MISSOURI COMMENTARY: THE VITAL CENTER OR THE DEAD CENTER?

It was something of a listless inaugural. American presidential second terms are generally anticlimactic. The two term presidents of this century -- Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Ronald Reagan -- all found more political success in their first four years than in their second.

Second inaugurals, however, usually maintain their special luster even though events and policies to follow may not have warrant it. There was something about the second Clinton inaugural that just wasn't on the mark insofar as spirit and attitude were concerned.

Yes, there were the endless brunches, lunches, receptions, dinners, and celebrations. But this year's batch seemed to be more obligatory than celebratory. Why?

-- The spillover from the 1996 political campaign. The unmemorable campaign had Bill Clinton crossing endless bridges to the 21st Century with a stump speech recycled from state to state.

Bob Dole never found a substantive idea worth repeating. If it is a sin to say mostly nothing over and over again, then it is an equal sin to ramble all over the place generating disjointed, incoherent bits of messages.

Clinton, the consummate politicians, who every poll showed was enjoying a decisive margin, could sit on his lead and run out the clock. The Clinton campaign watchwords were: take no changes; gamble on nothing; play it cautious. By Democratic design and Republican ineptitude, the 1996 election became a big yawn. Such a campaign is not the springboard to an electrifying inaugural.

-- Time ran out on "Happy Days Are Here Again." During the times of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson, the enthusiasm generated within the Democratic Party came from proponents of governmental activism -- those also believed that government, despite its blunders, performed for the greater good. Until the next deep and prolonged recession, that philosophy seems to have run its course.

The New Deal type Democratic stalwarts have faded away. The campaign music has changed. The new music may be louder in decibels, but it doesn't spring forth with enthusiasm from the political soul.

-- The search for the center. What center? Arthur Schlesinger and other scholars speak and write of the "vital center." If getting to the center means to hop on a series of poll-proofed gems which most people seem to find inoffensive, then, according to Schlesinger, you may have arrived at a "dead center."

On the other hand, if getting to the center means identifying some significant issues -- Social Security, Medicare reform, education, for example -- and building an action agenda drawing support from the left and the right, then you have arrived at the "vital center."

President Clinton, we read, draws inspiration from Theodore Roosevelt. The first Roosevelt tried, without lasting success, to form a new center for the Republican Party. He acted boldly and generated public enthusiasm by his zeal and fearlessness. Bill Clinton during his first two years in office perhaps had an occasional spurt of Theodore Roosevelt, but the Clinton of 1995 and 1996, the Clinton who was re-elected, did not.

Clearly the country is not in a mood for seismic change. That should not be interpreted as a national desire to stagnate. The success or failure of the Clinton second term will depend on how imaginatively he perceives the difference.

-- The scandals -- Democratic, Republican -- all of them. As the president has his day in the inaugural sun, the Speaker of the House awaited the imposition of his punishment. The Whitewater prosecutor was polishing up his efforts for indictments to be handed down possibly by spring. Senate and House committees were digging into gluttonous finance excesses left over from the 1996 campaign. Paula Jones had become a mainstream magazine cover story.

Washington had become the meanest, unhappiest town in the country. Yet Clinton stands at his highest level in the polls. Hopefully, he can somehow rise above the rancor. History may say no to a second term success, but Clinton is not necessarily doomed to repeat the past.

~Tom Eagleton of St. Louis is a former U.S. senator from Missouri.