Charming Billy Shoots Himself In The Foot

LOS ANGELES - "Can you bake a cherry pie, Billy Boy, Billy Boy? Can you bake a cherry pie, Charming Billy?" - so goes the children's song.

You were the apple of their eye, but now the women are mad at you for breaking your great promise to them as a group, and so are all your white men friends, the ones you personally promised a specific piece of the big pie.

For almost a year, Bill Clinton had one of the great runs of luck in the history of American politics. His friends were legion, his enemies confused and indecisive, his charm became power. His rise to the presidency, in hindsight, was so easy that it seemed preordained. As hard as he worked at it, he barely worked up a sweat and rarely had to raise his voice.

The only times he showed anger - real or feigned, it's impossible to tell with good politicians - it was at the most obvious of targets, the press and a convenient young black rapper who thought it was entertaining to talk about killing white folks.

Then, after his race was run, and won, he fell apart last weekend, losing control of selecting his own Cabinet and attacking the people who elected him: the women of America.

The president-elect not only disabused all those holding the idea that his wife would be running the country - presumably Hillary Clinton mentioned to him that women believed him when he said his Cabinet would look like America - he decided to try to frighten women the same way he frightened the big-time press last winter by linking them with the purveyors of tall tales and sexual fantasy whose publications make it bearable to wait in supermarket lines.

This attack was as deliberate as the others - either that, or Clinton has an uncontrollable temper, which I very seriously doubt. It is almost never a slip of the tongue when a professional like Clinton demeans people by calling them "bean counters"; he does it for a reason. I assume that reason was that he thought he could scare women's groups into keeping their mouths shut.

But, it seems women, half of America, are a lot tougher than reporters. It was amazing he took them on, as if he felt no obligation to them after what they did for him in an election where men were pretty evenly divided in their support of the three men running this year. Again, his wife could have told him that he didn't get it.

Or, more likely, he is tired, and what he doesn't get is what it's like to be president. He should have taken time off after the election, rather than winding down by continuing to campaign, becoming the first president-elect in history to celebrate by going to the mall in Glendale and by jogging through the center of whatever town he happened to be in at the moment, looking for volleyball games.

"Welcome to the NFL!" say the sportscasters the first time a college star almost gets his head taken off in professional football. Welcome to the presidency, Mr. President!

Clinton, I am sure, will get up and shake off this hit - this self-inflicted hit. He was so busy waving that he ran into a wall.

Probably, he is as lucky as ever. It's better to beat yourself up a bit during the transition than, say, invade Cuba.

Besides, it's healthy both for him and the rest of us to understand that presidents lose control, too - all the power in the world does not change good old foot-shooting human nature. This was an odd series of mistakes for Clinton to make because one of the president-elect's great strengths is that he understands the relationship between politics and government and loves them both. Cabinet selection is one of the times they fit perfectly together, but this time Clinton, like a day-dreaming traffic cop, lost control of that intersection.

Now cars he didn't see or can't recognize are whizzing by, and he's just flailing out there. But, truth be told in this day and age, Cabinet members are not what they used to be, not nearly as important as they once were. Quick, how many members of President Bush's Cabinet can you name? Can anybody name them? If you woke him up in the middle of night, could Bush himself name them?

Since John Kennedy and television arrived at the White House at about the same time, the presidency has centralized. There was a time when hundreds of reporters covered the secretaries and departments behind the marble facades of Washington's boulevards, but Kennedy, Charming Johnny, wanted them where he could watch them and deliberately drew the action and attention to himself -leaving coverage of the actual government to $1,000-a-year newsletters for lobbyists.

"I can bake a cherry pie as quick as a cat can blink his eye," goes the next line of the children's song. Then you better get cooking, Charming Billy! Richard Reeve's column appears regularly on editorial pages of The Times.

(Copyright, 1992, Universal Press Syndicate)