Kelly cont'd 3/3

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FL: But is image over substance and policy...has image replaced this in our presidents?

KELLY:

The great change in presidential politics I think begins thirty years ago roughly, with the campaign to elect John F. Kennedy [for] President. That was the first modern image-based campaign, the first campaign in which the primary thing that the candidate is offering the voter is not a matter of policy -- Kennedy's positions on the policies were very close to Richard Nixon's -- it is a matter of style, a matter of image, a matter of what sort of man John F. Kennedy appears to be versus what sort of man Richard Nixon appears to be.

And Kennedy wins on this. He doesn't win because his positions on the issues are different than Dick Nixon's -- as I say the issues, they're so close on this that they have to invent issues like the missile gap -- he wins because the image of him as a handsome, charming, witty, dynamic, glorious man is more attractive than the image of Richard Nixon; scowling, dark, brooding, tormented. The lesson from the Kennedy campaign is image entered politics and changed it forever.

And one of the reasons it changed it forever is because Richard Nixon didn't end his political career in 1960 but went on to become president himself. And when he became president he was obsessed and he gathered around him a staff that was obsessed with the way that he and his staff felt: Kennedy had manipulated his image to create a false Kennedy that won the election -- something that ... in a sense Nixon felt the election had been stolen from him in this regard, not merely in the question of voter fraud in Illinois and West Virginia, but that Kennedy had somehow put something over on the people- presented a Kennedy to the people that wasn't true.

And Nixon set out to create an apparatus in his White House that would enable them to do this; to make a Dick Nixon, a public perception of a Dick Nixon that would be attractive. And the Nixon White House was dominated by men who were in love with the idea of systems -- of systemized, business-like, efficient organization. The White House should be run like a business, politics should be run like a business.

So they systemized the idea that Kennedy and his people had invented. They set out to create this whole apparatus, to create an image presidency, to systemize it, and to set up a great big machine that would do this by dissemination of talking points and visuals and photo-ops, they created a whole language, a whole culture and a whole profession designed to work this culture.

And this culture came to take over essentially the White House. This is a culture that Sidney Blumenthal described as a permanent campaign, where campaigning and governing become one. And what it is to be the president is not clear how it is different to be campaigning for something. Everything's a campaign event. Everything. What matters in everything is the projection, not the reality -- the image that you depict, not that actually happened.

And, what that has brought us to today is a culture in which people, voters, all of us, have a sense at all times that when we're looking at the White House, when we're looking at the president or the man who would be president, there is no way to tell anymore the difference between what is image and what is real. There is no way to tell what is the staged event and what is not -- we assume everything at this point is a staged event. But we understand that it is important to us to get beyond the facade. It's important to us because we want to know, and we should know, what sort of person is running the country. So we're always looking for glimpses or glimmers of the real Clinton or the real Nixon or the real Reagan or whatever.

And this chase for the glimmer of the real beneath all the great machinery of image creation leads us to this obsessive quality that you see in the press now and media coverage of the president and people running for the president where we're always trying to divine all sorts of things into small actions any time the president does something that is real, is indisputably real. He utters something that is indiscreet, he is caught on camera when he doesn't know he's on camera. He makes a joke that is clearly spontaneous. We all rush to write about what this means -- now we have a glimpse of the real Bill Clinton -- everything. There's a kind of an obsessive quality to it, and the obsessive quality stems from this conviction that everybody shares -- reporters, public at large I think, that we've lost sight of what can be real in the president.

FL: Among the dozens of photographers we spoke with... the majority of them found that Clinton was the hardest to capture...

KELLY:

Have you ever seen the tape that Rush Limbaugh showed of Ron Brown's funeral? It's an amazing piece of videotape. Clinton is walking along and he's smiling and laughing and he's unaware that the cameras are videotaping him because there are some people between him and the cameras, and then he appears to see that the cameras are there and all of a sudden he's crying, and I mean I think with Clinton he is different from some of the other ones because he has true theatrical abilities as Ronald Reagan did.

Ronald Reagan's theatrical abilities and Clinton's are of a different sort. Ronald Reagan as an actor was not the seducer. He played a different sort of man. Clinton's theatrical qualities are the theatrical qualities of the seducer; the facial mechanisms that he has, the soulful look and the bit lower lip and the furrowed brow and the flash of anger and so on. There is an undeniable theatrical quality to them. You have a sense when you're watching him that you're actually watching someone trying on the appropriate face for the moment and moving on. I don't think it's to his benefit in the end. I think it is discomfiting to people and it plays into people's more serious unsettlements and fears about the whole question of whether we know anymore who the president is.

FL: Bosnia. Could you briefly take us through the Bosnia story as an emblematic one for Clinton?

KELLY:

I think Bosnia is emblematic of the Clinton style and the style of campaigning and the style of governing. The style starts with a great desire to promise people what they want to hear, and also to reap political gain. It is not an uncalculating desire.

So in 1992 when Bill Clinton is running against George Bush for the presidency he notices that George Bush has no policy on Bosnia -- the Bush administration's policy on Bosnia is as James Baker said, that "we don't have a dog in that fight", and they're sort of drifting. And there was a great deal of moral outrage about what is happening in Bosnia and a mounting sense that something should be done and it is obviously to Bill Clinton's advantage at that point to criticize Bush for his drift and inaction, and to say that he will promise to do differently, so he does. He commits himself during the campaign, or possibly it was, I think, most firmly in the transition -- but he commits himself during the campaign and in the transition to a policy towards Bosnia of what was called `lift and strike' -- that in essence the policy would allow the Bosnians to arm and defend themselves, a policy that would go against the United Nations agreement worked out with our European allies that kept the Bosnians from doing that.

But once in office, many difficulties inherent in fulfilling this policy become clear. It will cause a huge rift with our European allies, it may destroy NATO even. There's a lot of problems with it. Maybe it will lead to a bigger war. So Clinton begins his own drift. And there is no sense that he cares, or that he wants his administration particularly to care about what's happening in Bosnia or about the fact that he has not fulfilled what is actually a fairly significant promise. Things just drift along. People resign from the State Department in protest, and there's disgust and there is no sign that the president is particularly concerned about this. He adopts a position that in essence there's not much that can be done here. It was always thus in the Balkans.

And things drift along until they reach a point where catastrophe looms, and where you get to 1995 and it is clear that the United Nations peace-keeping effort in Bosnia is a disaster. It's not going to work. What is going to happen is that the United Nations peace-keeping effort is going to have to get out of Bosnia, and may have to get out of Bosnia under combat conditions. And the administration has pledged itself to helping the United Nations force do this with 25,000 American troops. So, the president is then faced with this box that he and events have put himself in where he faces the possibility of, in an election year, Bosnia finally imploding and him having to send in 25,000 American troops to help the United Nations force escape. There's no victory in this at all -- to escape with their lives and as much of their equipment as they can and at that moment, when it is clear that catastrophe does await, then he gets serious about it and says to Richard Holbrook at the State Department and the other people who have been pushing for more serious action on Bosnia "you know o.k., we've got to do something here."

And something is done. The United States actually brokers a peace treaty, the Dayton Accords, that bring a sort of a peace to Bosnia. And this is hailed as a triumph, and it is a sort of a triumph. It is a triumph in that fighting has stopped, people are not being killed, women are not being raped, their concentration camps have been busted up and so on.

But it is in the end also emblematic, this triumph, in the suspicion that it has a hollowness at its core. That it was utilitarian, designed to paper over the real difficulties there and get us to move along to something else, having said that we bought peace to Bosnia. It is a peace treaty that says that, that commits us to a united, multicultural Bosnia on paper, but has no enforcement mechanism, so that it appears, as we go into the fall of 1996, more and more clear that what it is likely to do is to be a treaty that will allow for the de facto partition of Bosnia. But presumably by then we'll be out of there and moving on to something else.

So Bosnia....is a pattern that you see obtaining with Bill Clinton over and over again...on all sorts of issues; first the over-promise without the sense of consequences of the promise, then the drift away from the promise, the apparent unconcern with the fulfillment of the promise. Eventually either the promise disappears altogether and is just lost, left. Or something reaches a crisis point and a new direction is taken. There is not a sense of continuity or coherence. There's not a sense of continuity between cause and effect or a sense of understanding between cause and effect. We promised this today we're going to hold ourselves to it and we're going to achieve this and achieve this and achieve this and move in a straight forward line until the job is done. That sense is lacking utterly.

FL: The last four years of the Clinton Administration...could you briefly just touch on the initiatives ... look at the underlying pattern if there is one?

KELLY:

I think you can see several larger patterns in the Clinton Administration's four years that stem from character. And one of these is a kind of astonishing flexibility. That this is an administration that is comfortable with being so profoundly different in its ideology and style and legislative policies between the first two years and the second two years, that it seems like two different administrations, and that in fact within the White House people think of it as two different administrations essentially.

There was the administration that was in place in 1993 and led to the disastrous defeat of the Democrats across the country in 1994, and then there was the post-1994 election administration. The first administration was pretty liberal and in some ways radical in its impulses. It attempted a great big, great big sweeping things like the reform of the entire health system in America.

The second administration is moderately conservative. Bill Clinton is running in 1996 as a moderate conservative. I think, slightly to the right of George Bush. And that's rather odd. But you don't have a sense that Bill Clinton thinks it's rather odd. And that kind of breathtaking flexibility is a great pattern in him. And I suppose it is the pattern of living in the moment, and believing what you say when you say it. It's in the short-term very effective as, politically, it keeps your opponent widely off-balance. I don't know how effective it is in the long-term.

The other pattern I think that you can discern is a ... the other pattern I think that you can discern has something in common with Clinton's earlier life as a Governor. When Clinton was first elected Governor he served one two-year term, lost, was thrown out of office by voters who felt essentially that he was too liberal, too radical, he and his people were too left for Arkansas, and they taxed people too much and they wore the wrong kind of clothes and so on, so they threw him out. He comes back with the help of among other people, a political consultant named Dick Morris, on the strength of a strategy that essentially boiled down to this: fashion a public image for yourself as a populist, but only choose the populist image, the populist programs and policies that are pretty safe. In Arkansas it was to be for good education. Well most people are for good education. Most people would like better schools for their children.

But the Clinton who came back after he was re-elected to office in Arkansas was not the more radical, not the more liberal Clinton who was defeated. He was no longer interested in taking on the moneyed interests in Arkansas to the degree that he had been. He was no longer interested in doing things that would alienate the voters in Arkansas as he had been, for instance raising taxes and so on.

And the fact that this necessitated a shift in direction of fairly large proportions was not a problem for him. He fashioned a kind of safe populism that, I think, is not very real, but that is based on giving the voters certain gimmies and so on, tax breaks... promise of better education for the children and so on, with a kind of cultural conservativism, or at least an appearance of cultural conservativism. He was not going to challenge the mores of this society any more.

That pattern you can see obtaining in the presidential pattern too, the pattern of these two administrations. The Clinton administration in 1993 - 1994 had people in it like the Surgeon General Jocelyn Elders, who said she thought that America should get over its love-affair with the fetus. It had, it had a kind of outspoken, "we're hip, we're young, we're in-your-face" quality to it -- very much like the first Clinton gubernatorial administration. That's all utterly gone now.

The Clinton administration of 1995 and 1996 is so culturally conservative that it has taken cultural issues away from the Republicans. The White House that's for the v-chip in television and is railing against the purveyors of filth in Hollywood. It's the liberal president Bill Clinton who rushes to sign the most dramatic revision of Habeus Corpus rights in forty years, and an anti-terrorist bill, and make more crimes federal death-penalty statutes and so on. That is a classic, that is a return to what worked for him before. This is what worked in Arkansas and this is what's going to work.