In all the hoopla over Bill Clinton's personal life, resuscitated by the recent publication of his autobiography, the policy details of the longest Democratic presidency since Harry Truman's are sadly overlooked. What did Bill Clinton set out to accomplish? To what extent is he responsible for the spectacular economy of the 1990s? And to what extent did he put it to good use?
Ann Lewis, White House director of communications from 1997-99, says that Clinton's successes can be seen in the quality of individual families' lives, while Economic Policy Institute economist Max B. Sawicky argues that the administration sacrificed the Democratic mission for political considerations.
Ann Lewis:
Bill Clinton's presidency was good for our country: After eight years, America was stronger at home, more confident in its ability to face challenges by working together, and more comfortable with the ability of government to meet and serve people's needs. We were better off in the world, with more friends and allies and more respect for American leadership. It was also good for progressive politics: Clinton governed by principles that measured the positive impact on real people's lives and showed the difference good policies make in practice.
Is there any question that we were stronger at home? Those 22 million new jobs were accompanied by rising household incomes; millions more low-income families benefiting from an expanded Earned Income Tax Credit; the largest drop in child poverty in almost 30 years; and the Children's Health Insurance Program, the single largest investment in children's health since Medicaid was introduced.
The first bill Clinton signed as president, the Family and Medical Leave Act, may be emblematic of his presidency. First developed by a progressive policy center (now the National Partnership for Women and Families) to meet the needs of a changing society in which both mother and father are likely to work, the bill was opposed by the business establishment and vetoed twice by George Bush Senior. The act has now been used by millions of people to care for new babies and aging relatives, and it's regularly cited as an example of a government policy that has had a real impact on people's lives.
Bill Clinton actually believed in the imperative to leave no child behind and the value of investing in education. He increased support for Head Start; expanded after-school learning centers; built programs to bring more teachers and college tutors to children in early grades; and opened the doors of college wider with tax credits, work-study programs, and Pell Grants.
Clinton demonstrated that environmental protections need not come at the expense of a growing economy. He approved new clean-air standards, strengthened the Safe Drinking Water Act, and issued new standards to protect food safety. He used his political capital for a crime bill that put more police officers on the street, added a record check for handguns, and banned assault weapons. Violent crime went down to its lowest level in years; people felt safer because they were.
Were there failures? Of course, most notably the failure to pass a health-care bill that is now more badly needed than ever. That bill failed as part of the too-ambitious agenda of Clinton's first two years, and it contributed to the political backlash that cost Democrats control of Congress in 1994. And there were painful disagreements with friends, particularly over the welfare-reform bill of 1996 -- a subject that calls for a debate of its own.
But there were also progressive victories that deserve more attention, including the numerous times Clinton stood up to right-wing attempts to use wedge politics. The attack on affirmative action had gathered significant national momentum until Clinton spoke out with his "mend it, don't end it" speech. The “partial-birth abortion” bill, designed to be politically unstoppable, was vetoed twice by Clinton because, he explained, it gave no consideration to women's health. He was unable to end discrimination against gays in the military, but he made historic appointments of openly gay men and lesbians, issued an executive order ending federal discrimination on the basis on sexual orientation, and spoke both for barring private-sector nondiscrimination and adding sexual orientation to the hate-crimes bill.
Compared with the last three years of George W. Bush, Bill Clinton's administration looks like a golden age of progressive politics. I would argue that his accomplishments look good even when standing on their own.
Max B. Sawicky:
Before I get started, I'd like to emphasize that my views do not represent those of the Economic Policy Institute. I'd also like to acknowledge that we were better off under a Clinton presidency than we would have been with Bush Senior or Bob Dole. As politicians like to say, however, our best days are still ahead of us.
Liberal critics often depict Democratic politicians as lacking the guts to do the right thing. That's a blind alley. Policies need to be politically feasible as well as right on the merits. The Clinton administration's problem was that it embraced bad policies that were also bad politics, and its view of political feasibility was narrow.
As Ann details, the administration did not lack entirely for achievements, such as launching the State Children's Health Insurance Program, expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, and coming up with a 1993 budget plan that reversed extremely adverse deficit trends (which Clinton did while subsequently fending off Republican tax and spending cuts).
The most important economic development in the '90s, though, was the boom in the latter half of the decade. Although the 1993 budget victory was necessary to make the boom possible, there is little support for the premise that Clinton policies created it -- if I fix your broken ankle and you recover to win the Boston Marathon, the latter achievement is yours, not mine.
This economic boom generated budget surpluses that the Clinton administration then failed to capitalize on. Instead of proposing worthwhile domestic spending initiatives, it polemicized against tax cuts and on behalf of misbegotten ambitions to extirpate the national debt. It could have tried to rehabilitate the reputation of the welfare state by proposing well-founded expansions. This, I submit, is the mission of the Democratic Party; otherwise, it has little purpose.
One summary measure of progress in federal social-welfare policy is domestic discretionary spending. In 1992 it was $284 billion (in constant 2000 dollars). For fiscal year 1995, still reflecting Democratic control of the Congress, it was only $302 billion -- a two-year increase of $18 billion. That's pathetic. By 2000, it was still only $320 billion. (Now, after three years of George W. Bush, it's about $420 billion.)
The ambiguous exception to this domestic thrift was the health-care proposal, which was founded on rejecting a good policy -- a single-payer system -- that could have been a winning politics. The faulty political calculation held that a proposal indulging some leading manufacturers and existing health-insurance companies would attract centrist support, but the corporations had not been sold the deal and failed to come around. At the very least, it would have been better to flame out for something you really want rather than for a second-best alternative.
Among the most regrettable legacies of the Clinton administration are its ideological nostrums: gross exaggerations of the benefits of deficit reduction, free trade, and reinventing government. There isn't the space to unpack them all. Clinton and Co. probably believed the free-trade bit, but they must have known the other two were way hyped.
To highlight some of the other failings: I see no progress on race relations between 1992 and 2000. Offsetting some of the good vibes about affirmative action were welfare reform and the trashing of Lani Guinier by the president himself, which I'd say set back the cause of minority voting rights a couple of decades. Welfare reform, meanwhile, was the biggest social-policy fraud of the past 30 years.
On the foreign-policy front -- not my specialty, to be sure -- there were some noble endeavors, some tail tucking, and some utter misfires. In category one I put the Kosovo intervention and Israeli-Palestinian peace efforts; in two, Somalia and Rwanda; in three, sanctions against Iraq and the outrageous bombing of the aspirin factory in the Sudan. I see no way to net this out to a single verdict.
So in conclusion, the Clinton administration passed on some major opportunities, succumbed to some huge blunders, and committed some execrable deeds. In one sense, politics as usual. But our interest should be in the politics of the unusual. Nothing less is required to put the world in much better shape.
Lewis:
Max and I agree that policies need to be right on the merits and politically feasible -- I would add, and assume he concurs, that the latter is the key to effective governance in a small, democratic society. And we agree that the 1993 budget victory made the succeeding economic boom possible.
I am puzzled, then, why he is unwilling to give the Clinton administration any further credit for structuring an economic expansion that raised household income, including African American and Hispanic households; invested in education and technology, with an emphasis on underserved populations; and added micro-credit loans to extend access to capital for small neighborhood enterprises. Indeed, I don't see why he's unwilling to give any credit to a president who at the height of the boom used the opportunity to develop a “New Markets” program encouraging investment in economically depressed American communities.
Max complains that Bill Clinton "polemicized" against tax cuts -- a line that, by itself, reminds any progressive what a remarkable leader Clinton was. The Clinton administration supported certain tax cuts: The expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit, which Max lauds, provided major tax relief for low-income earners; the increased child-tax credit and other targeted tax cuts were designed to benefit lower- and middle-income families.
But Clinton did stand up to a Republican Congress yearning to cut taxes more broadly to benefit their higher-income constituents (and donors). Blocking larger, irresponsible tax cuts was an act of political statesmanship. Doing so by calling on Congress to "save Social Security first" was an act of dazzling political skill.
Max argues that the "mission" of the Democratic Party is to expand the welfare state. I disagree. I believe our mission is to build a society in which more people are able to live better lives -- a society that rewards hard work, ensures equal opportunity, respects civil and human rights, and offers a better future for every child from every family and a secure and dignified old age. Government programs can be the best tools to reach these goals, but more government is not an end in itself.
By Max's standards, the Bush administration took a step forward by shifting the cost of cleaning toxic-waste sites from polluters to taxpayers, thus expanding government outlays. I preferred the Clinton-era version in which polluters paid, and I suspect Max does, too. His measure has no room for such progressive successes as strong environmental standards, or the Family and Medical Leave Act -- yet these policies have made a real difference in many people's lives.
I am glad that Max mentioned foreign policy in his response. Again, we agree on the Kosovo intervention, which set an example of U.S. action in the face of genocide and of building a coalition with American leadership, as well as on Clinton's tireless efforts to help build agreement in the Middle East. I would add his more successful efforts in Northern Ireland; the people of Ireland and Northern Ireland have expressed their appreciation better than I possibly could.
There are other aspects of Bill Clinton's foreign policy worth applauding, most notably his attention to human rights. As Hillary Rodham Clinton reminded us in her historic 1995 speech in Beijing, this included the recognition that women's rights are human rights; the accompanying attention to health care, education, and access to capital for women and girls was embodied in the president's foreign-policy initiatives. There was one outstanding failure: We should have acted to prevent genocide in Rwanda.
Finally, I am at a loss as to how to respond to Max's comment that he saw "no progress on race" in the Clinton years, especially considering the strong, positive response Clinton got from African Americans while he was in the White House (and to this day). Surely, as progressives, we should give some credit to the opinions of people who have the most at stake?
Sawicky:
The following remark by Ann Lewis typifies the posture of the Clinton administration and encapsulates the problem in Democratic Party politics:
Max argues that the "mission" of the Democratic Party is to expand the welfare state. I disagree. I believe our mission is to build a society in which more people are able to live better lives -- a society that rewards hard work, ensures equal opportunity, respects civil and human rights, and offers a better future for every child from every family and a secure and dignified old age. Government programs can be the best tools to reach these goals, but more government is not an end in itself.
We have here a blend of truisms and triangulation that evades the issue. I raise the pursuit of social welfare, and she translates that as statism.
There are huge gaps in our social safety net, giving rise to major sources of economic insecurity for working people: displacement, ill health, workplace injury, destitution in old age, inability to finance long-term care, and an increasingly rapacious Wal-Mart-style labor market. There is no mystery about how to fill these gaps: with social insurance. I strongly suspect this is well understood by every Clinton-administration alumnus and alumna, but debatable political calculations give rise to intellectual evasion.
Social insurance doesn't solve every problem, but it beats the hell out of the “New Markets” initiative, invisible social investment, and micro-credit. It would be better to admit political reservations than to tout micro-initiatives as the best answer to economic inequality. A comparison can be drawn to the Bush administration's strategy of discounting the cost of its ambitions in Iraq to sell a stripped-down mission to the public. While far less disastrous, Clinton's economic patchwork was no better designed for accomplishing its ostensible goals.
Ann counterposes Clinton-administration advances in regulation to public spending. Of course gross spending levels are an imperfect index of progress in social welfare. But regarding regulation, one thing at least is clear: You need an enforcement mechanism, usually public employees, and that takes us back to the stagnation of domestic discretionary spending.
Then there's the touchy subject of race. As an indicator of progress, Ann cites President Clinton's popularity among African Americans. To be sure, African Americans supported an embattled president because they believed him to be on their side, and his opponents to be hell-bent on the destruction of the civil-rights revolution. But opposition to conservative goals is a low standard by which to gauge commitment in this arena. Aside from avoiding regression, I can't imagine many African Americans look at 1992-2000 as an era of progress.
I come back to the Democrats' mission: to expand the welfare state, because it offers obvious solutions to fundamental problems. Social supports do not interfere with “rewarding work.” To the contrary, it is precisely the failure of markets to reward work that creates a need for a welfare state. Markets, which can alternatively be described as “employers, doing what they like,” can fail to reward merit, hard work, or educational attainment; they constitute a system of power in which the worker operates at a chronic disadvantage. The meritocracy myth is propagated by those who have lucked out, or who have advanced by sidestepping the straight and narrow -- good grief, look at who's now living in the White House!
Merits aside, are my suggestions politically plausible? Perhaps not, under present circumstances, although I recall no wave of outrage in 1997 over the welfare-state expansion that was the State Children's Health Insurance Program. So I would extend the Democrats' mission to changing these circumstances, to using leadership positions to broach solutions that they know are best, if presently unpopular. Credulous, defensive rhetoric about personal responsibility, the end of big government, and fiscal responsibility does not point the way forward.
President Clinton did what politicians do, better than most, under highly aversive conditions. He might be likened to a great hockey goalie, taking some bone-crunching hits and accomplishing some miraculous saves, but never getting a chance to leave the net and score. To some extent, it was his fault, and we all know why. What's important is to recognize the familiar, infernal dynamics that, as we speak, are driving a senator with an 85-percent Americans for Democratic Action voting record pell-mell toward the political center. There must be some way out of this.
Ann Lewis, Bill Clinton's director of communications from 1997-99 and counselor to the president from 1999-2001, is chair of the Democratic National Committee's Women's Vote Center. Max B. Sawicky is an economist at the Economic Policy Institute and the author of the blog MaxSpeak.
