --after the initial shock of the 1994 Democratic party fiasco, the Clinton White House succeeded, with some help from Newt Gingrich's hubris, of staunching the so-called Republican Revolution before it started. For a Democrat, as I am, that might be Bill Clinton's greatest accomplishment.

There are, however, some ways in which Bill Clinton failed as president. He never got close to real change of America's Social Security and Medicare systems. His national conversation on race was also a non-starter from the get-go. He kept in place, with little reexamination, the nation's failed War on Drug policies. He took a pass on real public-school reform and he never was a clear advocate for changing our campaign-finance system. In addition, many foreign policy scholars will swear that the administration's "photo-op" international policy will eventually come back to haunt the United States as the rest of the world has lost respect for America's global leadership.

The leadership question

In the end, Clinton was a president whose strengths came from his abilities as a politician -- the ease with which he connected with people, his strategist's understanding of how politics work and his ability to adopt new ideas when the old ones did not work. His weaknesses, however, came from his inability to lead.

At Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government where I am currently studying, Ronald Heifetz's Leadership Without Easy Answers has become a bible of sorts. In it, Heifetz writes of doing the work one needs to lead. Being a leader is, in Heifetz's concept, not only about being an authority figure who recognizes the "technical" challenges (in this case the political challenges) that must be met. Being a leader is, instead, someone who gets the people around him to understand that there are challenges that they don't even see yet that must be faced. Heifetz describes these as adaptive challenges.

Perhaps the nature of the presidency does not allow for a leader who readily embraces adaptive challenges. Maybe the job really is about being the nation's chief politician, as Clinton was, and not about leading the polity past the daily fray. You can make that case. That explanation, however, lets Clinton off the hook a bit too easy.

Clinton was mainly about the technical challenges in front of him and rarely about those adaptive challenges that were around the corner. He was too often preoccupied with keeping his authority and too rarely concerned with leading his followers. Power, to Clinton, was oftentimes an end in itself and because he had to spend so much time fighting to maintain his, he never really got the chance to let his "better angels" lead. That, I think, should be his ultimate legacy: He was not as good as he could have been, and he did not lead America to the places we could have gone. In short, he was Clintonian.

Bob Kolasky is the former managing editor of IntellectualCapital.com and a student at Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government. His e-mail address is bkolasky@yahoo.com.