Why Clinton wishes he were JFK.

• Author: Reeves, Richard
• Position: Clinton's relations with Congress

"Prigogine" was the vice president's answer. Albert Gore Jr.--son of a senator, raised in Washington, himself a member of Congress from 1977 to 1992--was explaining to me, right before the 1994 election, his theory about what has changed over the years in the nation's capital.

Hya Prigogine is a Belgian physicist (Russian-born) who won the Nobel Prize in 1977 for his work in thermodynamics. "If you look at a system with more and more energy and matter coming in," Gore said, "it will spontaneously reorganize itself into a more complicated system. Something different will come out, but what it is can't be predicted beforehand."

Gore picked up a pen and drew a diagram: a pipeline leading into an empty chamber, representing Washington, and another pipeline leading out. More molecules poured in: more matter, more energy, more heat, more information, new news cycles, new action-reaction-action-reaction, faster and faster. Pow! Something happens inside--Gore scrawls a new world in the chamber--and then something different comes out the other end. Inside there are new men, new women, new media, new money, new information, new relationships: a new Washington.

Gore's sketch is part of the answer to what must be the central question of the Clinton presidency: How could Bill Clinton, the most talented politician of his generation, seem so baffled so much of the time? The answer is that the capital is on overload, different from what he knew and different from what he expected, and, soon, different from what it was when he arrived. Even those who have spent all their lives here are at a loss. Information--decentralized, accelerating, and increasingly bewildering--drives Washington. Decision-making is high-speed and interactive; analysis and adjustment are reactive and continuous. "These changes," concluded Gore, "are not friendly to the linear debate envisioned by the Founding Fathers." The electronic din is robbing presidents of Richard Reeves, a syndicated columnist and author of President Kennedy: Profile of Power, is currently writing a book on the presidency of Richard Nixon. what had previously been their greatest power: the ability to shape and control the flow of information to the nation. The president's voice is now one among many, along with those of Rush Limbaugh, The New York Times, The National Enquirer, the CIA, the Pharmaceutical Manufacturers Association, Larry King, and you and me. Even an old newspaper staple, the story-behind-the-story, has been overtaken by a different beast: the story-before-the-story. In the fall of 1993, when two Los Angeles Times reporters went to Little Rock to check out a new round of rumors about Clinton's sex life, California Republican Robert Dornan took to Limbaugh's program to announce that the paper was about to publish. "Is this democratization," Washington veteran and former White House Counsel Lloyd Cutler asked me, or disintegration?"

The President's leadership model has been John F. Kennedy, the man who he says inspired his life in politics. But this isn't Kennedy's Washington. As soon as the 1992 election was over Clinton tried, as Kennedy had done, to ally himself with liberal congressional leaders. But there was no Speaker Sam Rayburn this time. The weary Democrats Clinton inherited, George Mitchell and Tom Foley, had lost touch and grasp. "The...