And so it came to pass, sort of. The victory brought encomiums on cue, but most seemed grudging. Bill Clinton’s single-mindedness in support of NAFTA was appreciated, but what about the “irreparable” damage to the Democrats’ coalition? His mastery of the Congress was celebrated–he was even compared to Lyndon Johnson, not Jimmy Carter, for a change–but mostly because of his arm-twisting and pork-tossing skills in lining up votes. Even the speaker of the House, Tom Foley, leavened his praise with a warning: “You can’t keep up this way,” he allegedly told the president in a morning-after meeting at the White House, referring to Clinton’s highrisk, high-tension, high-wire legislative act.
The nit-picking may be justified, but it misses a larger point: there has been something quite unusual, and admirable, about the first year of Bill Clinton’s presidency. He has expended great gobs of political capital on issues–deficit reduction, free trade (for starters)–that will yield him no immediate political gain. Neither NAFTA nor the budget deal is likely to pay tangible benefits by 1996; either, or both, could backfire. Perhaps more important, the president has opened a national debate in two crucial areas–America’s enduring racial dilemma and the challenge to middle-class economic security posed by the global economy–that politicians have been fudging or avoiding for the past 20 years. He has taken the abstract, long-term, high-minded concerns that usually interest only editorial writers and policy masochists, and made them his agenda. His proposed solutions can be questioned. His ability to make his purposes compelling, or even comprehensible, has been intermittent at best. But he has not taken the easy road. This administration is not about–sorry Ross–politics as usual.
There will be an effort now to sell Clinton’s 1993 legislative record as stupendous–and there have been triumphs (and more to come, if anything resembling the Senate’s $22 billion crime bill is adopted, as seems likely). The White House has even figured out, belatedly, how to sell last summer’s budget deal: there really was a middle-class tax cut, after all. It was called the Earned Income Tax Credit, designed to help the working poor. It will, aides say, lower taxes for 15 million households come April. Income taxes will be raised for one tenth as many (1.4 million). Nice work, but peripheral to the president’s future.
Bill Clinton seems destined for a weird presidency. He may pass lots of legislation and still not be very popular. His fate may turn on the public’s sense of his personal fortitude, his ability to inspire confidence not strong points so far. Clinton’s best chance to change current impressions may be his leadership in the two crucial discussions he has now opened–on job security and race. Even the usual barometers of success, like economic growth, may not, ultimately, mean as much as they usually do: a hot debate inside the White House is how much hype to give the current, favorable economic trends. Usually, this is a no-brainer–optimism trumps pessimism. But some aides worry that cheerleading will seem insensitive to the millions who fear for their jobs.
NAFTA became a war because those fears have gone largely unattended for 20 years. Conservatives tried to finesse the fear with lower taxes; labor tried to finesse it with nostalgia for assembly lines lost. Neither was credible. Bill Clinton is gambling on another theory, popularized by his Secretary of Labor Robert Reich: that education will triumph over nationalism, that the most productive work force will lure the best jobs in the new global economy. This assumes a rational world–and the existence of enough high-tech jobs to sustain the sort of broad middle class that flourished in America after World War II. Even if Clinton is right, the rapidly churning postindustrial economy will make workers feel more insecure, an anxiety government can affect only at the margins. The president is hoping universal health care and the revamped employment system he’ll introduce in January will help. His real challenge, though, will be to resell a leisure-addled public on the importance of education–a lifetime of continuing, rigorous education.
The second discussion, about race, crime and morality, will be more emotional but no less significant. In his memorable speech to a black church group in Memphis, Tenn., on Nov. 13, the president raised a sad, but rather deft, question: what would Martin Luther King think of the moral anarchy that has engulfed the poorest neighborhoods since his death? This is familiar territory for sociologists, but few Democrats have ever spoken so bluntly on this issue. Certainly, no president ever has. But Bill Clinton, who is more comfortable with black audiences than most white politicians, may have it in his power to reshape the civil-rights debate, to focus finally on the family disintegration at the heart of the welfare-dependent underclass. “It’s like Nixon going to China,” says an aide. “He doesn’t scare people, like the religious right. He can talk about core values, discipline and responsibility. We’re going to work with the entertainment community and go into the neighborhoods. This is one place you can really use the bully pulpit.”
There isn’t the money to do much else. Health care may be the president’s last legislative splurge; money for the rest of his agenda will have to come from killing or reforming existing programs, a prospect he embraced–in principle–in a speech at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation meeting in Seattle last week. Such discipline is probably good for a president with Clinton’s egregious policy appetites. It will force him to be creative, to think beyond the legislature–and to continue his exploration of the enormous moral and cultural powers inherent in his office.
