The
Clinton Administration --excerpt from Who Built America textbook, 2000)
T'he political trajectory of the Clinton administration falls into two phases. Between late 1992 and the fall of 1994, Clinton and his advisers sought to implement an ambitious program of social reform that harkened back to issues last debated during the liberal heyday of the mid- I 960s. But Clinton's failures, both personal and political, led to a sweeping Republican victory in the 1994 congressional elections, after which his administration sought little more than survival in office, even at the cost of a programmatic accommodation to congressional conservatives.
Clinton's initial cabinet appointments were unusually diverse. He put African Americans in charge of the Departments of Agriculture, Commerce, and Energy, heretofore the reserve of conservative white businessmen, and he made Janet Reno, a Florida law enforcement official, the first female attorney general. Hispanic politicians from Colorado and Texas took over stewardship of the Departments oftransportation and of Housing and Urban Development. Clinton named the liberal economist Laura Tyson as head of the Council of Economic Advisers and Robert Reich, a well-known critic of the nation's growing inequality of wealth, education, and wages, as Secretary of Labor. Not long after his inauguration, Clinton had the chance to appoint to the Supreme Court Ruth Bader Ginsberg, a pioneer in the legal fight against gender discrimination. And in 1994 he nominated Stephen Breyer, an economic conservative whose social views tended toward liberalism, to the High Court.
Early in 1993, Clinton signed social legislation that Bush would have vetoed: the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guaranteed workers their jobs when they returned from childbirth or a family medical emergency; the Brady bill, which regulated handguns; and the "Motor-Voter" bill, which made voter registration available through many state agencies, including those that issued driver's licenses. He ended the Reagan-era ban on abortion counseling in family-planning clinics and won new funding for more police and prisons, as well as a youth-oriented job corps.
But on the big economic issues, the
Clinton administration came to demonstrate much continuity with the policies of
his Republican predecessors. In his presidential campaign Clinton had
downplayed deficit reduction and emphasized the need for new social investment:
in infra- structure, education, environmental technology, and health care. He wanted
a new tax on business to encourage energy conservation and job training.
Once in office, however, he dropped the fight for large-scale infrastructure
spending - and the jobs it would have created - when his more conservative
advisers, including Secretary of the Treasury Lloyd Bentsen and Robert Rubin of
the National Economic Council, warned that the federal government needed to
sacrifice social spending and instead emphasize deficit reduction. Clinton did
push through Congress a substantial tax increase on wealthy individuals,
which restored some of the tax progressivity lost during the Reagan era.
Otherwise his adminis- tration remained fiscally conservative, not unlike the
'Eisenhower Republicans'"complained Clinton in one Oval Office meeting. Such
restraint mollified Wall Street bond traders and generated the lower interest
rates Clinton's more orthodox advisers thought necessary for business in-
vestment and economic recovery.
Despite this accommodation to the
fiscal conservatives within his own administration, Clinton proved a polarizing
figure, whose person and presidency evoked social and cultural controversies
smoldering since the Vietnam era. To many Americans, Clinton never seemed to be
an entirely legitimate president, especially with regard to military issues.
Although they maintained a facade of apolitical neutrality, many military
officers were contemptuous of their commander-in-chief, who had
"dodged" the draft during the Vietnam War. Thus Clinton's effort to
support gay rights within the armed services generated a storm of criticism,
forcing his administration to promulgate a confusing 'Don't Ask, Don't
Tell" doctrine regarding the homo- sexual orientation of enlisted
personnel. Fearing similar attacks on his judgment and patriotism, Clinton did
little to reduce the post -Cold War military budget.
[brief
discussion of military policies –deferred to later readings]
….Clinton considered his economic
diplomacy of even greater importance than these skittish military
interventions. His administration backed U. S. membership in the North American
Free Trade Association over the adamant opposition of organized labor and most
Democratic liberals. NAFTA made it far easier for Canadian and U.S.
corporations to buy low-cost goods from Mexico, sometimes produced by the
American subsidiaries that fled south to take advantage of the low wages there.
Although the movement of jobs to Latin America did not amount to the
"giant sucking sound" Ross Perot had predicted, NAFTA did prove a powerful
weapon in the hands of employers, who used the specter of a factory shutdown to
forestall employee drives for higher pay and unionization. Some economists
estimated that nearly a quarter of all the recent growth in wage inequality
derived from this downward pressure on U.S. wages. Thus when Congress enacted
NAFTA legislation in the fall of 1993, the lion's share of the votes came from
Republicans.
Robert Rubin, who became Treasury
secretary in 1994, played a key role in sustaining the Clinton administration's
commitment to free trade and unregulated financial markets, even when such
policies required austerity in developing nations. Rubin orchestrated a
controversial, multibillion-dollar bailout of the Mexican economy-and of the
U.S. banks that had lent money there-after the peso collapsed in 1994. But in
1997 and 1998 the International Monetary Fund'- (heavily influenced by the U.
S. Treasury) exacerbated an Asian financial crisis when, in return
for
new loans to Thailand, South Korea, and Indonesia, it demanded high interest
rates and government-spending cutbacks certain to generate business
bankruptcies, massive layoffs, and a lower living standard. The crisis
precipitated a near-revolution in Indonesia, repression in Malaysia, and
factory occupations in South Korea.
Clinton's effort to establish a system of
universal health care was the most important legislative battle fought by his
administration. The issue was red-hot in the early 1990s for two reasons.
First, the American health care delivery system was a failure, compared to
those of other Western nations. More than 20 percent of all people under the
age of sixty-five had no insured access to a doctor. Moreover, health care
costs were rising at twice the level of inflation, and the United States was
spending more of its total income, 14 percent, on medical care than any other
nation. America's fragmented, employment-based commercial system was a
paperwork nightmare. A Toronto hospital administrator familiar with Canada's 'single-payer"
system of universal coverage (the government paid doctors and hospitals from
tax revenues) found U.S. health ca* costs bloated by 'overwhelming duplication
of bureaucracies working in dozens of insurance companies, no two of which have
the same forms or even the same coverage.'
Second, the health insurance system had
become a political and social issue of great contention. During the 1980s,
management efforts to trim health insurance costs had precipitated more than 80
percent of all strikes that took place in the United States. The United Mine
Workers (UMW) of America fought the most spectacular of these struggles in
1989- an eleven-month siege of the Pittston Coal Company-in defense of miners'
health care benefits and pension rights. Some 3,000 miners and UMW supporters
were arrested during a campaign that resurrected the sit-dov,m tactics and mass
demonstrations characteristic of the union movement in its formative years.
Such industrial conflicts soon had their political echo. The death knell of the
Bush presidency may well have been sounded during a 1991 Senate contest in
Pennsylvania, when Harris Wofford, a former aide to President John Kennedy,
came from forty points behind to defeat Bush's former attorney general, Richard
Thornburgh. The key issue was universal health coverage. As Wofford put it,
'Americans should have the same right to a doctor as they do to a lawyer."
President Clinton and his wife Hillary,
who was in charge of the health care project, rejected a Canadian-style
single-payer system. Although recognizing its economic efficiency and political
popularity, they argued that health care reform had to be built on the existing
system of employer-paid benefits and private insurance. The Clinton plan, which
was reminiscent of the Roosevelt reform of capitalism under the 1933 National
Recovery Act, would have regulated the largest insurance companies through a
system of "managed competition” contained within a "global
budget" set by the federal government. With this lid on insurance costs,
the government could mandate employers to provide health insurance for all
their employees. The plan did provide for a universal system of health care,
but it was highly complex -the proposed law required more than 1,350 pages of
text-because the Clintons sought to regulate and expand an inherently
heterogeneous system of privately funded health insurance.
Despite
these problems, the Clinton health program was the most ambitious and
progressive effort to expand the American welfare state in three decades. By
guaranteeing health insurance to every worker, the plan would have taken a
large step toward reversing the growth in social in- equality; and it would
have provided employers with a powerful incentive to transform part-time jobs
into forty-hour-a-week positions. The Clintons counted on support from those
high-wage business sectors that already provided health insurance: employer
mandates cost them nothing, but instead spread insurance costs equally among
all employers. American auto companies paid more for health insurance than for
steel, but Wal-Mart, Marriott, and hundreds of thousands of other low-wage
service-sector firms shifted the health care costs of their employees to the
state, to charity, or to other firms' payrolls. Thus Pizza Hut, a PepsiCo
subsidiary that employed 93,000 workers, offered health insurance to only
3,000, most of them managers.
But the Clintons miscalculated. American capitalism had
transformed itself dramatically since the last era of health care reform in the
1960s, and low-wage, low-benefit companies in the swollen service sector,
especially restaurants and retail outlets, bitterly resisted employer mandates.
In addition, almost all the smaller insurance companies, who sought the
youngest and least risky clients, assailed the plan. These companies bankrolled
a widely viewed set of television commercials that pointed to the complexity
and regulatory burden inherent in the Clinton plan. Among the strongest backers
of the Clinton plan were American trade unions, but after more than two decades
of waning strength, organized labor commanded far less congressional influence
than when Congress had enacted Medicare three decades before.
Indeed the fate of the Clinton’s plan turned into a referendum on
the capacity of the state to resolve social problems. Their reforms would have
instituted a new layer of social citizenship, symbolized by a health security
the government would issue to every American. But conservatives feared such an
entitlement, both because of the expense and because of the legitimacy it
conferred on governmental activism…Thus by August 1994, when the Clinton health
plan expired in Congress even many Democrats had abandoned the ambitious effort
to restructure one-seventh of the economy… Health insurance was still linked
primarily to employment, which meant that at the end of the 1990s more than 44
million Amercans were without health insurance.
The collapse of the Clinton health care
initiative generated a large vacuum in American politics, which a reinvigorated
Republican party promptly filled. With conservatives out of the Presidency for
the first time in twelve years, the leading spokesmen for the cause were both
more strident and more ideological. Talk-show hosts such as Rush Limbaugh piled
denunciations of Clinton's ineffectiveness onto their daily attack on
'feminazis;' "Washington insiders," and 'political correctness."
Georgia congressrnan Newt Gingrich codified much of this right-wing militancy
in a 1994 election rnanifesto, the "Contract with America," which
sought to ideologically unify scores of Republican congressional campaigns.
Gingrich and other GOP conservatives avoided divisive cultural issues such as
abortion rights and school prayer, calling instea:d for large reductions in
federal social spender . congressional term limits, partial privatization of
Medicare and public education, the elimination of five cabinet departments, and
a new set of tax cuts.
Like Clinton, Gingrich was a baby boomer
who had avoided the draft during the Vietnam War. But this articulate,
historically minded ideologue moved steadily rightward in the 1970s and 1980s.
He led the GOP revolt that nearly sank the Bush administration's budget in
1990. Then he pushed aside Robert Michel, a more conventional conservative, to
become House Minority Leader. Although many voters were apparently unaware of
Gingrich's Contract with America during the 1994 elections, liberals were
dispirited during the campaign. Labor did not mobilize its troops, and among
women, turnout was the lowest in twenty years. The Republicans captured control
of both the House and Senate for the first time in forty years, won several
governorships, and gained ground in most state legislatures. In the House of
Representatives, the elections sent to Washington a large, unified class of GOP
freshmen whose politics were ideologically right-wing. As the newly chosen
Speaker, Gingrich embodied a dramatic transformation within the Republican
party, whose legislative leadership now shifted from the old Midwest to the
deep South.
Clinton's moment for neo-Rooseveltian
reform was finished. He staged a successful rearguard defense of his presidency
after 1994, but only by shifting his politics to accommodate Gingrich
conservatives. The president quickly distanced himself from the remaining
liberals in Con- gress, later announcing, in his 1996 State of the Union
address, "The era of big government is over.' Clinton did win much public
support in his effort to preserve existing programs when House Republicans
closed many government agencies during a late 1995 showdown over their proposed
budget cuts. just nine months later, he signed into law a drastic revision of
U.S. welfare law that ended the federal government's sixty-year commitment to
families with dependent children. Henceforth, caregivers - most of whom were
young mothers - would be eligible during their entire lifetime for only five
years of federal benefits. Many states soon enacted even more restrictive
guidelines. Although the government provided no new monies for child care or
job training, most welfare recipients were expected to get a job in the private
sector, a task that was eased in the late 1990s by the boom in fast-food and
other service-sector employment. Conservatives claimed this reform would break
the welfare "cycle of dependency."
Gingrich Republicanism had its echo in
California, where voters en- acted a state ballot initiative in 1994 curbing
the social citizenship rights of illegal immigrants. Proposition 187 denied
unlawful residents of the United States access to prenatal and childbirth
services, child welfare, public education, and nonemergency health care. Its
passage, which reflected the severity of the recession in California, was a
belated effect of a 1978 ballot proposition that had frozen most property
taxes, costing local government more than $ 200 billion in badly needed
revenue. (California schools, once among the best funded in the country, had
deteriorated sharply, to quality levels historically characteristic of the far
poorer South.) In a pattern reaching back to the anti-Chinese riots of the late
nineteenth century, conservatives lay the blame for economic insecurity on
nonwhite immigrants. An infamous TV spot broadcast during the 1994 campaign
replayed video footage of Mexican illegals rushing through a San Diego border
checkpoint, with the ominous voiceover: 'They keep coming."
Two years later, voters in the nation's
largest state enacted the California Civil Rights Initiative, which banned
affirmative action at the University of California and in state agencies.
Affirmative action guide- lines were strongly backed by most university
administrators, as well as by corporate executives, who saw diversity as
essential to the legitimacy and effectiveness of their businesses in a
multiracial society. Indeed, an exhaustive 1998 study authored by two former
Ivy League college presi- dents demonstrated that African-American students
admitted under affirmative action guidelines graduated as readily as any other
group of students. They then went on to careers in the professions, government,
and business in proportions even greater than that of their white peers. But
affirmative action remained highly controversial in the United States in the
mid-1990s. Most conservatives argued that it contravened the idea of a
color-blind society, of a social order based on merit, and that the civil
rights laws of the 1960s had successfully ended most racism, eliminating the
necessity for such policies. Indeed, the conflict over affirmative action had
turned into an argument over the degree to which racism remained a force within
American politics and society. President Clinton possibly spoke for many when
he proposed to "mend it, don't end it.'
Gingrich's brand of conservatism soon
generated its own backlash. As House Speaker, Gingrich was perceived by the
public as a brash radical: public opinion polls gave him some of the lowest
approval ratings of any national political leader since Richard Nixon was
forced from the White House. Although Gingrich retained the fervent loyalty of
many right- wingers, other Republicans began to distance themselves from his
leadership. In the 1996 Republican primaries, pro-Gingrich conservatives such
as Forbes magazine owner Steve Forbes and Texas senator Phil Gramm spent
considerable money but won few primary votes. Pat Buchanan once again ran as an
anti-abortion cultural conservative, but he generated the most excitement by
denouncing NAFTA and big corporations. The more moderate Senate Majority Leader
Robert Dole, who won his party's nomination for president, ran a spiritless
campaign that advanced few.# Contract with America themes.
Although Clinton and Gore also ran a
relatively muted, apolitical campaign, they had little trouble winning
reelection, albeit with only 49 percent of the popular vote. (Ross Perot took
only 8 percent this time.) Turnout in the election fell to levels not seen
since 1924. But for one
group
of voters, the election was a political coming of age. The Latino electorate,
which had increased substantially, swung sharply to the Democrats. Although
this rapidly growing population had given Ronald Reagan more than 40
percent of their vote, many Latinos were furious with the GOP's anti-immigrant
politics. In both 1996 and 1998, their wholesale shift into the Democratic
column locked up California for Clinton and his party.
The U.S. Constitution provides for the
removal of a sitting president if the House of Representatives, by a majority
vote, impeaches (charges) and the Senate,, by a two-thirds vote, convicts the
president of "high crimes and misdemeanors."Three presidents have
faced such a quasi-judicial drama. In 1867 the politics of Reconstruction stood
at the heart of Andrew Johnson's Senate trial; in 1974 Richard Nixon resigned
when the House seemed certain to impeach him for abuse of presidential power as
a consequence of his involvement in the Watergate burglary; and in December
1998 the House impeached Bill Clinton on charges of perjury and obstruction of
justice. In contrast to Andrew Johnson's trial and Richard Nixon's forced
resignation, the constitutional crisis that enveloped Clinton hinged not on his
public statecraft but on his character and the consequences of his personal
conduct. But in an era when sexual conduct and social attitudes had become
thoroughly politicized, that was enough.
To
conservatives, President Clinton was an intensely polarizing figure. He had
appropriated many Republican issues, such as a balanced budget, welfare reform,
and tough-on-crime measures to expand the death penalty and put more police on
the street. At the same time, Clinton seemed to embody the social and cultural
values of the 1960s, including an unconstrained sexuality and freewheeling
capacity to spin the truth in his personal and business affairs. Though he had
been elected president twice, a substantial minority of Americans had never
considered Clinton a truly legitimate occupant of the White House.
Clinton's legal and political troubles
began in 1994, when Attorney General Reno appointed an independent counsel,
Robert Fiske, to investigate questionable Arkansas real estate investments made
in 1978 by Bill and Hillary Clinton in the Whitewater Development Corporation.
Although several of the president's associates were eventually jailed in
connection with their Whitewater land dealings, Clinton and his wife never
faced criminal charges. However, the lengthy Whitewater investigation was
transmuted four years later by Kenneth Starr, an aggressive conservative former
judge who had replaced Fiske as independent counsel, into a probe of Clinton's
sexual conduct and the truthfulness of his testimony on this subject. In 1995
and 1996, President Clinton had an affair with Monica Lewinsky, a
twenty-two-year-old White House intern. This episodic sexual relationship was
not illegal, but lying about it under oath, or
attempting
to convince others to do so, would have constituted perjury and obstruction of
justice. Clinton may well have done so, when Lewinsky and he gave depositions
in a sexual harassment suit filed against the president filed by Paula Jones,
who had worked as a state clerk when Clinton was governor of Arkansas. Clinton
damaged his credibility when in January 1998 he publicly denied having had sex
with Lewinsky, then six months later admitted to an "inappropriate
relationship" with Lewinsky before a grand jury.
The furor over the Lewinsky affair
revealed that the nation was deeply divided in what many came to see as a
renewal of the culture wars that had been so characteristic of public debate in
the late 1980s and early 1990s. To those who sought the president's impeachment
and removal from office, Clinton's mendacity about the affair spoke for itself.
His recklessness had shamed the nation, subverted its legal institutions, and
proven him unfit for office. Clinton seemed to embody all that conservative
moralists found intolerable in contemporary American life. Representative Tom
DeLay of Texas, one of the most militant of the conservative Republicans,
thought the impeachment fight "a debate about relativism versus absolute
truth." House Judiciary Committee chairman Henry Hyde wondered if, 'after this
culture war is over that we are engaged in, an America will survive that's
worth fighting to defend."
Clinton's supporters did not defend his
sexual escapades or the lies he told about them. But they thought impeachment
and removal from office a punishment disproportionate to his transgressions.
They drew a sharp line between his personal conduct and his role as an
effective political leader. Moreover, to many Clinton partisans, Kenneth
Starr's massive, intrusive investigative effort was, in the words of Hillary
Clinton, part of "a vast right-wing conspiracy that represented an attempt
by the Republican Right to persecute Clinton and 'criminalize" normal
political debate.
Nearly two-thirds of all Americans
solidly backed Clinton's continuation in the White House, even as they
repudiated his private conduct. The president's handsome approval ratings were
bolstered by steady economic growth, low unemployment, and Clinton's popularity
as a defender of Social Security, public education, and racial reconciliation.
African Americans, white women, and liberal Democrats were especially fervent
in their support, in part because they found nothing particularly dreadful in
lying about extramarital relationships and in part because of the prominent
role played by conservative white Southerners in the impeachment investigation.
Most Americans were offended by Kenneth Starr’s exposure of the most intimate
details of theClinton-Lewinsky relationship…