William Jefferson Clintonmustered his cognitive resources to obtain victory, with perhaps a
decrease as their future was resolved, and that important topics such
as the national health care policy would engage substantially higher
complexity than such secondary issues as homosexuals in the mili-
tary. None of these hypotheses was supported.
Most recently, we looked at the president's speeches during and
after his second election campaign. The absolute level of his com-
plexity still had not changed much, although this time there was a
pre- to postelection increase; but both the increase and his postelec-
tion level of complexity were still among the lowest of all twentieth-
century presidents. Another researcher has reported results highly
similar to ours: Panos (1998) found Clinton's complexity in the
1992 and 1996 campaign debates to be 1.5 and 1.9 respectively, and
the annual mean score of his presidential speeches between 1993 and
1997 ranged from 1.8 to 2.6. In 1998, during the first two months
after the Lewinsky scandal broke, his speeches (including the State of
the Union address) were scored at a mean of 2.0.
It appears that, contrary to the implications of some other analy-
ses, President Clinton deals with policy issues at a consistently low
level of integrative complexity. We may ask, So what? After all, the
cognitive manager model argues that simple decision strategies are
not necessarily worse than more complex ones. As we have said, dif-
ferent kinds of problems are particularly amenable to complex or
simple decision making. There is general agreement that simple
strategies are optimal when, for example, a decision must be made
quickly, one is confronting an implacably hostile opponent, crucial
values are at significant risk, and it is important to project an image
of decisiveness and strength. These situations have not been typical
of the ones with which President Clinton has had to deal.
Conceptual complexity theorists would propose that Clinton may
be operating at a low level of trait, not merely state, complexity. This
would explain his strikingly consistent scores across time periods
and issue domains. Subjects low in (trait) conceptual complexity
have been found to function inadequately in many situations requir-
ing the processing of high levels of changing information, a condi-
tion that must be the prototype of most presidential decision mak-
ing. The cognitive manager model suggests that people differ in
their ability to recognize the need to change their level of complex-