Senator Clinton? - prospects of Clinton running for back to Congress after the presidency - Cover Story

On January 20, 2001, after smiling gracefully through the inauguration of his successor, William Jefferson Clinton will begin a retirement very different from that of most ex-Presidents.

That afternoon, he will board a plane back to his native Arkansas. He will take a few discreet weeks of down time, then set up shop in Hope. Americans will hear of his morning walks, which will take him the few blocks from his new home to the office he has rented, the one with the simple sign outside that reads, "Bill Clinton--Attorney at Law." Reporters will ask how it feels to go from being the most powerful man in the world to being a simple country lawyer. "Great," Clinton will reply, quoting his hero, Thomas Jefferson, to the effect that the Presidency is an act of service one gives one's country, not an imperial designation, as some would have it.

Clinton will practice little law, spending most of his time completing the first volume in a set of memoirs--which will pay all of his outstanding legal bills and position him comfortably in the nation's millionaire class. Then, after the briefest retirement, he will surprise America by announcing that he has chosen to answer the call of his home-state Democratic Party. "Reluctantly, at the urging of my friends, my family, and my Party, I have decided to run for the United States Senate."

Elected overwhelmingly by Arkansans, Clinton will begin the first of many terms in that most august of legislative bodies.

Farfetched? Hardly, says veteran Clinton watcher Ernest Dumas, the former political writer for the Arkansas Gazette. "No one who has seriously followed Bill Clinton's political career can imagine him not running for office again," says Dumas, now a college professor and must-read political columnist in Little Rock. "It's probably a Senate race. But whatever contest it is, there'll be another race. That's Clinton's way."

Michael Dorris was even more certain. "He's definitely going to run for Senate," the author of The Broken Cord told The Progressive two months before he committed suicide. Dorris, who was a friend of Clinton's for more than twenty years, suggested he had heard this from the Clintons themselves.

It wouldn't surprise Paul Greenberg the Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial-page editor of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. "I think he's going to run for public office again, and I certainly wouldn't rule out a run for the Senate," says Greenberg, who has been keeping track of Clinton for twenty-five years. "Whenever I say this, people give me strange looks. But once you've watched Clinton long enough, you start to understand how the man operates. The one thing that you always come back to with Bill Clinton is that he so enjoys running for office."

No doubt about that, says Dumas. "Obviously, there are no higher posts than President," he says. "So if he's going to stay active, he has to go down the ladder. And, as steps down the ladder go, the Senate's a pretty comfortable one."

For those who still seek an explanation for Clinton's lack of principle in dealing with a Republican Congress and the insatiable demands of corporate special interests, his unceasing ambition (even on a downward ladder to the Senate) provides one.

"There was this thought--you heard it expressed all the time by all sorts of different people during last year's Presidential campaign--that after Bill Clinton won this last election he would be liberated and move to the left," reflects veteran activist David Mixner, a political and personal confidant of Clinton's for almost thirty years. "But he's even moved further to the right of center. He isn't acting like a lame-duck President. He's acting like somebody who has another election coming."

Americans are not accustomed to considering second-term Presidents as anything more than lame ducks. Since World War II, the only Presidents who finished a full two terms in the White House were Dwight Eisenhower, who retired at age seventy-one after having suffered a heart attack and a serious stroke, and Ronald Reagan, who hung up his political spurs at seventy-seven in the early stages of a devastating bout with Alzheimer's.

"We're used to thinking of ex-Presidents as men who have pretty much come to the end of their political lives. They might write their memoirs or set up their Presidential library, maybe even do some humanitarian work, but we don't tend to expect major career moves from them," says David Wilhelm, the former Democratic National Committee chairman who ran Clinton's 1992 Presidential campaign. "But Clinton's not in his seventies, like Reagan and Bush. He's a whole generation younger."

Indeed, when he leaves office at age fifty-four, Clinton will be the youngest man in American history to have finished two terms in the White House. The only younger person to finish his time in the Presidency was Teddy Roosevelt, who left the Oval Office in 1909 at age fifty and promptly began preparing to seek the Presidency again in 1912.

For Clinton, however, another run at the Presidency is foreclosed by the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, which provides that no person shall be elected President more than twice. But his other options remain open--remarkably open.

Of more than a dozen veteran Clinton associates and observers contacted for this article, all agreed he would write the standard set of Presidential memoirs and probably a line of policy texts patterned after those of Richard Nixon. Most thought he would join the same lucrative lecture circuit that has been so good to George Bush. And few doubted that he would lend his name to the same sort of partisan fundraising efforts to which Gerald Ford has devoted himself.

Celebrity book contracts being what they are, Clinton will be able to set himself up quite nicely with a deal for his memoirs and a few additional books. Besides, it's easy to hold expenses down when you have, as Clinton will, a full personal staff and security contingent paid for by the American taxpayers that will respond to his every whim until his death.

So what, then, does a Bill Clinton do when he is freed from financial responsibility?

Clinton said during his 1996 reelection campaign that it would be his last foray into politics.

But later he told a reporter that, because of his interest in education, he might run for a local school-board seat. Those who know Clinton say only a fool would bet that the "comeback kid" of American politics hasn't pondered more adventurous electoral forays.

More than one Clinton confidant has heard the President recount the story of how John Quincy Adams served for seventeen years in the House of Representatives after finishing his Presidency.

"Bill Clinton is a student of history. He's very familiar with the story of John Quincy Adams," says Tom McRae, vice president of the Arkansas-based Southern Development Bank, and a man who has been both a "Friend of Bill" and a serious critic.

A lackluster President who presided over the nation for a single term in the 1820s, Adams made little impression on the nation as chief executive. But less than two years after leaving the White House in 1829, Adams was elected by his neighbors in southeastern Massachusetts to represent them in the U.S. House.

Over the next seventeen years, Adams established a Congressional record that eclipsed his Presidential one in terms of commitment and political courage. He led the fight to open a debate on slavery on the floor of the House. When he won, he read hundreds of anti-slavery petitions into the Congressional Record. He went before the U.S. Supreme Court to argue successfully for the freedom of the slaves who mutinied aboard the Spanish ship Armistad. He cleared the way for the development of the Smithsonian Institution at a time when many in government wanted to refuse donations from England's James Smithson. He voted no on the declaration of war against Mexico in 1846, and he spent the last two years of his life speaking out on the floor of Congress against American imperialism.

Whether Clinton would rise in stature as Adams did in Congress is anybody's guess. But his prospects in Arkansas are not in serious doubt. Clinton could probably win another election there. "The state has always been so defensive," says political columnist Dumas. "The idea of having Clinton representing us in the Senate might make people feel they'd get a little more attention."

People on both sides of the political aisle suggest that Clinton could revitalize Democratic prospects in a state that now has a Republican governor and a Republican U.S. Senator for the first time since Reconstruction.

Next year, when U.S. Senator Dale Bumpers, a Democrat, retires, Arkansas might well end up with two Republican U.S. Senators.

If that is the case, then Arkansas will face Senatorial elections in both 2002 and 2004. In either year, Clinton could run for a U.S. Senate seat held by a Republican. That possibility certainly appeals to Arkansas Democrats--and frightens Arkansas Republicans. They'd rather have him out of the state.

"The best thing to happen to the Republican Party in this state is Bill Clinton getting elected President," says Richard Bearden, executive director of the state's GOP. "We've joked that we'd be willing to change the Constitution and let Bill Clinton have another term as President. It wouldn't be a bad deal for us."

John Nichols is an editorial writer for The Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin. He covers electoral politics for The Progressive.

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