But as no less an authority than Mr. Clinton reminded us, the comparison is incomplete and imperfect. “The story line is how well we worked with the Republicans and all that,” he said during his brief West Wing comeback. “But you know, we played political kabuki for a year.”
Indeed, the real history of his response to the Republican takeover of Congress in 1994 was more complicated than the reductionist version. And so far, Mr. Obama’s response to the November elections has been more complicated as well. The current president’s uncomfortable tax compromise with Republicans harked back to only one aspect of Mr. Clinton’s recovery strategy in 1995 and 1996, although the howls of protest from the left must have sounded familiar to the visiting former chief executive. Mr. Clinton’s approach involved as much confrontation as conciliation, and most of all, improvisation.
Even in the few weeks since the Republican election victory, Mr. Obama has already sampled from the full menu of options. On the tax cuts, he concluded that he had little choice but to cut a deal with Republicans, conceding to them one of their core priorities and angering his own supporters even as he squeezed out of the opposition as many concessions as he could to balance the agreement.
But faced with Republican resistance to his New Start arms control treaty, Mr. Obama took a different tack, refusing to back down and wait until next year. Instead, he organized a sustained, high-profile campaign to pressure Republican senators into approving the pact before year’s end and now appears to have the votes if the Senate can schedule enough time to debate.
“Sometimes you’re going to tack this way or that way,” said Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director. “Sometimes that means that the best way to get to that North Star is working with the other party and looking for compromise, and other times it’s going to require confrontation.”
It’s worth remembering that Mr. Clinton and Mr. Obama are strikingly different figures. Mr. Clinton was a Southern governor who had defined his political identity in part as an apostle of moving his party to the political middle, while Mr. Obama is from the urban north and came to office presenting himself as a pragmatist, but not necessarily a centrist, and has ushered in the most sweeping liberal policy initiatives in years.
Their circumstances were different as well — the 1990s ultimately were a decade of relative peace and prosperity, while so far Mr. Obama’s tenure has been marked by two persistent wars and the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. The Republican sweep in 1994 was more of a shock to Democrats, who had held the House for 40 years. Mr. Obama saw this year’s defeat coming and appears less off balance than did Mr. Clinton. And Newt Gingrich was the driving force behind the successful Republican insurgency, while today’s Congressional leaders are mainly the beneficiaries of it.
After the 1994 election, Mr. Clinton flailed for months, secretly bringing in the Republican adviser, Dick Morris, without telling his current advisers as he searched for a way forward.
“He was lost, he was completely lost,” recalled Robert Reich, a longtime Clinton friend who served as labor secretary. “He just didn’t know what to do. It was a real crisis.”
Douglas B. Sosnik, who was Mr. Clinton’s White House political director, said the first phase of recovery was mainly about dealing with shock. “It took us six months to regain our internal footing,” he said.
Mr. Clinton’s lowest postelection moment arguably came less than 24 hours before he began his comeback. In April 1995, he was reduced to arguing at a news conference that “the president is relevant.” The next day, bombers blew up an Oklahoma City federal building, and Mr. Clinton’s steady, reassuring and empathetic response made him more of a national leader.
Mr. Sosnik identified two other phases that followed. Phase 2, he said, was spent “getting our theory of the case on how we were going to deal with this new reality,” and really started when Mr. Clinton proposed balancing the budget in hopes of outflanking the Republicans. Phase 3, he said, came in the fall of 1995, when Mr. Clinton engaged Republicans over the role of government, ultimately refusing to agree to deeper spending cuts and winning the spin battle over who was responsible for government shutdowns.
Mr. Clinton had coopted Republican issues but on his own terms, picking selective fights that left them looking extreme. Even one of his most memorable compromises with Republicans, legislation overhauling the welfare system, came only after he vetoed the first two versions, saying they went too far.
The shorthand more than a decade later boils this down to “triangulation,” Mr. Morris’s term for separating from the ideological wings of both parties to recapture the middle. That left a bad taste among Democrats that persists to this day, helping to explain the visceral outrage over the tax cut deal.
Mr. Obama’s advisers insist that that is not what he is up to. “A lot of people say, ‘Aha, he’s triangulating,’ which is absolutely not what he’s doing,” said Mr. Pfeiffer. “There’s a lot to learn from what the Clinton White House did in 1994 forward with a similar situation. But it’s also important to understand we’re not in the exact same situation.”
Still, it’s a measure of Mr. Obama’s uncertainty in this moment of peril that he would summon not only the spirit but also the person of Mr. Clinton, whom he disparaged during the 2008 campaign for small-ball politics that made him less of a transformational president than Ronald Reagan. Lately, Mr. Obama has been reading accounts of Mr. Clinton’s presidency.
In applying the lessons, Mr. Obama might find areas for cooperation and conflict. The president and Congressional Republicans could find common ground on issues like education reform and alternative energy. They could clash on spending, environmental regulation and any attempt to repeal Mr. Obama’s health care program.
Whether he can turn that into a formula for political resurrection in an era of 9.8 percent unemployment is unclear. Mr. Pfeiffer speculated on what it would be like to find in his West Wing desk George Stephanopoulos’s old playbook. “It would be a mistake to take it out and run all the same plays,” Mr. Pfeiffer said. “It would also be a mistake to throw it away.”
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