One Hundred Days of Lassitude

President Bill Clinton's first 100 days have come and gone, and whatever the numerological significance of this period, politicos feel that it is no longer unseemly to write reflectively about the young administration.

And in reflection, the Clinton Administration seems to have passed its first 100 days without chalking up any substantive accomplishments. To hear President Clinton tell it, however, his hundred-day-honeymoon has been the most eventful since Franklin Roosevelt's.

It would be altogether too easy to dismiss this assertion as the perfunctory but necessary posturing of a candidate who promised instant dynamism, but produced nothing more than paralysis. But the clash between Clinton's belief that he's a proven man of action and the apparent reality of his stagnant administration is not just a matter of politics; it is a true dissonance of perception. Clinton is the first president of a generation which values deliberation as much as, and perhaps more than, substantive action.

Consider the primary "accomplishments" of the Clinton Administration. The President has convened the Health Care Task Force. His administration has reshuffled the White House staff and structure, moving such posts as the United Nations ambassador and the Environmental Protection Agency director to the cabinet level.

Neither of these accomplishments is truly an action. Both are deliberative, internal to the policy formulation process. In short, they are instrumentalities to future action. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Ira C. Magaziner can brainstorm until the cows come home, but nothing will happen without a sedulous effort to realize whatever ideas they generate.

The Clinton administration has proven itself full of master-brainstormers. The First Lady heads a so-called "Task Force"--a rather interesting turn of a phrase, since the carton of egg-heads at its helm has accomplished no tasks outside of its own deliberations, and has applied no force to effect any actual changes in the external world. The Secretary of the Interior came up with a great plan to change the way federal lands are managed. The Department of Health and Human Services floated a proposal for federally funded childhood immunization. Clinton himself formulated a much ballyhooed stimulus package.

All of these looked formidable on paper; they were probably the result of endless meetings, committees and think-tank reports. Yet none amounts to more than the merest moonshine, because the Clinton Administration was unable to implement them.

Why and how these plans have stalled is not as relevant as the way the president regards them. Even after his administration has failed to execute them, Clinton still considers them accomplishments. Without blushing, he has lectured the press on these and other "accomplishments" of the first hundred days.

But debate, discussion and deliberation are functions internal to the administration, the brain of the body politic. Simply to have thought of something does not amount to having done it. This sort of cogitation lacks any real value, political or practical--its value is merely contingent on some prospect of future action.

Obviously every presidential administration has done its share of thinking--otherwise. American policy would be even more haphazard then it already is. The difference is that now this internal process is advertised as an externally palpable achievement.

You can't lay all the blame on Bill Clinton; after all, the president is a man of his generation. Beginning with the baby-bloomers, Americans have developed a very different set of assumptions about the relative weight of debate and action. Holdovers from the generation before Clinton's knew a United States that still had a vibrant manufacturing sector; they remember an America that made things. For the baby boomers, the service sector represents the essence of the country's productive life. And in a service culture, the divide between thought and action is much less clear. The closest many people of Clinton's age and education get to action is writing a memo. Their battlefields are board meetings and "working groups."

It is Clinton's generation that has exalted a profession dedicated entirely to deliberation. How many people went into "consulting" 50 years ago? The Clinton Administration is filled with consultants. The rest are either academics or lawyers, perhaps the only two professions as categorically addicted to profitless jawing.

The careers of these Clintonites have been centered around spouting--they are cerebral fountains. For consultants, lawyers and academics, fruitful rumination may be considered a legitimate accomplishment. But in politics, it is implementation that counts.

If the Clinton Administration is to achieve anything, it must understand this. Its underlying philosophy must change from "I think therefore I am " to "to be is to do." Otherwise Clinton's next three and one-half years will be no more successful than these past hundred days. And the administration will not turn out to be the whirlwind of change the campaign promised, but a four-year debating club for Friends of Bill.