A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (158 page)

Bush had himself to blame. From the moment he took office, he believed the media “gloomsters” and Texas millionaire Ross Perot, who warned that the federal budget deficits had reached intolerable levels. When considered in real constant dollars, the deficits were slightly higher than in past decades, but hardly dangerous. Quite the contrary, the nation’s GNP had grown faster than the deficits, reducing the real level of deficits-to-GNP throughout the Reagan/Bush years. But Bush had surrounded himself with Keynesian advisers who saw tax increases as the only solution to rising deficits.

What followed was one of the most incredible political meltdowns in history. In 1990, pressure built on Bush to compromise with Democrats in Congress to raise taxes, ostensibly to reduce the deficit. Yet Democratic congresses for thirty years had been comfortable with constant deficits, most of them proportionally higher than those existing in 1990. Only when it became a political weapon did they suddenly exhibit concern about the nation’s finances, and then only in terms of raising taxes, not in terms of cutting massive federal expenditures. Bush agreed to cut spending in return for a $133 billion in new taxes—the largest tax increase in the nation’s history. The agreement slammed the top rate back up to 31 percent from 27 percent; imposed so-called sin taxes on tobacco and alcohol, which penalized the poor; and eliminated exemptions. Most important, it put Bush in the position of reneging on his “read my lips, no new taxes” convention pledge.

Bush sorely underestimated the public resentment of a bald-faced lie, especially the reaction of conservatives. Worse, he overestimated the veracity of the Democrats in Congress, where no substantive spending cuts took place. In the hinterlands, however, the Republican base was outraged, especially since Bush had marketed himself in 1988 as Reagan’s successor specifically on supply-side principles.
read my lips: i lied
, blared the New York
Post
’s front page.
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Many abandoned the GOP in disgust.

Bush had put himself in a hole: having sided with the Democrats and their tax increases, Bush could not tout tax cuts as a means to end the economy’s slide. In addition, he seemed out of touch with the lives of ordinary Americans and unwilling to embrace Reagan’s legacy. Whereas Reagan had come into office eager to abolish the Department of Energy and the Department of Education (and had failed to do so), Bush had no such prejudices against big government. His campaign theme of a “kinder, gentler America” seemed to agree with Democratic criticisms that Reagan’s America had been mean and harsh. Bush celebrated a “thousand points of light,” a phrase that referred to the good deeds of millions of individual Americans who could privately shoulder some responsibilities carried by Uncle Sam. But he lacked a clear vision and obviously did not have Reagan’s communication skills to enable him to go over the heads of the Washington/New York media elites, straight to American citizens.

Even when Bush took positions that were far to the left of his conservative base, such as pushing through the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) and stricter environmental laws, he won no praise from the media, but instead was criticized for not doing enough. When Thurgood Marshall, the only African American on the U.S. Supreme Court, retired, Bush nominated Clarence Thomas, a black conservative federal judge with an impeccable record. Instead of praising Bush’s racial sensitivity, Thomas was nearly “borked” at the Senate hearings when a University of Oklahoma law professor, Anita Hill, claimed Thomas had sexually harassed her. After a high-profile Senate hearing Thomas was confirmed and became an outstanding and consistent justice.

Thomas was representative of a new class of African Americans who had become successful and prosperous with minimal, if any, aid from government. As such, he represented a significant threat to the civil rights establishment, whose central objective remained lobbying for government action on behalf of those it claimed to represent. Men and women like John Johnson, Michael Jordan, Herman Cain, and Oprah Winfrey illustrated by their success within the market system that political favors played almost no part in economic achievement for blacks. At the same time, a new class of conservative black intellectuals arose—Thomas himself and men like Shelby Steele, Walter Williams, Glenn Loury, and Thomas Sowell—that was at odds with the entrenched civil rights leadership, yet were deliberately ignored and trivialized by the media.

Episodes of racial injustice—no matter how unusual or atypical—turned into opportunities to once again mobilize black political support around civil rights themes. One such event occurred in April 1992, when four white Los Angeles police officers attempted to stop a black motorist who had run from them at speeds of more than a hundred miles per hour. The driver, Rodney King, repeatedly resisted the officers, and the police suspected he was high on a narcotic, possibly PCP (psychoactive drug phencyclidine), which diminishes pain receptors. When King did not respond to oral commands, the police beat him with their clubs and hit him with a Taser stun gun. A witness taped the entire episode with a video camera, and King sued the Los Angeles Police Department for violations of his civil rights. Tried in Simi Valley, a northern Los Angeles suburb, the officers were acquitted by an all-white jury, some of whom stated that when viewed in context, the tapes showed that King had appeared dangerous as he continued to resist.

When the verdict was announced, South-Central Los Angeles broke out in Watts-like riots and looting, protesting the appearance that the white officers got off the hook. It took troops three days to restore order, by which time fifty-four people had died and thousands of buildings had been damaged or destroyed. The Bush Department of Justice quickly hauled the officers up on federal civil rights charges, and on April 17, 1992, two of them were found guilty of violating King’s civil rights and sentenced to thirty months in prison. It would not be the first racially charged case in Los Angeles to make news during the decade.

“I Didn’t Inhale”

Bush’s weakness on the economy opened the door for a serious challenge to the sitting president from the Democrats, but it was still one he should have weathered. Instead, Bush found himself besieged not by one, but by two political opponents.

Americans had become frustrated with the national debt and the annual deficits, but were unwilling to elect individual legislators who would resist the siren song of spending. A dynamic developed in which, to get elected, politicians of both parties would tout their ability to bring in dollars locally while opposing national spending programs in other districts.

Moreover, structural impediments to change had afflicted the House of Representatives, where, by law, spending bills originated. Having held the majority for almost forty years, the Democrats dominated committees, and they did so in such a way that there was little debate or discussion about many legislative items. Democrats controlled the rules committee, and simply prohibited extensive analysis of spending bills. Indeed, proposals to cut taxes, to restrain spending, and to force various caps onto the budgetary process never made it to the floor of the House for a vote. Democrat leaders killed the proposals in committee, quietly, and away from public roll calls. This process shielded Democrats from charges from opponents of being big spenders by keeping the votes secret: a politician could simply deny that he supported a particular measure and that was the end of it.

Politicians had also started to become permanent Washington fixtures. Far from the Jeffersonian ideal of citizen legislators, many of the people who ran the nation had never lived or worked outside of Washington; most of the members of Congress were lawyers who had gone straight from law school to government work. Few had ever run a business or had had to show a profit or meet a payroll. In contrast, as legislators, when government ran short of money, they either ran a deficit or hiked taxes. There was never any talk of actually cutting back, or belt tightening. Gradually, popular resentment built up against “politics as usual.”

It took the right person to tap into this well of anti-Washington sentiment. In 1992, H. Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, burst onto the political scene. He had founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1962, turning it into a cash machine.
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In 1979 he funded a successful effort to pluck several EDS employees out of revolutionary Iran, which author Ken Follett later turned into a best-selling novel,
On the Wings of Eagles.
After selling EDS to General Motors, he started Perot Systems. By the time he began to appear in public forums, Perot possessed a certain amount of credibility. He initially appealed to many as homey, sensible, and practical, but at the same time, he turned off elites like those swarming around the Clinton staff. (Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos called Perot a “weird little man who was a ventriloquist’s dummy for voter anger,” a comment that itself showed how detached insiders like Stehanopoulos were).
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Perot’s business background attracted many who were outraged by out-of-control deficit spending, and his simple-sounding solutions on the surface had appeal. He played to his role as an outsider, claiming he owed nothing to either of the established parties. Denouncing campaign spending, Perot refused federal money and financed himself in 1992. He carefully avoided any abortion position that would have alienated the sea of moderates, and he stayed away from any specifics in his policy recommendations for as long as possible. Adept with charts and graphs, Perot was the master of the political infomercial, but he faltered badly when confronted by a forceful critic.

Unlike Reagan’s, Perot’s simple-sounding solutions were often contradictory and poorly grounded in political realities. After a brief infatuation with Perot, the media turned hostile in early summer, leading the Texan to withdraw from the race in July. The withdrawal, however, was another Perot ploy to avoid close inspection. He reentered the race in October, when the press had to pay more attention to the established candidates, and although the two-month hiatus may have cost him a few votes, Perot gained much more by avoiding the media scrutiny during the summer. He hoped to gain a plurality of the vote in enough states to snatch the presidency from Bush or Clinton.

The Democrats, in the wake of the 1988 Dukakis debacle, had listened to calls to move to the center. That year, Al From decided that Bill Clinton had to be made the chairman of the DLC, and he began to organize a structure that would facilitate a White House run by the DLC chairman. It was nothing less than a breathtaking transformation of American campaign finance practices. In 1990, Clinton accepted the position with the promise that he could use the resources of the DLC as a fund-raising apparatus. Indeed, from the outset, Clinton’s primary purpose at the organization was raising money.

Bolstered by a series of New Democrat studies, Clinton supported several moderate positions, especially free trade through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and welfare reform rather than welfare expansion. Along with other New Democrats, Clinton touted law-and-order issues and railed against deficits. Above all, he sought to repackage old, dilapidated liberal ideas with new language, calling government spending “investment” and referring to taxes as “contributions.”
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At the convention, Clinton chose as his running mate Al Gore of Tennessee, whom the DLC had originally intended as its model candidate back in 1988. Awash in money and wielding a series of policy proposals designed to win back the middle class, Clinton should have been a formidable candidate. As it was, he stumbled.

For one thing, he had dodged the draft during the Vietnam war. Reporters who had known the story all along and had failed to address it finally began to home in on his flight to England as a Rhodes Scholar (where he participated in antiwar protests) and on his manipulation of his college ROTC classification. There were equally damaging allegations of marital infidelity. Gennifer Flowers, a former lover, produced a tape-recorded conversation of Clinton telling her to lie about their relationship. Once again, the press had known about that relationship and effectively buried it until it could no longer be contained. Appearing with his wife, Hillary, on a
60 Minutes
television interview, Clinton evaded the Flowers allegations but admitted there had been “pain in their marriage,” and the pair continued on as the happy (and ever politic) couple.
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As the first major candidate from the boomer generation, Clinton portrayed himself as young and hip, appearing on a nighttime television show in sunglasses to play the saxophone with the band, and answering questions about the type of underwear he wore on MTV. He admitted to smoking marijuana—but he “didn’t inhale.” (His brother, Roger, had been jailed for possession of cocaine.) When it came to women, Clinton had used state troopers in Arkansas to “introduce” him to various girls and then employed the bodyguards to transport the females to and from their assignations. Most of his former sex partners remained silent. The few who did speak up came under withering fire from Clinton allies, who vilified them as “nuts and sluts.” (A female Clinton staffer was hired to specifically deal with “bimbo eruptions,” claims by other women that they had had affairs with the candidate.)

Clinton’s flagrant disregard of traditional morals outraged large segments of the public, who were already concerned about high crime rates, rising illegitimacy, soaring divorce numbers, and public schools that suffered from a plague of violence. Although George Bush confidently believed that his character would stand in stark relief to that of Clinton’s, he himself had brazenly lied about the tax hikes.

On election day, Clinton effectively secured 43 percent of the vote. Bush netted only 37 percent, and the spoiler Perot siphoned off 19 percent. Perot’s total was significant, equaling the amount won by Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, when he had essentially denied the presidency to William Howard Taft. It would be inaccurate, however, to claim that Perot stole the election from Bush: exit polls show that he took votes equally from both established candidates. Perot did damage Bush, however, by muddying the waters on Clinton’s character, and by portraying both parties as equally guilty of deficits, insulating Clinton from tax-and-spend criticisms.