The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton WhiteHouse By Benjamin R. Barber. W.W. Norton and Company, 320 pages, $26.95
The Best of Times: America in the Clinton Years By Haynes Johnson. Harcourt, 610 pages, $27.00
From the Center to the Edge: The Politics and Policies of the ClintonPresidency By William C. Berman. Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 141 pages, $16.95
Political Fictions By Joan Didion. Alfred A. Knopf, 338 pages, $25.00
In Washington, conservatives still roam the Capitol trying to name airports,post offices, and federal buildings for Ronald Reagan. But Democrats seementirely unsure about what to make of their only recent two-term president, BillClinton. In 2000, Al Gore thought Clinton more of an albatross than an asset andbecame so spooked by the administration's odor of scandal that he also ran awayfrom its record of peace and prosperity. In a January speech critiquing PresidentGeorge W. Bush's management of the economy, Senate majority leader Tom Daschlepraised the economic strategy of Clinton's two terms and even sat Robert Rubin,Clinton's treasury secretary, on the podium to underscore the point. But he nevermentioned Clinton by name. Meanwhile, Clinton, whose tendency toward self-pity ishis least attractive quality, has been reported to be in his Harlem aeriecharacteristically brooding over whether history is shortchanging hisaccomplishments.
He's likely to find only limited solace in four new books that begin theprocess of framing his legacy. All approach Clinton from a largely sympatheticcenter to center-left perspective. Yet all find him wanting. In part, thatjudgment reflects an understandable conclusion that Clinton's faults confoundedhis talents and produced a record stained by too many missed opportunities andself-inflicted wounds (in which category the Monica Lewinsky affair would qualifyas a shotgun to the head). But these conclusions also reflect a reluctance,especially on the left, to recognize the extent of Clinton's political and policyachievements in a difficult political environment.
Each of these books offers insights into the man and the political passionsthat swirled around him during the 1990s. But all slight his most positivelegacy: an economic expansion that spread more benefits to more families than anysince the 1960s. Lower- and middle-income families gained more ground underClinton than under any president since Lyndon Johnson, and those gains wereaccelerated by government policies designed both to encourage and to reward work.That fact doesn't fit the story line either of conservative critics, who want toportray a frivolous presidency that left behind only scandal, or of liberalskeptics, who see in Clinton a poll-driven opportunist who abandoned traditionalDemocratic priorities for a cynical centrism.
In fact, the evidence of the 1990s suggests that Clinton synthesized an approach to expanding opportunity that was both effective and politicallypopular: He simultaneously reduced poverty and increased the party's reach amongupper-income voters. By linking opportunity to responsibility--by demanding workin welfare reform, but then insisting that government had an obligation to "makework pay"--he provided Democrats a politically sustainable model for broadeningthe benefits of prosperity. His tenure saw many missed opportunities; but hissystematic efforts to reward work, encourage investment in troubledneighborhoods, expand home ownership, and tilt the burden of taxes from averagefamilies to the affluent displayed a coherent and consistent priority on seizingthe opportunity that good times provided to improve ordinary lives. It's a legacythat Democrats may fully appreciate only as the government moves on to differentpriorities.
Bill Clinton may be so difficult to bring into focus because somany things about him were contradictory. He reshaped the Democratic agenda toreconnect it with mainstream values and then flouted those values himself by hisdalliance with Lewinsky. He restored the Democrats' capacity to compete for thepresidency (in the three campaigns immediately before Clinton, the Democraticpresidential nominees won a smaller share of the available electoral votes thanin any three-election sequence since the formation of the modern party systemwith Andrew Jackson in 1828); then he lost control of the House and Senate in the1994 Republican landslide. He recovered to beat back the Newt Gingrich revolutionand then suffered the ignominy of impeachment. His policy achievements carriedGore to the brink of the presidency in 2000, but his personal failures may havebeen just enough to allow Bush to win on a promise to restore honor to the WhiteHouse. Clinton was creator and destroyer.
Of the four authors considered here, political scientist Benjamin R. Barberbest captures all of these personal and political ambiguities. Barber, who cameto know Clinton through a series of dinners the White House convened with"big-think intellectuals," aptly compares him to Walt Whitman in his bottomless,sometimes debilitating desire to transcend all divisions, political and personal:"He was many, embracing the North and the South, the East and the West. Andalmost making it work."
Barber's book suffers from a restricted angle of vision. Almost all of hismeaningful interactions with Clinton came at these yearly dinners where Clintonmingled with assorted academics--ostensibly to kick around themes for the Stateof the Union, but mostly because it seemed to satisfy the president's endlesscapacity for political discussion both abstract and concrete. (Others wouldflag--like Tipper Gore, who once lightly dozed off on Barber's shoulder--butClinton kept talking, often brilliantly, when even the professors were ready tosurface for air.)
But Barber compensates with generally astute political judgments and an acutepersonal portrayal of Clinton. He captures Clinton's all-purpose insatiabilitywith a deft account of sharing a bowl of cashews with the president at one of thebig-think dinners: "Talk about a common touch," Barber writes. "He would look outacross the table, exchange words with someone down at the other end, but leavesome sixth sense on guard, a third eye marking my hand in motion and parrying myevery thrust with a quicker move of his own. If I got three cashews over tenminutes, that was a lot." Later, Barber tellingly observes: "Too many people feltclose to the president for it to be true."
He's just as sharp in many of his political conclusions. Barber placeshimself to Clinton's left but recognizes the necessity of Clinton's efforts toreclaim the center: "The poor could not be served by a party of the minoritiesthat became a permanent minority party," he writes. While Clinton might not haveachieved as much as liberals hoped, Barber notes, he also stymied Gingrich'sdrive to roll back the Great Society and even the New Deal. Barber has a point:Clinton's success in making a case for Washington's role can be measured in thedistance between Gingrich's dream of radically retrenching government and Bush'smore modest hopes of constraining it.
In The Best of Times, Haynes Johnson, the former Washington Post reporter, offers a similarly mixed assessment of Clinton's impact. Johnson's book covers more than Clinton: It's a panoramic, sometimes familiar, but almost always engaging account of politics, business (what he calls technotimes), and culture (teletimes) in the 1990s. The book's heart is an extended, extremely well-written recounting of the Clinton impeachment saga. Johnson offers no "news," no insider revelations from the White House or Special Prosecutor Ken Starr's office. But he has produced something valuable: keen portraits of the key players and a shrewd understanding of the decades-long cultural conflicts that the impeachment saga crystallized. Johnson is an able guide for future historians through this sorry story: Without ever condoning Clinton's behavior, he captures the rabid ferocity of his opponents. It's impossible to read his devastating portrayals of Linda Tripp and Lucianne Goldberg and not think of Shakespeare's witches, stirring the cauldron with the bile of their own disappointments.
Johnson has less to say about the policy record of Clinton's eight years. Buthis bottom line is similar to Barber's, though a bit less sympathetic. Mostly because of the Lewinsky scandal, he sees Clinton as squandering "a time ofunparalleled peace and prosperity when a second-term president had a rarehistorical opportunity to provide significant long-term leadership."
That's roughly the appraisal University of Toronto emeritus history professorWilliam C. Berman gives, too, in his slim and superficial account of Clinton's presidency, From the Center to the Edge. Berman's book is little more than a recapitulation of old headlines; it reads like a CliffsNotes guide to the Clinton era. Compounding the problem, Berman can never quite fix his perspective on Clinton. He seems sympathetic to those who believe that Clinton surrendered too much of the Democrats' traditional agenda. But he acknowledges that the president advanced several venerable Democratic priorities (such as protecting the environment and the rights of minorities) in an adverse political climate and punctured Gingrich's dream of fundamentally shrinking government.
In Political Fictions, a collection of her political journalism from The New York Review of Books, Joan Didion won't give Clinton even that much. Didion is often bitingly insightful about Clinton's enemies, like Newt Gingrich and Ken Starr. Her criticism of the media's performance--particularly in the frenzy that surrounded the Lewinsky scandal--is devastatingly precise. But her Clinton is a cartoon character.
To Didion, Clinton represents the triumph of focus groups and the culminationof what she terms "the determination of the Democratic Party to shed anyassociation with its traditional low-income base." Guided by polls, fueled by bigmoney, and fortified by the machinations of the Democratic Leadership Council(DLC), Clinton was obsessed with "phantom Reagan Democrats," in her view, and wasedging near racism in his appeals to "the forgotten middle class."
The contradictions of Clinton's presidency provide evidence forand against almost all of these criticisms. (Though not all should be takenseriously: To consider appeals to the middle class a cover for racism is lunatic.) Did Clinton rely heavily on polls and focus groups? Yes--though he wasmore willing to confront them than Didion suggests. Surely, no poll advisedClinton that it would be popular to raise taxes in his 1993 deficit-reductionplan. Did impeachment diminish Clinton's accomplishments in his final term?Unquestionably--though even before Lewinsky, the conservative backlash againstthe 1997 balanced-budget deal was already discouraging the Republican Congressfrom making deals with a president their base supporters considered illegitimate. Did Clinton sometimes vacillate and change course?Absolutely--though he often arrived at an effective destination, as he did insanctioning, after much hesitation, the bombing campaigns in Bosnia and Kosovo.After the events of September 11, which occurred too late to be considered in anyof these books, Clinton will undoubtedly face comparably pointed questions fromhistorians about his record in preparing America to resist and combat terrorism.
Yet the most common complaint against Clinton in these books is the leastvalid: the contention that his "New Democrat" agenda abandoned the poor and theworking-class and thus steered the Democratic Party away from its historicmission of expanding opportunity. Didion phrases this indictment in its mostsimplistic formulation, deriding Clinton's call for policies that reward work as"silly." She suggests that the agenda he rode to the White House in 1992 could beread as "based on transferring entitlements from what were called 'specialinterests' to those who 'work hard and play by the rules,' in other wordsdistributing what wealth there was among the voting percentage of thepopulation." But Johnson, a more serious critic, also concludes that "the boom[of the Clinton years] was leaving the poor farther behind economically." Berman accuses Clinton of a "cautious centrism" on the problems of the poor. EvenBarber, the most sympathetic of the four, wonders why African-Americans supportedClinton so ardently when he "did not necessarily deliver the goods" for them.
Maybe the answer is because he did deliver the goods, though in ways different from those that Democrats have traditionally used. The deep instinct of liberals to believe that Clinton's success at expanding the party's electoral coalition was won solely at the price of sacrificing its neediest constituents can be sustained only by ignoring the actual record of the 1990s. Under Clinton, low-income and working-class families made their biggest gains since the 1960s--largely because of the booming economy, but also because of the policies Didion derides as "silly": a set of initiatives that encouraged and rewarded work. It turned out that "making work pay" was not only a good political slogan but an effective strategy.
The 1990s were unquestionably a good time for Americans in the penthouses. Yetthe boom of the Clinton years was defined not only by its length but also by itsbreadth and depth; it reached even workers on the margins of the economy,minorities, single mothers, and people with limited education. Census Bureaustatistics paint a portrait of the decade recognizable in none of these books.
Consider the median income. Overall, in real terms, the median income--the income level achieved by half of American families--increased by almost 15percent from 1993 to 2000. But it rose much faster for blacks (33 percent) andHispanics (24 percent) than it did for whites (14 percent). It rose faster incentral cities (18.5 percent) than it did in suburbs (12 percent). Despite allthe warnings about welfare reform impoverishing single mothers, the median incomefor female householders jumped nearly 29 percent from 1993 to 2001, significantlymore than the 17 percent increase for married couples.
In percentage terms, families on the lowest rung of the income ladder scoredthe biggest income gains from 1993 through 1999. According to Economic PolicyInstitute calculations, families in the bottom fifth of the income distributionsaw their average income increase nearly 19 percent from 1993 through 1999--whilefamilies in the top 5 percent enjoyed an average increase of about 15 percent.By comparison, in the expansion of the 1980s, the average income of the top 5percent grew more than five times faster than the incomes of the bottom 20percent.
Those broadly shared income gains refute another common liberal complaintabout the Clinton years: that the expansion of the 1990s widened the gap betweenrich and poor. Actually, according to Census Bureau figures, the gap between richand poor remained virtually unchanged through the decade. In 1993, the top fifthof households received 48.9 percent of all income; in 2000, the number hadincreased only slightly, to 49.6 percent. (The top fifth increased their share oftotal income much more rapidly in the 1980s.) The share of total income receivedby the bottom three-fifths of families declined during Clinton's tenure, butonly slightly (from 27.7 percent to 27.3 percent). It's perhaps a legitimatecomplaint that the Clinton years didn't see more progress at narrowing income inequality. But given the enormous gains of families at the top during the 1990s, even holding inequality essentially stable has to be seen as a kind of triumph, for it required significant advances for workers on the economy's lower rungs as well.
And those gains generated dramatic and almost entirely overlooked advances inreducing poverty. From 1993 through 2000, the poverty rate in America fell from15.1 percent to 11.3 percent--a reduction of 25 percent, the biggest eight-yeardecline since the 1960s. As with income, the most vulnerable groups recorded thebiggest gains. The poverty rate among blacks dropped by fully a third underClinton; among Hispanics, the drop was just over 30 percent. For both groups, thepoverty rate is now the lowest ever recorded. Poverty dropped faster forfemale-headed households than it did for married couples and is now, by far, atthe lowest level ever recorded. Children registered the greatest gains of all.Under Clinton, poverty among children fell by nearly 30 percent, to the lowestlevel since 1978. During Clinton's tenure, the number of children in poverty fellby 4.1 million--compared with just 50,000 during the expansion under RonaldReagan. Meanwhile, home ownership among African-Americans and Latinos rose to thehighest levels ever recorded.
Obviously, the long boom itself (in particular, the lowunemployment rates) deserves the most credit for these advances. But even leavingaside the question of how much Clinton's success in deficit reduction contributedto the expansion, his administration pursued a coherent series of initiativesthat reinforced these trends by demanding and honoring work. The stick waswelfare reform, which pushed welfare recipients into the job market, where theycould benefit from the rising tide. The carrot was a steady stream of policies toreward work, beginning with a major increase in the Earned Income Tax Credit(EITC) and then continuing with a hike in the minimum wage, the creation of thechildren's health-insurance program (to provide coverage for the children ofworking poor families), extended access to Medicaid for former welfarerecipients, an increase in day-care subsidies and funding for after-schoolprograms (which provide another source of child care for working families), and achildren's tax credit that significantly reduced the tax burden on manyworking-class families. On a separate track, much tougher enforcement offair-lending laws and federal subsidies for community lending institutionscontributed to a staggering 97 percent increase in home mortgage loans tolow-income borrowers from 1993 to 1999. The four authors contemplating Clintongive, at most, short shrift to all of these accomplishments.
But taken together, these efforts tangibly improved millions of lives andtook a significant further bite out of poverty. Under Clinton, the federal taxburden on families at the median income and below fell markedly. (At the sametime, the 47 percent share of total federal taxes paid by families earning$100,000 or more jumped to 57 percent--a statistic that doesn't exactly confirmDidion's portrayal of the Clinton administration as a DLC-inspired surrender tothe wealthy.) Harvard professor David T. Ellwood, a former Clinton welfareofficial, recently calculated that a single mother who left welfare for full-timeminimum-wage work would have come out ahead by only $2,005 in 1986; by 1997,largely because of the expansion of the EITC, work was some $7,100 more valuablethan welfare. That support for work lifted millions of additional families out ofpoverty under Clinton. Once the EITC and other government income supports (suchas food stamps) are added in and state and federal taxes paid are subtracted,the poverty rate in 2000 stood at just 8.7 percent overall and only 11.1 percentamong children, the Census Bureau found.
It's possible to argue that those numbers are still too high in an affluentsociety. Or that even those who have escaped poverty still haven't progressed farenough toward the middle class. Or that Clinton did not increase assistance tothe working poor enough. (The failure to improve health-care security for adultsmay stand as his greatest policy failure.) But to ignore the real gains of the1990s, as these books largely do, is to miss the most important political andpolicy achievements of the Clinton years.
During his two terms, Clinton demonstrated that it was possible for Democratsto deliver for families struggling on the lowest rungs of the economic ladderwithout alienating those above them. He did that by grounding his domesticpolicies not in the class warfare that Didion pines for but in values that sharebroad support across society: fiscal discipline, expanding opportunity, anddemanding personal responsibility. Clinton's failure to behave responsibly in hispersonal life will forever cloud these achievements and diminish his place inhistory. But it's unlikely that Democrats will regain the White House withoutrecognizing and building on his success at constructing an agenda that expandedboth opportunity and the party's fragile electoral coalition.
