Last night, President Clinton gave his final State of the Union address. Clinton was expected to use the speech to burnish his record for the history books while pumping the campaigns of both his vice president, Al Gore, and his wife, Hillary Clinton. The American Prospect asked the experts to give us their take on the proceedings.
Wendy Kaminer:
Rarely does the Supreme Court act unanimously, so I knew there was a strong case against attending the State of the Union when I heard that all the Justices were staying away. I found myself experiencing an entirely unfamiliar emotion -- pity for the members of Congress. But I have become a disaffected voter, and events like the State of the Union only serve to remind me of the falsities of our political enterprise.
It's not that I mind a little theater. Let the wives adorn the gallery and enjoy their moments of applause. Let the average citizens take their bows for everyday acts of heroism. (Carlos Rosas actually supports his children; imagine that.) Let the President engage in a little triumphalism -- but let it be tempered by honesty. Someday, every child will be educated, no child will be poor, no American will lack decent affordable health care, and America will be the safest large country on earth, the President assures us, and I recoil from the empty rhetorical utopianism.
Why can't he talk to us like adults, I wonder. Why can't he say, "We will not eliminate poverty, meanness, or even mere incompetence, but we will do our best to limit them." Why doesn't he exhort us to embrace the "strenuous life" imagined by William James? "Not the absence of vice, but vice there, and virtue holding her by the throat, seems the ideal human state," James wrote.
Why doesn't Clinton even mention the two million Americans in prison? They may not feel quite so "fortunate to be alive in this moment in history." They have been expelled from the "community" that the President extols, often for minor, non-violent offenses. Many of them, including a disproportionate share of African-Americans, will lose the right to vote (no wonder Clinton ignores them). Many are condemned to reside in appallingly inhumane prisons where abuse by guards or other prisoners is predictable. Yet Congress recently passed, and the President signed, a law aimed at practically eliminating legal challenges to unsafe and unconstitutional prison conditions. All Clinton can say is "crime is down." I guess oppression is one way of "restoring the vital center."
The President makes the usual rhetorical references to the Founders, but ignores one of their finest accomplishments -- the Bill of Rights. His themes are Opportunity, Responsibility, and Community. Conspicuously absent is Liberty. Clinton talks about freedom only when he's considering the absence of it in China. He talks about the free flow of ideas only when he's lauding free trade. He wants to wire America's schools and ensure that our children are at home in cyberspace -- so long as the government can control the ideas they encounter there. (The Administration has advocated restricting "indecency" on the Internet, as well as the dissemination of material that government officials consider harmful to minors.)
It's not surprising that Clinton omits any discussion of liberty. It requires the restraint of government, and like most Presidents, Clinton wants to expand government power, not restrain it. As an old- fashioned liberal, I support government intervention in the marketplace and hold the government responsible for social welfare. But, as a civil libertarian, I mistrust the government. As persistent legislative efforts to restrict First Amendment rights or reproduction choice show, government is often the enemy, not the friend, of freedom.
Wendy Kaminer is a senior correspondent for The American Prospect and has been a fellow at Radcliffe College since 1987. Her most recent book is Sleeping With Extra-Terrestrials: The Rise of Irrationalism and Perils of Piety.
Peter Schrag:
Anybody who wants to compress the 89 minutes of President Clinton's State of the Union Address into a few words couldn't do better than see it as an attempt at getting a legacy up. If there was a single issue, cause, problem or interest group that was ignored, it's hard to think what it might have been. The president, as usual, addressed both the Congress and the country. But in this, his last State of the Union speech, he also tried to speak across the years to history. And he spoke for Al Gore whose fortunes will in great part ride on the prosperity, social progress and the restored vital center that Clinton tried to toss into the future.
No one expects to see the enactment of more than a handful of the scores of initiatives -- some old, some new -- that he proposed. Just to list them -- more money for schools, pre-schools and child care, for expanded health care and college tuition tax credits; expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit; increases in the minimum wage; tax incentives for investment in low income areas; state hand gun registration laws; hate crimes laws, major new acquisitions of land for parks; more money for research; free trade with the obligatory words about protecting labor and the environment; passage of the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty -- is an exhausting process. All that and pay down the national debt as well. But this surely is both a baseline for the future and a campaign agenda for Democrats and for the man he hopes will succeed him.
Those who watched or listened to the speech know that he made one telling Freudian slip -- indeed made it twice -- when he transposed the call for creating "livable communities" into "liberal communities." It got a laugh and considerable derisive applause from the Republicans in front of him. But it could also serve as a marker from a president who is nothing if not a weatherman, and who just four years ago declared the "the era of big government" is over.
Budget surpluses, of course, will make most chief executives sing a cheerier song. In much of what Clinton proposed, moreover, there was still less then met the eye -- the additional tax credits for college students, like those enacted two years ago, will go to the middle class, not the poor; nor would his added federal health care cover more than a fourth of the 40 million Americans who are uninsured; the gun registration proposal would only affect new gun owners. But Clinton may also be reading a national willingness to accept -- maybe even a desire for -- a more liberal agenda, even if it doesn't happen tomorrow. For a man whose most memorable sentence will always be his denial about sexual relations "with that woman, Monica Lewinsky," and whose appeal to posterity must therefore always rest on the record and not on character, it's also the last chance to raise the odds that the country will remember him more for his dreams than his obsessions.
Peter Schrag, a longtime education writer and editor, is the author of Paradise Lost: California's Experience, America's Future and former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee.
Jeff Faux:
It was a good speech. And it was hard for a liberal not to want to stand up and cheer for the dozens of proposals Bill Clinton sprinkled over their hearts -- education, health care, medical research, gun control, mass transit, inner-city development, foreign aid, and dozens more. Nor was it unpleasant to watch conservatives squirming in their seat with frozen smiles as the President taunted them with his pledges to defend Social Security and Medicare. But it was also hard not to bite your lips in frustration and sadness at the memory of how Clinton's progressive sentiments have throughout his presidency been systematically sacrificed on the alter of fiscal conservatism and solicitation for the comfort of big business.
When Bill Clinton entered the White House eight Januarys ago, he seemed to have learned Ronald Reagan's strategic lesson for making history: concentrate on the big idea. The historic task of the Democratic restoration of the nineties was to rekindle the nation's faith in proactive government. And the big idea with which to make the case was access to national health insurance for every American. Less than two years later, the national health care fight was abandoned without even a vote in the Congress. And after the elections of 1994, he embraced the Republican big idea -- austerity for the domestic public sector in order to pay off Ronald Reagan's debts.
Bill Clinton presided over what will soon be the longest economic expansion in modern times. Whatever its causes, he has a right to claim credit for it. But a place in the first, or even second, rank of presidents is not earned for having extended a business cycle of average growth to nine years. It is earned for making historic change. Reagan -- who moved America to accept his political principles, is a contender. This State of the Union address reminds us why Clinton is not.
Despite a soaring budget surplus, the best this Democrat could do for health care was a modest proposal to help the children of the poor and some of their parents have access to medical insurance. His claim that this is a step toward national health insurance is weak: It is funded not as an entitlement but through appropriations that have to be voted on every year and matched by funds from the states. Most importantly, it does nothing to challenge the power of the health insurance companies, who are the primary obstacles to progress.
Clinton's big ideas were saved for Reagan's corporate constituency. And they will overwhelm the comprehensive but thin liberal agenda he laid out. By making the elimination of the national debt in 13 years an overarching priority, he virtually assures that the shrinkage of domestic spending will continue. And his demand that China be admitted to the WTO would effectively block the efforts for global labor rights and environmental standards for years to come. Moreover, Clinton's liberal programs are built around the conservative delivery mode of choice -- inefficient tax credits that further riddle the revenue code with loopholes and undercut its integrity.
In the end, it was classic Clinton. It touched every Democratic base, annoyed his Republican opponents, and did nothing to disturb Wall Street's sleep.
Jeff Faux is president of the Economic Policy Institute.
Micah Sifry:
President Clinton rattled off a lot of ambitious programs and promising numbers in a final pyrotechnic display of his rhetorical skills last night:
While I listened, I couldn't help but think of a different list of numbers and programs that make this one essentially moot: Nearly $76 million in soft money, large individual contributions ($200 and up), and PAC money to federal candidates and parties from doctors, hospitals, nursing homes, pharmaceutical companies, and other health industry interests from January 1997 through December 1999. Sixty percent of this went to Republicans. (Nothing from uninsured Americans, who don't have a lobby.)
This is not to say that the future of all of Clinton's proposals is predetermined by money. Sometimes, the power of organized people can defeat organized money. Sometimes, a crisis or tragedy draws enough media coverage to focus public attention on a financially-disadvantaged proposal. And sometimes, as with the tobacco industry, the weight of public outrage becomes the more dominant factor.
That's why we need serious campaign finance reform, the kind that not only shuts down soft money as a factor in national fundraising, but also frees candidates from the demands and dictates of hard money givers as well. And I didn't hear Clinton say a word about that.
Micah L. Sifry is senior analyst with Public Campaign.