Clinton’s Key Goal: Building for Future

WASHINGTON — More than a quarter-century ago, when President Clinton was still a student at Georgetown University, he had a professor who liked to admonish: “Future preference. Don’t ever forget that.”

Today, as Clinton takes the oath of office for his second term in the White House, it is a lesson he remembers vividly, a lesson that has shaped the vision he will set forth in his inaugural address before a global audience.

Indeed, the future long has occupied a prominent role in the president’s thoughts--both as a political strategy to isolate opponents and as an influence on how he governs the nation and thinks about the world. Clinton’s much-traveled “bridge to the 21st century” helped him win reelection. And now, as the next millennium begins to capture the public’s imagination, the future is key to Clinton’s second-term proposals for schools, technology, the budget and other matters.

“What we have to do is imagine the world of possibility in the 21st century . . . how we can sort of seize the good things and beat down the bad things and create that world,” Clinton said in a recent interview with The Times.

To construct this new world, the president continued, Americans in effect need to sift through issues of personal responsibility and community, figuring out “what things we can do on our own and what things we have to do together and through government--and then create that.”

Throughout history, presidents have used inaugurations to offer a broad-gauged vision of society: from Abraham Lincoln, whose address called on war-weary Americans to “bind up the nation’s wounds” to John F. Kennedy, who a century later proclaimed that a torch had been passed to a new generation.

Clinton, however, provides an unusual example in his zeal to define the future, describe the pathway and, in the process, squeeze out every ounce of political benefit he can.

Americans retain a substantial reservoir of optimism about the future, polls show. Yet the future also remains a symbol of the unknown, suggesting economic uncertainty, bewildering technologies and the unraveling of age-old institutions and ways of life.

In expressing hope and optimism about this hazy tomorrow, as Clinton is certain to do today, he is adopting an approach that offers political rewards and also reflects his own world view, some scholars believe.

“Somewhere in there is some mixture of political advice and his personal predilections,” said John Petrocik, a political scientist at UCLA.

To find the seeds of Clinton’s future focus is to imagine a Georgetown University classroom in the 1960s, where a Western civilization professor named Carroll Quigley would lecture students on the need to “prefer” the future--accepting sacrifice today for a better tomorrow.

“That belief has taken man out of the chaos and deprivation that most human beings toiled in for most of history to the point we are at today,” Quigley lectured, according to the account by David Maraniss in his biography of Clinton, “First in His Class.”

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The student who went on to become president recounted this lesson in his 1992 campaign manifesto, “Putting People First,” as he wrote that striving for the future is what has made America the “greatest country in history.”

Lofty as such thoughts may be, Clinton also learned to use the future as a weapon in the coarser battleground of politics, identifying his proposals with a better tomorrow while tagging opponents with failed policies of an earlier day.

“Folks, this is a clear choice,” Clinton declared at a typical campaign stop last fall in Louisville, Ky. “Hope against fear, the future against the failed policies of the past, a village working together against ‘you’re on your own.’ ”

To Petrocik, the “bridge to the 21st century” that Clinton was fond of citing on the campaign trail sounded like “somebody who was rewriting polling data,” given voters’ receptiveness to an upbeat, forward-looking message. Such rhetoric, the onetime Republican consultant added, “is the kind of thing that a political strategy session comes up with.”

At the same time, some who know Clinton argue that the realities of a world in flux have hit the president close to home. While the symbolism of a new millennium may be too enticing for speech writers to resist, it also is true that Clinton holds the reins of power at a time of authentic change.

New forms of media proliferate. The Cold War is over. A globalized economy offers spectacular rewards to the skillful but increasingly penalizes those without education. Computer technologies have remade the workplace. American society seems to have fragmented in myriad ways, both economically and culturally.

On top of all that, it has been Clinton’s fate to occupy the Oval Office at a time when government programs that once seemed the very essence of a modern, progressive democracy have been battered by soaring costs and declining public support.

“The part that comes from his gut is ‘what can we still do with government--and why?’ ” said Sam Popkin, a political scientist at UC San Diego and deputy pollster in Clinton’s 1992 campaign.

In a 1993 speech at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library Museum in Boston, Clinton laid out what he saw as the basic economic challenges Americans face in the changing world. The “dawn of the 21st century,” he said, is an era of new possibilities, but also one in which many workers are threatened with stagnant incomes, slow economic growth and other complex, frustrating problems.

He asserted that the nation has little choice but to go forward into the “new frontier,” adding: “No one has all the answers, but we do know one thing: We will never find the answer if we don’t continue on the journey.”

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Two major areas to search for answers, Clinton has recently suggested, are in greater social unity and improved education.

White House budget plans for 1998, for instance, will feature tax proposals to make post-high school education more affordable; one tax break will be aimed at community college students and another more generally at university students.

When it comes to education, “you’re going to see him go back to it and back to it and back to it,” predicted Elaine Kamarck, an aide to Vice President Al Gore and an architect of the administration’s bid to “reinvent government.”

Expectations about the future have shaped other administration plans as well, including some highly controversial within Clinton’s own Democratic Party.

His support for welfare reform with work requirements reflected the view that the program not only was failing but was threatening public support of the government. The push for the North American Free Trade Agreement and other trade accords was dictated by a view that U.S. affluence is increasingly linked to global commerce.

Throughout the campaign, Clinton tried to galvanize support for federal science funding by saluting advances in science and medicine, from nerve transplants in laboratory animals to new AIDS treatments. Second-term efforts to improve worker training will reflect his view that the future is increasingly threatening to those without modern job skills.

“It’s very important to have a vision of what the world is going to look like and what life could be like for Americans, and to try to keep working toward it,” he told the Los Angeles Times Magazine in 1994.

In an interview with The Times last month, Clinton drew a parallel between his own challenges and those of such predecessors as Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson.

Jefferson, he said, used his powers of imagination to help guide the fledgling United States, envisioning an educated populace and then promoting schools to accomplish it. Roosevelt and Wilson, who held power in times of increased urbanization and mass movement from farms to factories, imagined roles for government as a buffer against the harsher edges of capitalism.

His job, Clinton said, is to “imagine the world of possibility” in the next century, despite the “old demons” of racial and ethnic hatreds and terrorism; it is a matter of altering government and private institutions, and creating “an ethic” of service and citizenship.

“The test will be, did we succeed in preparing the country for the 21st century,” he said. “That’s the hand we’ve been dealt, and we have to play it. That’s our job. That’s my job, and that’s the job of everybody else in this administration.”

Times political writer Ronald Brownstein contributed to this story.