Up close and presidential

John F. HARRIS has done the impossible. He’s written a book about Bill Clinton that is insightful, comprehensive and above all reasonable in measuring the former president’s strengths and weaknesses, achievements and failures. George Stephanopoulos once said that Clinton ignited so much emotion that he drove people crazy. Harris, a Washington Post reporter who covered the Clinton White House, has proved admirably immune to that frenzy, unless you consider it an act of madness in today’s politically polarized atmosphere to try writing a balanced book about a president who inspired such passions.

Clinton left office only a little more than four years ago, but his reputation has already oscillated through several distinct cycles, even among Democrats. In 2000, Al Gore ran away from him, fearing that voters would place more weight on Clinton’s personal failures than on his policy achievements. Through President Bush’s first term, Clinton regained luster with Democrats as they contrasted his economic record (balanced budgets, rising incomes, nearly 23 million new jobs over eight years) with the economy’s lackluster performance under his successor. Now, after John Kerry’s defeat, the cycle may be turning again, as more and more Democrats (especially on the left) argue that Bush’s concentration on energizing his base with a starkly ideological agenda offers a better model for regaining the White House than did Clinton’s emphasis on persuading swing voters with his “third way� centrism.

Harris’ new biography, “The Survivor: Bill Clinton in the White House,� won’t settle these arguments -- or the many others that are still swirling around the 42nd president. But it provides all sides in the debate with the most complete and accessible account of Clinton’s presidency yet available. In crisp, unmannered language, Harris displays an impressive command of the broad themes and minute details of the Clinton era. And though the author is evenhanded, he is not indecisive: He has not only reported widely on the Clinton record but also thought hard about it, and his brisk judgments will rattle many assumptions about the man and his presidency.

Harris’ freshest insight challenges a cornerstone of accepted wisdom among both Clinton supporters and critics. Almost all portraits of Clinton focus on his hunger for ideas, information, people and sensation, and his desire to squeeze every opportunity and experience from each day. His admirers believe that this restless insatiability sparked his political and policy innovations, even if it fed the personal recklessness exemplified by the Monica Lewinsky scandal. Many of his critics, conversely, believe he dissipated his presidency by failing to focus it; even some sympathetic analysts, like journalist Joe Klein, have argued that Clinton’s personal failings and political setbacks were both marked by an inability to set limits or establish priorities.

A common theme for supporters and critics alike is that the essence of Clinton is his boundless energy -- his curiosity, ambition and voracious appetites. Harris acknowledges all of that. (How could he not?) But mostly he turns the judgment on its head. Clinton’s problem, he argues provocatively, wasn’t too much activism but, on many occasions, too little.

“Beneath Clinton’s constant whir of activity,� he writes, “lay a passive streak.� While Clinton was intellectually drawn to the toughest problems, Harris argues, he too often let decisions drift, unable or unwilling to settle disputes among his advisors or with Congress or other nations. Clinton’s desire to synthesize alternatives and preserve his options sometimes produced brilliant improvisation -- as when he outmaneuvered congressional Republicans, and revived his presidency, during the 1995 showdown over the federal budget. But especially in his first term, his failure to impose his will -- or sometimes even to discern it -- left him paralyzed on issues from campaign finance reform to turmoil in Haiti and atrocities in Bosnia. Later, Clinton’s reluctance to confront resistance within the government’s national security bureaucracy prevented him from producing a response to terrorism commensurate with his understanding of the problem.

The result, Harris astutely concludes, was a presidency that was most effective when Clinton’s advisors offered him a clear direction. “He needed people of emphatic certitudes to help sharpen his own goals, and to give him the self-confidence to pursue them,� Harris writes. Even during the most chaotic moments of the administration’s first years, he notes, Clinton established a decisive course on economic policy that emphasized deficit reduction and free trade largely because confident advisors the president respected, like Lloyd Bentsen and Robert Rubin, unwaveringly urged him in that direction. By contrast, Harris believes, Clinton’s foreign policy drifted badly in his initial years partly because Warren Christopher, his first secretary of State, tried to “respond to his boss’s wishes� rather than shape them. Christopher failed to recognize that what Clinton needed in a secretary of State “was someone who with his own certitude quieted Clinton’s doubts.�

What makes this book unusual is that Harris acknowledges Clinton’s successes in equal measure with his disappointments and missteps. He notes that the economic plan Clinton squeezed through Congress in 1993 without a single Republican vote helped usher in “a decade of remarkable prosperity.� He correctly concludes that the often ridiculed “micro-initiatives� Clinton pursued -- on such issues as school safety and teen smoking -- after the Republican congressional takeover in 1994 cumulatively advanced goals important to Democrats. He shows how Clinton’s foreign policy gained confidence and subtlety as his experience deepened. And he demonstrates, especially in an extended account of welfare reform that is one of the book’s highlights, how Clinton forced Democrats to rethink domestic policies that had grown both ineffective and politically damaging.

On all these fronts, Harris regularly takes readers inside the Oval Office. Clinton apparently did not speak to him, but many of his top advisors did. The result is a personal portrait both fresh and full. Clinton emerges as brilliant, moody, dogged, resilient, intermittently self-pitying and profane. New anecdotes capture Clinton as candidly as an unexpected snapshot. One of the most telling is Clinton’s explanation of why he called Lewinsky “that woman� in the initial television appearance in which he falsely denied a sexual relationship with her. When he stalked away from the lectern, still shaking with anger, Clinton told an aide that he had used that slightly contemptuous phrase because he “blanked out on her name.� (It’s difficult to say whether Clinton looks worse if he genuinely forgot Lewinsky’s name or falsely claimed he did.)

The book stumbles at points. Harris interrupts his flow too often for mini-profiles of Clinton aides and advisors, losing momentum in a misguided attempt to humanize the story. He’s sometimes too quick to see Clinton’s “New Democrat� agenda solely as a tactical retreat before conservative arguments. A wider lens would have helped too; this is very much a life, rather than a life and times. Harris offers too little about how Clinton’s policies affected the country, how his political strategy affected the Democratic Party and how his allies and enemies maneuvered in response to his initiatives. More of that outside story would have deepened Harris’ insider account of how Clinton operated in the Oval Office.

But the story Harris does tell is vivid and enlightening. At least until scholars gain access to more of the administration’s internal papers, “The Survivor� is likely to stand as the most comprehensive account of Clinton’s presidency. The verdict on his term that Clinton probably cares most about will come from the electorate if his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, someday seeks the presidency. In the meantime, he won’t find a judge more thoughtful or thorough than Harris.