Bill Clinton’s unexplained idea

THE standard line on Bill Clinton is that he talks well and does little. The truth, so far as 1997 is concerned, is closer to the opposite. He has accomplished, or helped to accomplish, rather a lot: he has fixed the budget and enlarged NATO, and these are big things; he has made modest but useful progress on health care and education. But, for much of the year, he has talked rather little. He has avoided the cameras and the White House briefing room; he has failed to present his administration's various schemes as part of one grand vision. Hence the mounting talk that he is aimless, exhausted, a lame duck. And hence the importance of his news conference on December 16th, which ran for 94 minutes and may have been the longest in America's presidential history.