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| Was Bill Clinton a successful President? |
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RICH LOWRY
Editor, National Review
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Posted 06.30.04 | 11:00 AM
Dear John,
Thanks for your thoughtful response.
At the risk of sounding snarky, let's be absolutely clear: Yes, debating whether Clinton was successful or not would be "easy" — for a Clinton critic like me. He clearly wasn't successful. "Creating jobs"? Please. It's easy to "create" jobs when you inherit a recovery. There was a telling incident early on in the administration when Paul Begala wanted to put out a nonsensical economic paper about how Clinton's budget plan would create 8 million new jobs. Laura Tyson, bless her, insisted that he change the verbiage since pretty much every economist agreed that 8 million would be created by the recovery, budget plan or no.
Let me take your sections in order.
FOREIGN POLICY: You're right that Clinton was so feckless in his first term that as the Bosnian crisis neared an end even Jacques Chirac was tougher than he was. Clinton eventually achieved relative success in the Balkans. But by the end of the Kosovo war the administration had so exhausted itself in that strategically marginal part of the world that it had nothing left to deal with the true threats to the U.S. in Afghanistan and in the Middle East. The administration's notion was that nothing really ailed the Middle East that couldn't be solved by giving Yasser Arafat, that thief and terrorist, a state. But by doing so we just would have added to the list of Arab rogue states. Clinton instinctively wanted to paper over any problem with "peace deals." The Arab world is beset by backwardness and irrational hatred of the United States? Cut a deal with Arafat. North Korea is cheating on its nuclear deal? Cut a new, additional missile deal with Pyongyang. A vicious bastard is terrorizing Sierra Leone? Get him a peace deal right away. (TNR's coverage of Sierra Leone — encapsulating the dishonesty and illusions of the administration even when, by your account, it understood how the world worked — was excellent by the way.)
ECONOMIC POLICY: If your argument is that the Clinton economic policy in the later 199O's was appropriate and successful, let's call off this duel right now because we agree — but I wish someone would make the Democrats aware of our consensus. Clinton cut taxes in 1997 — on "the rich" no less. He was generally free trade, a position that has been largely abandoned by today's Democratic party: witness the party's absurd trashing of outsourcing. Although it began to spiral upward toward the end of the decade, government spending was under relative control in the mid-199Os. (Clinton signed a budget deal with Republicans in 1997 that, amazingly, held Medicare spending growth to essentially zero for two years.) Of course there were various deregulatory measures during his time in office as well. Again, if tax cuts, free trade, spending restraint, and deregulation are "appropriate" policies, I'm glad to hear it. But please work on your colleagues at TNR, would you?
SOCIAL POLICY: I don't see why Clinton gets credit for advocating things that didn't go anywhere, let alone the fact that they don't have much merit. Government job training, for instance, has rarely been shown to work. I'm guessing you skip over my point on welfare reform because it's pretty unassailable (and kind of embarrassing for liberals): The most important social policy of the decade, which had a wondrous effect on the lives of poor and minority women and children, was a conservative initiative.
POLITICS: Clinton indeed deserves credit for coming up with a more effective political formula for the Democrats by surrendering on certain important issues that had hurt the party for three decades. But the party was devastated beneath him during his time in office. Republicans not only established a fairly firm hold on the House, they picked up ground at the state level. As you write, by the time Clinton had reestablished the political initiative he lost it again to the Monica scandal. You are right that Clinton had enemies, which should have been all the more reason not to have sex with an intern and lie about it under oath. Even if Clinton hadn't been impeached, the very fact of the Monica scandal would have eroded Clinton's achievement of 1992 and 1996 of giving the Democratic party a more culturally conservative feel. Finally, you don't address the political methodology that brought Clinton back after 1994 — again the period when you say he began to realize how things really worked. More or less, his team asked people in shopping malls what they wanted to hear and then proceeded to tell them those things in the form of micro-initiatives, school uniforms, teenage curfews, all the rest. What a joke.
Maybe what we have is a disagreement over terminology. If "transitional" is what you are when you don't have a clear idea of where you are going, do little that is important, and consume your presidency with trivia — whether it's minute policies or an intern — yes, Clinton was transitional, very transitional.
Best,
— Rich
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JOHN B. JUDIS
Senior Editor, The New Republic
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Posted 07.01.04 | 10:55 AM
Dear Rich:
I am going to resist the temptation to cross swords with you about Israel and North Korea. I would certainly defend Clinton's approaches against the younger Bush's, but I fear that this "duel" would carry us too far afield. Instead, I want to explain more clearly what I meant in calling Clinton and Bush "transitional" presidents. The term applies to the circumstances in which they governed, not to their personal capacity to govern. And it helps to explain why it is difficult to call Clinton either a "success" or a "failure." (Some readers will recognize parts of this argument from The Emerging Democratic Majority, but political scientist Stephen Skowroneck makes a similar structural argument in The Politics Presidents Make.)
American politics follows cycles that roughly overlap with larger changes in America's political economy and relationship to the world. Transitional presidents take office in the interstices of these cycles, and often find themselves forced to develop new policies in the face of a lingering opposition majority. Calvin Coolidge, Franklin Roosevelt, and Ronald Reagan were not transitional presidents. Neither was Dwight Eisenhower who governed amicably in the midst of a Democratic era. Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter were transitional presidents. They held office during the transition from a New Deal liberal to a conservative majority. They had to grapple with the obsolescence of deficit liberalism and the repercussions of America's disaster in Vietnam.
Nixon won office through a split in the national Democratic party over civil rights, but because Southern conservatives continued to vote Democratic in local and state elections, the Democrats retained control of Congress. The nation itself was divided between liberal and conservative much the way it is now. In the face of these obstacles, Nixon boldly tried to create a new Republican majority, as well as to forge new economic and foreign policies. Nixon was forced to resign over the Watergate scandal — which was partly the result of his attempt to overcome his opposition through illegal means, but partly also the result of an opposition determined to undermine his presidency. His impeachment stemmed from personal failings, but also from the transitional circumstances of his presidency.
In 1976, Carter won the presidency and the Democrats won large Congressional majorities. Carter and the Democrats failed to recognize, however, that they had won so resoundingly because of Watergate, not because of the continuing appeal of their politics. As Carter found out when he tried to enact his program, the electorate had become skeptical of liberal approaches. He was a lame duck for an older majority that had been artificially prolonged by Watergate. Both his presidency and Nixon's are often seen as failures, but what becomes increasingly apparent is that both men governed under difficult, if not impossible, political circumstances.
Clinton is very similar to Nixon. He won office, and the Democrats won the Congress, largely because of a split in the opposing party. Perot was the George Wallace of 1992. But the split in the party also portended the erosion of the conservative majority and the need for new approaches to economic and foreign policy. Clinton was a political pioneer like Nixon who attempted to develop a new synthesis at a time when the country was not quite ready. After 1994, Clinton found himself forced to contend with a hostile Congress. His impeachment was far less deserved than Nixon's (I assume even National Review would agree that Clinton's sexual peccadilloes did not rank with Nixon's constitutional offenses) but the overall circumstances were similar: a transitional president attempting to forge a new majority in the face of a Congress controlled by the opposition party.
And Bush is similar to Carter. Bush barely won office from an electorate that was shifting from right to center, but he attempted to govern largely as if his election were a reaffirmation of Reagan conservatism, pushing through a massive tax cut for the wealthy. By the end of Summer 2001, his majority was in tatters, with the Senate gone, and his popularity hovering at 50 percent. If the analogy held perfectly, Bush would have been booted out of office in 2004 by a Democratic equivalent of Ronald Reagan, but history defies strict analogies. Bush's bold response to the terrorists attacks on September 11 recalled the older Republican appeal on national security, and it revived the conservative Republican majority the same way that Watergate had revived the Democratic majority in 1974 and 1976. Bush's ill-conceived invasion of Iraq has diminished this appeal and probably restored American politics to the status quo ante, but it is the status quo of 2000. Bush is damaged politically — Iraq is his equivalent of Carter's Iranian hostage crisis — but his opponent John Kerry is no Ronald Reagan, and the Democrats are still reeling from September 11. The transition will continue, no matter who wins in 2004.
Let me make one last point. You chide me for not crediting conservatives or Republicans for some of Clinton's policy successes, but the fact that Clinton co-opted conservative or Republican policies is entirely characteristic of harbingers of political realignment. Nixon repudiated Lyndon Johnson's Great Society, but much of his economic and social programs were modifications of Democratic policies. Clinton's presidency was in many ways a continuation of George H. W. Bush's. Bob Rubin was a Democratic version of Dick Darman, and Warren Christopher of James Baker. But there were also differences: Clinton attempted to combine conservative economic or social policy with a progressive commitment to social and economic equality, just as he attempted to combine the older Bush's diplomacy with a commitment to human rights and global democracy. That is what it means to try to create a new political synthesis — Tony Blair did the same to John Major's policies in Britain. And that is also why Clinton is likely to turn out the harbinger and the young Bush the anachronism when historians later assess the role of these two transitional presidents.
— John
Note: John Judis's response concludes this debate.
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JOHN B. JUDIS
Senior Editor, The New Republic
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Posted 06.29.04 | 8:45 AM
Dear Rich,
I'm not going to address directly the question of whether Bill Clinton succeeded or failed. It would be easy and too unenlightening to get into a debate like this. If you go back to Clinton's 1992 campaign, for instance, you'll find that his central campaign promise was to create new jobs. By that standard, he was wildly successful. If you look at specifics, like national health insurance, he was not so successful, but on this score neither was Franklin Roosevelt, who never got the balanced budget he promised, nor Ronald Reagan, who never shrank government.
The one word I'd use to describe Clinton and his times is "transitional." He became president at the Cold War's end, and at the beginning of an unexpected economic boom; like Richard Nixon, he was president at a time when an older political realignment still prevailed, and a new one more congenial to his politics had not yet emerged. During Clinton's first three years, he had yet to come to terms with these special circumstances in which he was governing. By January 1998, he clearly had, and had fashioned a foreign and domestic policy that was appropriate to them, but like Nixon, he was, by then, faced with an opposition hell-bent on driving him from office.
Foreign Policy: The Cold War's end created an illusion — shared by Democrats and Republicans alike — that foreign policy itself had become irrelevant and was to be superseded by international economic policy. When French President Jacques Chirac visited Washington in June 1995, he complained that the post of leader of the free world was "vacant." In other words, Clinton did not initially understand the global circumstances in which he governed. But Clinton recovered and by the end of his presidency, had fashioned a foreign policy that emphasized working with other nations to expand democracy and defend human rights, while trying to resolve age-old conflicts in Northern Ireland and Israel's occupied territories. It was most evident in the Balkans and in the attempt to develop an international "third way."
Economic Policy: In the early 1990s, some politicians and economists assumed that the United States was caught in a spiral of industrial decline from which it could only extricate itself through Japan's strategy of protectionism and industrial policy. They didn't understand that the United States was on the verge of a boom driven by computer technology and software. Clinton's initial policies, along with those of Alan Greenspan, probably helped more than they hurt, but were not based on an understanding of the new economy. (Greenspan, for instance, was committed to the myth of a "non-accelerating inflation rate of unemployment," or NAIRU, well into the 1990s.) But by his second term, Clinton, Bob Rubin, and Larry Summers had grasped the novelty of America's situation. They abandoned trade protectionism and deficit spending (except during recessions).
Social Policy: Clinton argued that globalization would be a net benefit to Americans, but he also recognized that in the course of achieving an open, integrated world economy, many Americans would lose or have to change jobs. He advocated national health insurance, pension reform, and worker training, among other things, to help Americans adapt to the insecurity and mobility of the new global economy. This was the right approach compared to Democratic full-employment and trade protection, on the one hand, and to conservative laissez-faire, on the other hand. But Clinton failed to meet his goals — partly because of his own political mistakes, but also because of the strength of his Republican opposition.
Political Realities: Clinton turned the Democratic Party toward a new left-center type of politics. He didn't abandon traditional Democratic goals of promoting equality and protecting Americans from the ravages of the business cycle, but he sought to do so within the framework of the new global economy. When he was first elected in 1992, he misjudged his own mandate. He ignored that his own victory was made possible by anti-deficit crusader Ross Perot splitting the Republican Party. He moved too ambitiously on health insurance and too slowly on welfare reform, and wound up provoking a backlash that left Congress in Republican hands. Afterwards, a wary Clinton attempted to achieve incrementally — with programs like CHIPs, aimed at uninsured children — what he had earlier attempted in one stroke. By January 1998, as my colleague Jon Chait wrote in 1998 ("Reactivated," Feb. 9, 1998), Clinton had finally "seized the policy initiative." But Chait's article appeared the same week as the Monica Lewinsky scandal broke — a scandal that Clinton's opponents used in order to cripple his presidency. (I assured Chait at the time that the scandal would blow over in a week.)
If Clinton was a transitional president, so too is his successor, George W. Bush. If Clinton pushed too far domestically to the left in his first term, Bush pushed too far to the right. And if Clinton seemed hesitant to engage the world, the post-September 11 Bush, after an initial success in Afghanistan, proceeded with reckless abandon. Bush may pick himself up, as Clinton did, or he may be defeated for reelection. In either case, I suspect that what we will see in a few years is an approach to foreign and domestic policy that is largely a continuation of what Clinton was trying to do (not altogether successfully) during his second term.
—John
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LOWRY
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Posted 06.28.04 | 10:40 AM
Dear John,
It's a pleasure meeting you here in an "opinion duel." I've always enjoyed your stuff, including your long-ago biography of William F. Buckley.
I think certainly on his own initial terms set out in his 1992 campaign, Clinton was a failure. He wanted to spend massively on new "investments," remake the American health-care system, and renew Americans' faith in government. He abandoned the first to pay obeisance to deficit reduction instead, failed in the second as the Hillary plan sank due to its own weight and complexity, and gave up on the last, declaring "the era of big government over," before recovering somewhat by blunting the Gingrich "revolution." But that was fundamentally a defensive action. After 1994, his domestic signature was poll-tested micro-initiatives so embarrassingly trivial that his supporters and even Clinton himself, judging by the space devoted to them in his book, would prefer to forget them.
Clinton defenders tout his economic stewardship. Here the picture is mixed. First, despite his rhetoric in 1992, he inherited a recovery. Second, his 1993 economic plan, despite the hysterical wailings of some congressional Republicans and conservatives, didn't prove that important one way or the other. It didn't have much effect on the deficit picture (which was marginally improving even before the plan passed), on interest rates (already declining well before it passed), or on growth (roughly steady as she goes). We did experience a wondrous boom in the mid- and late-1990's. Clinton's contribution was not to interfere, leaving Greenspan alone, deregulating, cutting taxes in 1997, and pushing free-trade deals — here he deserves real credit — that served as global tax cuts. Not bad, but hardly what liberals usually hail as visionary leadership.
On social policy, Clinton's accomplishment was to accommodate conservative trends in the country. He signed welfare reform, even though the Republican bill had an approach fundamentally different than the one he favored: tough work requirements and incentives for the states to keep people off the rolls entirely, rather than "work training" for a small proportion of the caseload. (Clinton gets credit for pushing increases in the EITC, but the smashingly successful welfare-reform law he signed was in its major features almost entirely a Republican production.) On crime, Clinton accepted and reinforced the political consensus that had been building for 30 years for get-tough-on-crime measures. But the case his supporters make that his minor gun-control measures and "100,000 cops" proposal were responsible for the drop in crime is ridiculous.
Finally, there is foreign policy. Oslo, the accomplishment for which he is most remembered thanks to that photo-op on the White House lawn, of course had nothing to do with Clinton diplomacy. Clinton was naturally involved in the follow-up agreements to Oslo, all of which came to naught since Arafat was never a trustworthy partner. While the Clinton administration was obsessed with dealing with this would-be rogue-state leader, it was seemingly oblivious to the rising anti-Americanism and radicalism in the Middle East. The containment policy against Saddam was breaking down, as the inspectors were booted on Clinton's watch and the oil-for-food program robbed blind. Elsewhere, Clinton cut a look-the-other-way deal with the North Koreans that everyone knew Pyongyang would cheat on — and it did. He undermined the cause of anti-proliferation more broadly by loosening various U.S. export controls to please corporate America, which rewarded him with copious campaign contributions. Despite a few genuine accomplishments — relative peace in the Balkans (after an excruciating three-year bout of presidential indecision) and the expansion of NATO — the world was becoming a more dangerous place, especially as al Qaeda grew in strength and brazenness. (I have more to say about the failures of Clinton anti-terror policy — it would have been nice, for instance, if he had been on speaking terms with his FBI director — but I'm bumping up against the space limit.)
Clinton was a success by what turned out to be his own most important standard: keeping his approval rating up. Otherwise, his presidency was a mediocrity that will mostly be forgotten by history, and deserves to be.
Best,
—Rich
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