Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (54 page)

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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.

C
LINTON 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.
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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.
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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.
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Nor did there seem to be a compelling reason in 1993 why Clinton should have revamped the nation’s military and foreign policies. With the Cold War over, no overarching threat seemed to endanger the United States or the peace of the world. Clinton, freed from worrying about the Soviets, became an enthusiastic and consistent supporter of economic globalization—opening markets via NAFTA and other agreements—to the extent that some people thought that the doings of the International Monetary Fund and the Treasury Department, which were active in promoting international financial stability, mattered more to him than the National Security Council.
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Still, Clinton was as eager as his predecessors had been to maintain America’s preeminence in the world. He also made a special effort to promote better relations between Israel, then headed by Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin, and the Palestine Liberation Organization, led by Yasser Arafat. In September 1993, following secret negotiations that had been facilitated by the government of Norway, Rabin and Arafat shook hands in a highly publicized show of harmony orchestrated by Clinton on the White House lawn. The once bitter enemies also signed the so-called Oslo Accords, which temporarily brought to a close a Palestinian intifada, or armed uprising, that had broken out in 1987. The accords featured a Declaration of Principles, which outlined a transition to control by a Palestinian Authority of parts of the West Bank and the Gaza Strip. The PLO recognized the right of the state of Israel to exist, renounced terrorism, and agreed to establish interim government in these areas.

After the assassination of Rabin by an angry Jewish man, however, the Oslo Accords fell victim to the hatreds that had long divided these implacable foes in the Middle East. By 1996, it was clear that Clinton’s efforts to establish lasting peace had failed. Moreover, like most Americans in the 1990s, the president did not propose to use the nation’s awesome military preeminence to press for major changes in international relationships, either in the Middle East or elsewhere in the world. His more prudent foreign policies tended instead to respond to problems and crises as they developed.