Well, never mind; the question seemed to be moot-ed with the president’s change of course–his adoption of a reasonably credible budget and his entry into the fray. But it wasn’t mooted, only waiting to reappear in a slightly different context. For Clinton’s indefatigable aides now seemed determined to let the world know that his new budget initiative, too, was a politically motivated, devilishly clever act. Just on the off chance that anyone might take their leader seriously and at face value, the president’s satellites and anonymous explainers were cited in the same stories–they didn’t even miss a news cycle-bragging about how this was really going to put the Republicans on the spot har har har. Some elaborated on how the move had been conceived precisely to do so.

I don’t wish to suggest that the Clinton White House is the only one engaged in this strange kind of self-undermining boastfulness. At least as long ago as the Nixon administration you began to get politicians in high places reading you the cooking directions off the soup can instead of simply being content to serve the soup. Nixon and Agnew were forever explaining the brilliant political, manipulative wisdom of their actions, thereby rendering them suspect. And as recently as last week you had some Republican senators letting the word get around that the votes they had east ending the chances of Dr. Henry Foster to be confirmed as surgeon general were impelled by reasons of strategy to do with COP nomination politics. But it must be said that the Clinton White House has taken this foot-shooting trend to a new place.

There is, for example, the matter of the blithely, if not mindlessly, leaked insult, Understand that I harbor no special affection for either the Democratic congressional leadership or what are generally known as the Democratic Party’s core constituencies when I say that it is not immediately apparent to me why the president’s aides and boosters would go out of their way to give either of them a poke in the eye with a sharp stick. Yet this, too, happened when Clinton produced his new budget and it, too, made the same news cycle, suggesting that there were those around the chief executive who just couldn’t wait to get this gloss on his action into the news.

Then cheerfully offered analyses included two thoughts that stood out. One held that the president’s action constituted a declaration of independence from his party’s leadership in Congress. Another held that Clinton’s action was bound to disturb the Democratic Party’s core constituencies–meaning the labor and liberal and minority beneficiaries of programs Clinton would now be committed to cut, But, the speaker continued, who cared? After all, he said, these constituencies hadn’t been all that essential to Clinton’s election. Encountering this in the paper, I wondered: Does the president have one of his fabled temper tantrums when he reads such things? Or does he merely say, “Thanks guys”?

There is some analysis of Clinton’s decision to produce a budget which holds that he has been moving away from an uncomfortable several-year entanglement with the traditional Democratic establishment and back toward his original more conservative, so-called “new Democrat” orientation. But even if true, it does not explain these gratuitous pokes at the party and its leaders on the Hill, all of whom will be needed by the Clinton White House for one thing or another. And, in any event, smart politics is not about needlessly alienating anyone; it’s about getting people on your side or, at the very least, neutralizing their discontent.

The only explanation I can come up with for what these presumed helpers of Clinton are doing is that they believe all the junk they read about how being seen to make some unpopular interest or constituency mad will help enormously in getting the vote from everyone else. And, of course, they believe not only in doing this, but also in making sure that everyone who reads the Daily Bugle and tunes in to the 6 o’clock news knows they are doing this, smart things that they are. We saw the same last year in the much-advertised attempt to be seen punching out the big insurance companies in the course of the health-care fight; there was much self-congratulatory prose coming from consultants concerning the wisdom of being seen in a fight with a despised opponent. More recently there have been intimations that, to the extent black Americans are made audibly unhappy by administration policy changes, angry white middle-class votes will accrue to Clinton. And now comes the wisdom that being seen in a quarrel with the far-from-popular congressional Democrats can also only be an electoral plus.

But Bill Clinton doesn’t need to be seen fighting against some entity or interest his dim well-wishers have conceived as this month’s useful enemy of choice. He needs to be seen fighting for something he believes. This would ‘revolve trying to bring in as much support as he could rather than picking fake, image-boosting fights with this one and that. It would also involve a sustained effort. If he did all this the image would take care of itself, although it’s hard to imagine that his voluble helpers would be content to leave it at that.