The Psychological Assessment of Political Leaderstions, this is in fact what we expected to find when scoring Clin-
ton's utterances.
In two successive studies (Suedfeld 1994; Suedfeld and Wallace
1995) we scored a large number of Clinton's statements made during
his first presidential election campaign (spring 1992) and up to the
end of his first year in office (1994). We started with the hypothesis,
based on the consensus of the media, that Clinton's problems arose out
of an excessively high level of complexity and an inability or unwill-
ingness to take a simple, firm, and uncompromising stand when such
a stand was needed. Much to our surprise, we found President Clin-
ton's mean complexity score to be quite low. Both during the election
campaign and in the first year of the administration, it reached only
the level of moderate differentiation (scores around 2.0-2.5).
Although this level was not unusual for the campaign speeches of
presidential candidates during the past eighty years or so, it was lower
than that of any sitting president except for Ronald Reagan and was at
about the same level as the second-lowest, George H. W. Bush.
Another striking datum was a small but consistently downward
trend in complexity from the time of the presidential campaign to
the period after the inauguration and throughout Clinton's first year
in office. There was relatively little variation across topics, although
he exhibited somewhat higher complexity in his campaign speeches
on economic policy and in his presidential speeches on health care
and the environment. This pattern is thought to identify areas that
are of special concern and in which success is perceived as possible.
There were no changes as a particular presidential initiative moved
toward congressional approval or rejection (e.g., the health care bill,
the North American Free Trade Agreement [NAFTA]).
We had expected to find a consistent increase in complexity as the
president gained more experience in office and learned the complica-
tions of developing and then selling his policies. This pattern had
been found in most twentieth-century American presidents and in
all of those whom current judgment considers to have been good at
the job (Tetlock 1991). (Incidentally, the first study to apply inte-
grative complexity scoring to archival materials [Suedfeld and Rank
1976] found exactly the same pattern among successful revolution-
ary leaders.) We had also thought that there would be complexity
increases as Clinton's proposals encountered opposition and as he