Laurels Elude President as Public Judges a War
By John M. Broder
Washington -- Presidents can ordinarily expect a surge in public support when they commit American forces to a foreign conflict and an even greater reward in public approval when the war ends with minimal loss of American life.
But the conflict in Kosovo is no ordinary one, and Bill Clinton is no ordinary President.
Clinton went on prime-time television 10 days ago to declare that the United States and NATO had won the war in Yugoslavia after 78 days of aerial bombardment. Clinton said that President Slobodan Milosevic's agreement to withdraw most of his troops from Kosovo represented "victory for a safer world, for our democratic values and for a stronger America."
But according to polls taken in the last week, fewer than half of Americans agreed with him. And just as public opinion surveys during the conflict showed no rallying around the President, the polls last week showed no "victory bounce" in Clinton's public approval ratings.
The poll results reflect public ambivalence about the way the war in the Balkans was conducted and about its ambiguous end, with streams of traumatized refugees returning to the charred and moldering remnants of their former lives. The survey results also demonstrate a skepticism about the claims of a President who acknowledged misleading the country about an affair with a former White House intern and who escaped Senate conviction on impeachment charges just four months ago.
Clinton's supporters and his critics agree that something has changed in the way Americans view the nation's role in the world and the respect they accord the Commander in Chief. But they differ profoundly on whether this is the fruit of Clinton's behavior in office or the natural result of the end of the bipolar world of the cold war.
Gone, for now, are the days when an American leader would see a large spike in his poll numbers during and after any military operation, even one with mixed results. Gone, at least for this President, is the rally-round-the-flag instinct of the American public.
In two recent polls, about two-fifths of Americans expressed belief that the allies had achieved the goals of 11 weeks of relentless bombardment of Yugoslavia. A Gallup Poll revealed that 40 percent of Americans said that Milosevic's agreement to withdraw his troops from Kosovo represented a victory for the United States. A survey from the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that only 46 percent of the public believed that Washington and its NATO allies had met their goals.
Why does the public grant Clinton so little credit for completing an operation that has cost not a single American life and achieved at least some of its stated goals?
Depends on whom you ask.
"After all we've been through with him, it's impossible to have Bill Clinton as a sustainable hero," said Douglas Brinkley, professor of history at the University of New Orleans. "Ever since 1992, when he was perceived as a waffler at best and a liar at worst, he has never represented the best of the Presidential tradition. He's seen as an astute politician, a likable person. But there have always been deep-seated suspicions about his motives."
A skeptical public ascribes Clinton's successes to luck, not skill, Professor Brinkley said. They admire the President's uncanny ability to crawl out of a deep hole relatively unscathed, but they never forget that Clinton usually dug the hole himself. They believe some, but hardly all, of what he tells them.
Professor Brinkley, it should be noted, is a sometime admirer of the President and an occasional adviser to the Democrats.
Andrew Kohut, who runs the Pew center, said the public was ambivalent about Clinton's "victory" in Kosovo because the results so far had been messy and ambiguous.
The Serb withdrawal represents something less than clear-cut triumph, Kohut said, and it is clear from news reports that a fearsome slaughter took place in Kosovo that NATO was powerless to prevent.
"People generally think we tried to do the right thing," he said, "but many people are wary about what we may or may not have achieved."
The American public's ambivalence about the Kosovo conflict reflected other factors as well. The remote-control nature of the air campaign made the war feel distant and bloodless, with few images of American servicemen in combat and few accounts of heroism under fire. In addition, officials in Washington took pains to portray the war as NATO's war, not Clinton's, an effort to spread criticism when things went wrong that also diffused the credit when the conflict ended.
Kohut noted the oddity that Clinton's public approval ratings rose after he admitted an adulterous relationship with Monica S. Lewinsky, but fell markedly when he unleashed the first missile attack on Yugoslavia in March. Clinton's job-approval rating has hovered in the mid-50's for the last three months in Kohut's poll.
"This is definitely not the cold war era when a President goes to lunch with some foreign dignitary and his approval rating goes up three points," Kohut said.
Such bounces in public approval used to be routine for Presidents who sent American forces into harm's way, even when the threat was exaggerated, as in Grenada, or the results were mixed, as in the Persian Gulf.
Clinton's supporters, not surprisingly, have a different explanation for why the President gets no respect as Commander in Chief.
Joe Lockhart, the President's press secretary, said that Clinton was mercilessly criticized for his decision to pursue the war solely in the air, but that few of his critics had stepped forward to admit error. The critics now say that Clinton achieved at best a modest political victory that is certain to crumble over time, Lockhart said.
"It's gotten to the point where it's comical," he said, displaying no sense of humor about the subject. "People revise their own history and disown their own opinions, twisting and bending the facts to fit their own conclusions. The only good part of this is that it has absolutely no effect on anybody. Nobody is listening."
[end]
Carl Remick