Restless Giant, page 40
Reno had barely settled in when she had to deal with David Koresh, head of a cult of Seventh-Day Adventists called the Branch Davidians that was suspected of illegally amassing automatic weapons at their compound in Waco, Texas. Following a gun battle on February 28 with agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that had killed four agents and two members of the cult, Koresh and many of his heavily armed followers holed up at their compound. FBI agents, supervised by Reno, maintained a siege there for seven weeks. On April 19—the Patriots Day anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775—the agents battered the walls of the compound with tanks and fired tear gas inside, whereupon Koresh ordered his followers to pour gasoline around the compound and to burn it down.
The explosive blaze that broke out killed more than seventy members of the cult, including Koresh and twenty-one children, several of whom he had fathered with some of his many wives. Only nine followers survived. Reno justified the assault by explaining that she had received reports of children being beaten inside the compound, and Clinton backed her up. Many Americans wondered, however, how carefully Clinton himself had followed the situation, and whether he—or was it Reno?—had acted precipitously.27
Meanwhile, Clinton found himself tangled in protracted struggles over his early announcement—the initial act of his administration—that he would end a ban against homosexuals in the military. From the start, a wide range of opponents, including General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, demurred. Following protracted acrimony, which dragged on into July, foes of change succeeded in forcing Clinton to accept a compromise: Military personnel were not to reveal their sexual preferences, and their superiors were not to ask them about it. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” as this policy was called, pleased no one. Over the course of the next ten years it resulted in the discharge of some 10,000 service men and women who revealed their homosexual preferences.28
Clinton blundered again when he tried to fire the White House travel staff. They were to be replaced by political supporters and friends of his wife. Though the president claimed that the employees had mismanaged their tasks, it became clear that this explanation was a cover for a partisan housecleaning of experienced workers who had served his predecessors. When critics counter-attacked, Clinton felt obliged to restore most of those whom he had fired. “Travelgate,” as the media named this imbroglio, further advertised his political clumsiness during the early months of 1993.
By then many observers were ridiculing the president, whose poll numbers were dropping steadily. The cartoonist Garry Trudeau depicted him as a waffle. A cover story in Time featured him as architect of the “Incredible Shrinking Presidency.” A biographer, Joe Klein, later dismissed Clinton’s performance during these early months as “amateur hour.”29
Though jolted by these controversies, Clinton consoled himself with the hope that he would succeed in achieving his major goal of 1993: securing legislation reforming America’s jerry-built system of health insurance coverage. “If I don’t get health care,” he said, “I’ll wish I didn’t run for President.” As he emphasized in calling for reform, private expenditures for health purposes were continuing to skyrocket—from $246 billion in 1980 to $880 billion in 1993.30 Yet more than 35 million Americans—around 14 percent of the population—had no medical insurance, either private or governmental, and another 20 million were said to lack adequate coverage. Most of these people were poor or unemployed. Their plight graphically exposed the persistence of poverty and inequality in the world’s richest nation.
In selecting health insurance reform as his major objective, Clinton surprised many solons on the Hill, who had expected him instead to overhaul the welfare system. After all, he had pledged during the campaign to reform welfare, and in February 1993 he proclaimed that America must “end welfare as we know it,” so that it will “cease to be a way of life.” New York senator Daniel Moynihan, a liberal, was eager to undertake revision of welfare and denied that the country faced a “health care crisis.” Most Americans, he said, had fairly decent coverage. The president ignored Moynihan’s appeals. In choosing the health issue, Clinton was sailing on a more liberal tack than he had seemed to steer in 1992, when he had campaigned as a centrist “New Democrat.”31 Reform of health care insurance, moreover, was a daunting project that had frustrated previous presidents dating back to Harry Truman. Still, he pressed ahead, entrusting development of a plan to a team headed by his wife and an old friend, Ira Magaziner.
Unfortunately for advocates of reform, Magaziner and Mrs. Clinton enshrouded their activities in secrecy. They virtually ignored Congress, including moderate Republicans, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services, where such a proposal might otherwise have gestated. They listened instead to a host of academics and other “experts,” sometimes in gatherings of 100 or more people who wrangled far into the night. When a plan finally emerged from this laborious process in September, it was bulky beyond belief—1,342 pages long.32 Liberals were upset that Clinton, perhaps fearing political repercussions in 1996 if he called for tax increases to support a governmentally financed plan, did not recommend a “single-payer” system such as the one in Canada. Rather, the plan required most employers to pay for 80 percent of their workers’ health benefits. The key to this system would be regional insurance-purchasing alliances that were expected to promote “managed competition” among private health insurers, thereby lowering premiums. The government was to pay for the uninsured, ensuring universal coverage.33
Most liberals agreed that the plan, though complicated, promised to reduce economic inequality in the United States. Some large employers, too, backed it, in the hope that it would reduce the cost of their health care benefits for their workers. From the start, however, the proposal ran into sharp opposition from interest groups, notably from small insurers, who feared that larger companies would squeeze them out of the action, and from many small employers, who bridled at being told to pay for 80 percent of their workers’ health premiums. Aroused, they spent millions of dollars on television ads denouncing the plan. On Capitol Hill, Gingrich aroused his forces to fight the effort. The Clintons, he said, “were going against the entire tide of Western history. I mean centralized, command bureaucracies are dying. This is the end of that era, not the beginning of it.”34
Foes such as these seriously damaged chances for reform, as did Clinton when he refused to consider compromises that would have settled for less than universal coverage. In 1994, when congressional committees began to consider his plans, the opposing interest groups mobilized effectively. As Moynihan had warned, moreover, it was not only “selfish interest groups” that were cool to Clinton’s plans: The majority of Americans (those with health insurance) seemed mostly content with their fee-for-service arrangements and exerted little pressure for the erection of a new and complicated system. So it was that Clinton’s most ambitious dream never even reached a vote on the floor of the Democratic Congress. It finally collapsed in August 1994. Badly beaten, the president was forced to drop the issue, leaving millions of Americans without coverage and millions more dependent on the will or the capacity of employers to provide for them.
Amid disappointments such as these, Clinton still managed to secure some of his lesser goals in 1993–94. Thanks in part to Democratic majorities, Congress approved his two nominees for positions on the Supreme Court, Ruth Bader Ginsburg in 1993 and Stephen Breyer in 1994. Because these new justices replaced a liberal (Harry Blackmun) and a moderate (Byron White), Clinton’s appointments did not greatly change the ideological balance of the Court: Conservatives still maintained a tenuous majority in many of the hotly contested cases that arose over the next ten years, during which time the membership of the Court did not change. But the presence of Ginsburg and Breyer seemed to ensure a pro-choice majority on the Court, thereby moderating the culture wars over abortion that had prompted massive Washington rallies in earlier years. For the next decade, political conflicts over abortion abated a little.35
The president prevailed in a few other struggles in his first two years in office. In 1994, he signed into law a measure banning the sale of nineteen kinds of semi-automatic assault weapons. Lawmakers approved a “motor-voter” law enabling citizens to register to vote while applying for drivers’ licenses; a modestly funded national service program that offered federal aid for college costs to young people who performed community service; an education law titled Goals 2000, which authorized $2 billion to help states advance educational standards; and a Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act.
Except for the Clinic Entrances Act, which made obstruction of clinics or places of worship a federal crime, these measures did not accomplish a great deal. Huge loopholes limited the reach of the gun control measure, which in any event did not affect some 25 millions guns, including an estimated 1.5 million semi-automatic assault weapons, already in private hands. After the passage of the law in 1994, gun manufacturers, slightly adapting assault weapons, continued to make and sell such guns.36 Motor-voter registration did not advance voter participation. The modestly funded Goals 2000 encouraged education officials to develop statewide achievement tests but had little impact on school practices, which (as always in American educational history) continued to be dictated by local officials.37 Even so, these laws revealed a significant aspect of Clinton’s performance as president: Though failing to achieve a major goal such as health care reform, he remained a persistent advocate of federal social programs. Willing to use the veto, he staved off conservative efforts to cut back the welfare state.
Well before these minor victories, Clinton had concluded that he had to bolster his credentials as a moderate. Otherwise, he believed, he faced defeat in 1996. For this reason, and because he was a prudent fiscal manager, he decided early in his term to concentrate on reducing annual federal deficits, which, though finally showing a modest decline in fiscal 1993, still amounted to $255 billion.38 In doing so he was especially mindful of advice from Treasury Secretary Lloyd Bentsen and Federal Reserve Board chairman Alan Greenspan, who had emerged as a widely admired and vocal advocate of deficit reduction. If that could be achieved, Greenspan told him, major players in the important “bond market”—bankers, lenders, money-market managers, other investors—would be reassured, thereby encouraging the Fed to call for lower long-term interest rates. These, in turn, would promote greater investment and economic growth.39
In siding with Greenspan, Clinton faced down angry liberals among his own advisers and among congressional advocates of greater government spending for infrastructure and social programs. Positioning himself as a New Democrat against “tax-and-spend” liberals, he recognized ruefully that he was appealing more to business leaders and conservatives than to his own party’s traditional base. “I hope you’re all aware we’re the Eisenhower Republicans,” he remarked sarcastically to his advisers. “We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. Isn’t that great?” Still, he felt driven to lower the deficit. The government’s lack of fiscal discipline, he said, was “like a bone in the throat.”40
Clinton, displaying unaccustomed decisiveness, thereupon worked hard to secure a budget package in 1993 that would reduce federal debt by $500 billion over the next five years. In doing so he dropped his pledge, highlighted during his campaign for election, to press for a middle-class tax cut. Conservatives in Congress, meanwhile, rejected his quest for an emergency stimulus package that would have authorized $16 billion for job creation in the summer of 1993. Liberals, still demanding high levels of social spending, fumed at this course of events.
The partisan struggle that followed resembled the battle that Bush had faced when he, too, had sought to curb the deficit, thereby breaking his famous pledge, “Read my lips: No new taxes.” In 1993, as in 1990, most Republicans—conservatives who said they believed in balanced budgets—hotly opposed efforts to raise taxes, especially on the wealthy, even though such increases would presumably have lowered the deficit. But Clinton stayed the course, hoping that most Democrats would stick with him. When the battle ended in August 1993, he secured a good deal of what he had requested, including a 1 percent hike in the highest corporate tax rate and a higher (39.6 percent) marginal tax on incomes of $250,000 or more. Modest spending cuts, some in defense and overseas intelligence, some in social programs, accompanied these tax increases. The package also authorized expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit to low-income working families with children. This became a little-discussed but important social benefit during the course of the decade. The package was expected to achieve the president’s goal of cutting the deficit by nearly $500 billion within five years. Clinton won without getting a single Republican vote in the House. His margin of victory there was 218 to 216. Vice President Gore had to break a fifty-to-fifty tie in the Senate.41
Passage of the budget package made a difference over time. During the next six years, federal outlays in current dollars—many of them for entitlements tied in part of cost-of-living increases—continued to rise, from $1.41 trillion in 1993 to $1.65 trillion in 1998. But they decreased as a percentage of GDP, from 21.5 in 1993 to 19.1 in 1998. This was the lowest percentage since the late 1960s. Government receipts increased during the same period, from $1.15 trillion in 1993 to $1.72 trillion in 1998. In that fiscal year the federal budget showed a surplus of almost $70 billion, the first since fiscal 1969. Even higher surpluses followed, averaging $156 billion a year between fiscal 1999 and 2001.42
The main reason for this astounding turnabout was the strong performance of the economy, especially after 1995, which brought in higher tax revenues. Lower interest rates, which Greenspan helped to promote after 1994, further advanced this surge. Clinton was fortunate to be president while changes such as these softened memories of the recession of the early 1990s. Still, enactment of the budget package of 1993 was widely credited with contributing to the turnabout. It sent a message to skittish American investors that the federal government was finally serious about reforming its fiscal affairs. One of the most impressive accomplishments of Clinton’s presidency, the budget deal of 1993 enhanced his reputation as an economic manager.
Having secured the budget package, Clinton concentrated on another domestic goal that he favored on its merits and that he hoped would further establish his credentials as a moderate. This was congressional approval of the North American Free Trade Agreement that Bush had negotiated with Canada and Mexico in December 1992. The agreement proposed to create a free-market trading zone involving the three nations. Clinton, a strong advocate of more open trade, allied himself with leading corporate figures and with Republicans in Congress, including Gingrich. In the process he encountered heated opposition from labor union leaders and from many Democrats, including House majority leader Gephardt, who feared that American corporations would move their operations to cheap-labor Mexico, thereby harming American workers. Opponents of NAFTA also demanded better safeguards against environmental pollution that they expected would spread in Mexico and across its border into the United States. Clinton, however, refused to compromise, and NAFTA, approved in late 1993, went into effect in January 1994.
NAFTA did not seem to greatly benefit Mexico, which suffered, as earlier, from widespread poverty and unemployment. Struggling peasants raising maize, hit hard by competition from the United States, were devastated. These and other desperately poor people continued to stream into the United States, provoking rising tensions in many parts of the Southwest. Meanwhile, soil and air pollution, already heavy in many areas of Mexico, increased. Whether NAFTA was good or bad for the economy of the United States continued to be hotly debated during the 1990s and later.43 Clinton and a great many economists maintained that breaking down trade barriers forced American exporters to become more efficient, thereby advancing their competitiveness and market share. American workers, therefore, would benefit, at least in the long run. The flight of American jobs to Mexico, moreover, turned out to be smaller than many NAFTA opponents had predicted, and thanks to America’s strong economy in the late 1990s, most people who were displaced from their jobs in the United States seemed to find other work. America’s unemployment rate decreased from 6.1 percent in 1994 to a low of 4 percent in 2000.44
But some corporations did move operations to Mexico, and pollution did plague some areas near the Mexican-American border. Labor leaders, complaining of the persisting stagnation of manufacturing wages in the United States, continued to charge that American corporations were not only “outsourcing” jobs to Mexico (and to other cheap-labor nations) but were also managing to depress payrolls by threatening to move. When the American economy soured in 2001, foes of NAFTA stepped up their opposition to it.
CLINTON NEVER CLAIMED TO CARE DEEPLY about international politics. “Foreign policy is not what I came here to do,” he exclaimed unhappily when he found himself embroiled in it.45
As his comment indicated, a host of problems dogged his foreign policy advisers, the first Democratic team to deal with the new and uncharted post–Cold War era of international relations. Heading this team was Warren Christopher, a hardworking, cautious, and undemonstrative attorney whom Clinton named as secretary of state. Christopher had been Secretary of State Cyrus Vance’s deputy in the Carter years. Bland and uninspiring, he struck some observers as being “Dean Rusk without the charisma.” Neither Christopher nor other top advisers to Clinton, such as Defense Secretary Les Aspin, a former Democratic congressman from Wisconsin, articulated grand strategic ideas.46 Aspin’s casual and unstructured style made him unpopular with many Defense Department personnel and frustrated General Powell, an orderly administrator who stayed on as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff for part of Clinton’s first year in office.47
