The problem, or at least one of the main ones, is talk-undisciplined, shortsighted talk from everywhere. In World War 11 they used to admonish factory workers, servicemen and others, “Loose lips sink ships.” Loose lips famously also sink legislation, pointlessly offend needed potential allies and inform adversaries of one’s plans, prospective tactics and weaknesses.
The Clinton administration certainly did not invent this penchant in government. Going back through the Bush, Reagan and Carter years, the memory dredges up quantities of gratuitous, harmful (to their own program) commentary too. But that was then and this is now, and it’s Clinton’s capacity to get a decent health bill through that is at stake. On that subject, anyone in Washington in the past several months could, with no difficulty, hear certain administration insiders boasting of a strategy to get their own bill or a close variation on it through Congress by cleverly outsmarting a few key legislators like Senate Finance Committee chairman Daniel P. Moynihan. This is clever? This is productive? If you heard it and I heard it and the person sitting next to you on the Washington-New York air shuttle heard it and everybody at Bootsie’s barbecue heard it, is it not at least reasonable to suppose that the legislators penciled in for outsmarting heard it too? I don’t think Bill Clinton, for all the vaunted temper people say he displays, is ever going to impose a strict system of discipline on his staff or enable his chief of staff to do so either. But the people in his government-meaning a lot of those in the departments and agencies, along with many on the White House staff-ought to be made to consider that what they say is heard by people every place, not just by those they are trying, for the moment, to impress or please or disarm.
There is one whole category of blurted remarks that may do terrible damage and about which probably nothing can be done until the laws of human nature are repealed. The angry outburst is one example. So are the incautious and often even more reckless things people say in the momentary euphoria and loss of judgement that follow their having come through some fearsome political ordeal. The late Clare Boothe Luce, having prevailed over an antagonistic senator’s protracted effort to prevent her confirmation to be ambassador to Brazil, exulted that his behavior had demonstrated the effects of his having been kicked in the head by a horse when young. Guess who then did not get confirmed by the Senate for her ambassadorship?
But even leaving damage by blurt out of the picture, there is plenty that can be controlled in the realm of thoughtless speech, if two main temptations are resisted. One is the temptation to brag and/or show off, the other is to defend oneself and one’s own position of the moment without regard for the unfortunate impact the defense will have on some larger administration interest.
The first of these is endemic to people who want to show you they are in the know or are awfully important or awfully smart. We in the press love them even though they are often just beating their own drum and may be giving out misinformation. There have been countless examples in this administration (the unending braggadocio about how the Congress is going to be managed is one). My favorite came on opening the paper the day the Al Gore-Ross Perot debate was to occur and reading an outline of the Gore secret strategy as participated in by the quoted person-what surprises were in store, what the vice presidential nominee’s tack would be and so forth. Lucky for them the Perot people evidently didn’t see it. I don’t give this indiscretion the pennant out of hand, but it certainly deserves a place in the playoffs.
That was before the election, of course, but this kind of self-indulgent showing-off has, if anything, become more prevalent with ascension to office. True, especially in its last days, the Bush government was famous for this, too, but I do not believe that is the model the man who beat him set out to emulate.
The second careless habit, that of saying anything at all to explain or defend yourself in an argument, evidently not caring about how it may affect your other business, has brought the administration in for much criticism, particularly in foreign affairs. It is often in this context that an administration spokesman or a leaker or just a plain old “reliable source” will leap to win a point concerning, say, criticism of the government for not being tougher or more resolute here or there with a litany of explanations of how impossible it is to do anything or how politically it cannot be achieved or something- signaling whatever foreign government or leader is involved where our back-off points are, what we think we can’t do. Clinton himself has done this on occasion. Much of what is called administration zigzagging in foreign policy has to do with having to amend such heedless, over-exuberant positions taken to win an argument.
I don’t think the administration would have to stop talking to journalists or trying to explain its ways to Congress and the public to get a grip on this. The discipline required is not even the external, administered-from-the-top-down kind that apparently is anathema to Clinton. It would be the self-discipline of innumerable people who subordinated their own immediate desire to win the point or gain an edge or show how terrific they were to the larger interest they purport to represent.
