Clinton spokesman evaluates boss

Striking a tone of slight frustration, President Bill Clinton's former press secretary Mike McCurry '76 characterized the Clinton presidency as a period of significant achievement marred by an increasingly adversarial press and partisan Congress in a lecture to students and visitors in Dodds Auditorium yesterday morning.

Despite Clinton's many domestic and international advances during his two terms as president, McCurry said, above all, "the record and legacy of the Clinton presidency is, dare I use the word, 'stain.' "

"In some ways, he had enormous potential and political gifts. But, they didn't arise because of his lack of discipline," McCurry added.

McCurry, who served as Clinton's press secretary from 1995 to 1998, was the president of the Press Club while at Princeton and was a contributing reporter to the Times of Trenton.

In his speech, McCurry touched on the three factors that he claimed most influenced Clinton's presidency.

First, he said the end of the Cold War in 1989 exacerbated partisan politics in the United States.

"President Clinton found himself trapped in abrupt shifts in American foreign policy," McCurry said. "Our politics at home lost bipartisan policy."

The explosion of the Internet and partisan media networks, he said, also heavily changed Clinton's time in office because of a new concentration on scandals. Clinton, McCurry said, frequently remarked that when he assumed the presidency in 1992, there were 50 web pages on the Internet. By the end of his second term, there were approximately 50 million.

McCurry noted that these electronic news sources — typified by the Drudge Report — ran through a serial list of crises and scandals that marked Clinton's time as president, including gays in the military, "White House sleepovers," Paula Jones, Monica Lewinsky and Clinton's impeachment.

"This was the press' focus day after day," he said. "There was an inability to change to more substantive topics."

This new focus of national press coverage, McCurry said, is the reason the media is still dysfunctional today.

Another important factor that shaped Clinton's presidency, McCurry said, is "the ambivalence of the baby boom generation," which is a generation "that lacks emotional intelligence."

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McCurry said this generation came of age in the 1960s believing that the government could do "extraordinary things."

The result of this generation, McCurry said, was a country where "we wanted to have much more government than we were willing to pay for."

While these roadblocks caused problems for Clinton's presidency, McCurry said, "Bill Clinton tried to practice the politics of inspiration." The reason many of his goals could not be accomplished, McCurry added, remains tied to his scandalous presidency.

"[Creating a] legacy," he said, "that moment when his skills could have been put forward in an activist way, was not his time. Maybe it will be time for another Clinton."