The qualms before the storm

How might Clinton and Obama handle the Oval Office? On the eve of Super Tuesday, what we still don't know could come back to haunt us.

Walter Shapiro
salon.com
Feb. 4, 2008

After 18 debates, $41 million in television ads and more town meetings than New England witnessed since the dawn of democracy, what is left to know about Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama? In theory, a year-long (and counting) presidential campaign can be justified as an attempt to teach us about the candidates by replicating the pressures of the Oval Office, much as planning a wedding imperfectly mirrors the stresses of marriage. But, in truth, so much that voters need to know about the next president is unknowable.

I first interviewed Hillary Clinton in the governor's mansion in Little Rock in September 1992. I have been following Barack Obama closely since he made his first test-the-waters foray into Iowa in September 2006. And yet as a New York primary voter, I feel like I will be groping in the dark next Tuesday when I pull the lever for Clinton or Obama. The old-fashioned voting machine will register my choice with a satisfying ker-chunk, but the sound in my ears will be the dismaying roar of continued uncertainty. Try as I might to accentuate the positive, I cannot fully transcend my reservations about both candidates.

What gives me pause is the memory that the last three newly elected Democratic presidents had a bumpy arrival in the White House. (Lyndon Johnson, elevated by the assassination of JFK, was a special case.) The generational torch may have been passed to John Kennedy in 1961, but so was (courtesy of the Eisenhower administration) the planning for the ill-conceived Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Jimmy Carter (in whose administration I served) faced what turned out to be an insurmountable learning curve going from a single term in the Georgia gubernatorial mansion to the White House. As for the early days of the Clinton presidency, it is hard to know whether to start with the slapdash way the White House staff was chosen, the three tries to select an attorney general, the Waco disaster or that hardy perennial, the failure of healthcare reform.

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