On the Edge: The Clinton Presidency.

• Author: Noah, Timothy

Six weeks before the 1992 presidential election, a Wall Street Journal-NBC News poll showed that voters believed Bill Clinton would do better than George Bush in dealing with the economy, creating new jobs, addressing health care and education, reducing the federal deficit, and protecting the environment. Voters even thought Clinton would better handle taxes and welfare policy, two areas where Democrats traditionally had been thought weak.

That doesn't mean people thought Bill Clinton was the better person. Quite the opposite: Responses to several questions in the poll showed that voters had a higher opinion of Bush's character than of Clinton's. More than three times as many respondents said they were dissatisfied with Clinton's character than said the same about Bush, and Bush edged out Clinton on a question about which candidate voters trusted more. Bush was a war hero; Clinton had famously (and, for his generation, rather typically) maneuvered his way out of the Vietnam draft. And while there were nasty rumors that both men had had extra-marital affairs, in Bush's case the evidence was pretty thin, whereas in Clinton's case the evidence (including statements by Clinton himself that bordered on outright confession) was fairly compelling.

Thus emerged a dichotomy that has persisted through the first two years of his presidency: People tend to think of Bill Clinton simultaneously as both a somewhat slippery character and an able political leader. This rather complex perception has torqued the national mood swings about Clinton's presidency.

Elizabeth Drew is aware of the problem; her new book notes on the first page that Clinton's "ups and downs were followed closely" and "sometimes exaggerated" by the public. Immediately after his election victory, Clinton could do no wrong; when his job-stimulus package failed to get through a Democratic Congress, he was seen as pathetically weak; when his deficit-reduction plan and the North American Free Trade Agreement passed, his presidency was suddenly a triumph; when Whitewater and Troopergate churned up questions about his past, his presidency was a failure; when the crime bill cleared Congress, his presidency was revived; and after his health care bill went south, many Democrats running for re-election avoided him like the pneumonic plague. I probably missed a cycle or two here.

Of course, every president has his ups and downs. George bush was typecast as the schizoid president, capable on foreign policy and comically indifferent to domestic affairs; his Q ratings bounced up with the Persian Gulf war and down with the emergence of "it's the economy, stupid" as the election-year mantra. Carter and Reagan are more straightforward cases: Their presidencies were long slides into oblivion, more painful in Carter's case because it was quicker (and because Reagan, who...