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latimes.com: Mr. Bull Moose may be best model for Clinton's post-White House years

latimes.com (Los Angeles Times) -- Bill Clinton has been reading up on the post-White House careers of former presidents. And as he begins his new life this week--with the specter of indictment suddenly lifted--he has reached some definite conclusions about the precedents.

To friends, Clinton has praised two of his predecessors as the most successful ex-presidents. Each represents a different model.

To Clinton, John Quincy Adams is the paramount example of continued political engagement. After he lost reelection in 1828, Adams led the anti-slavery cause for 17 years as a House member from Massachusetts.

Clinton's other paragon is Jimmy Carter. With his work in Africa, his support for global democracy and his charitable activities at home, Carter personifies the Mother Teresa model for life after the White House: the ex-president as penitent, the doer of good works.

Although drawn to both, neither of these alternatives entirely satisfies Clinton. Characteristically, he's looking for a third way: a model that would allow him to focus mostly on good works, but also remain politically engaged. Here Clinton might learn the most from Theodore Roosevelt--the president whose overall situation, upon leaving office, was perhaps most like Clinton's.

Like Clinton, Roosevelt was young for an ex-president (Roosevelt was just 50 when he left the White House, Clinton is 54). And like Roosevelt, Clinton is a man of voracious interests and boundless ambitions. Clinton believes Roosevelt took a wrong turn when he engaged in open warfare with his successor, William H. Taft (to the point of mounting a third-party presidential bid in 1912). But Clinton likes the way Roosevelt used his post-presidential years to promote a specific set of ideas ("the new nationalism"). The challenge for Clinton is finding the line between advancing a philosophy and feuding with his successor.

Clinton has dismissed recent stories that he's already decided to play a high-profile partisan role. He's told friends that he's exhausted and is likely to spend three months recuperating before making firm decisions. And whatever he does will have to be balanced against a baser imperative: the need to focus much of his time on making money, at least for the next few years.

But it's apparent to those around him that Clinton will keep a hand in politics. More than any presidents since Richard Nixon and Lyndon B. Johnson, Clinton saw himself as a political strategist. He's already decided that he wants to continue working behind the scenes to help shape the Democratic response to President Bush. Clinton is convinced, for instance, that the National Rifle Assn. was a deciding factor in Al Gore's narrow defeat and the Democratic failure to retake the House. He's eager to explore new ways for Democrats to address the gun control issue.

Clinton is well positioned for this backstage role. His wife's election to the Senate gives him both an opportunity and an excuse to continue to interact with Democratic congressional leaders. And the anticipated election of his confidant Terry McAuliffe as chairman of the Democratic National Committee will provide him easy access there too.

The more difficult question is how public a role to assume. Clinton's initial instinct is to keep a low profile at first. Privately, Clinton has said the spotlight should shift to Democrats who can run for president in 2004--from Gore to Sen. Evan Bayh of Indiana, the incoming chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council.

Yet, like Teddy Roosevelt, Clinton is drawn toward promoting the philosophy he tried to define as president. Clinton is planning to remain active in the international association of center-left leaders that he organized with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. And he's likely to remain active in the DLC, the centrist Democratic organization he chaired before 1992.

But those close to him say Clinton is torn about how far beyond that to venture. With the unhappy Roosevelt experience in mind, he seems to recognize intellectually that it would be best to avoid too much direct conflict with his successor. But it's not clear whether he's emotionally capable of simply biting his lip if Bush takes aim at some of his signature programs and priorities.

And Bush, as he puts his own stamp on Washington, is sure to provide Clinton plenty of provocation. The new administration is on track to repeal or reverse a series of Clinton executive orders probably even before all the boxes are unpacked at the White House. Groups on both sides of the abortion issue expect Bush to quickly repeal Clinton's order permitting U.S. funding for international family planning organizations that provide counseling on abortion. Bush has also indicated that he will skeptically review Clinton's orders setting aside millions of acres of public lands as national monuments and his recent decision to bar development on one-fourth of all federal timberland.

Over the longer term, other conflicts appear unavoidable. One area worth watching is the Community Reinvestment Act, the law requiring banks to make home mortgages and other loans available in low-income neighborhoods. Clinton dramatically toughened enforcement, which helped push homeownership rates among blacks and Latinos to unprecedented highs.

But the act sits in unstable ground between two competing Bush instincts. The new president has pledged to increase minority homeownership, but he also recoils from federal regulation of business. The act's regulations are administered through the Treasury Department's comptroller of the currency. Clinton allies take it as an ominous sign that incoming Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill showed little interest in the issue when one of his predecessors from the old administration, Robert E. Rubin, tried to raise it in a recent conversation.

For their part, Bush and his aides seem resigned to eventual sparks between these first two baby boom presidents. One senior advisor to Bush said that, although Clinton may initially avoid the limelight, the new administration would not be surprised if the former president eventually overshadows Gore as the leading voice of opposition.

In both parties, few would be shocked if Clinton ultimately reaches the same conclusion as Teddy Roosevelt, who once wrote an ally that although it was "a very ungracious thing for an ex-president to criticize his successor . . . I cannot as an honest man cease to battle for the principles [for] which you and I . . . stood."


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Monday, January 22, 2001

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