Listen, Liberal: Or, What Ever Happened to the Party of the People?

by Frank, Thomas

  Consider the new president’s own story. Higher education had been what opened the doors for Bill Clinton, what had allowed a talented commoner from a backward place to travel the wide world and to enter the highest circles of the power elite. And so it was with nearly all Clinton’s close confidants: they were successful professionals whose worth was established by their achievements in college or graduate school. Martin Walker, the journalist who wrote The President We Deserve, starts his biography by marveling at Clinton’s different circles of well-graduated friends—the ones from his college days at Georgetown, the ones from his days as a Rhodes Scholar, the ones from Yale Law School—and then he speculates about the kind of high-powered synergies that could happen when Bill brought one group of smart friends into contact with another.

  Clinton’s cabinet was a kind of yuppie Woodstock, a gathering of the highly credentialed tribes. Critics at the time tallied up how many of them had attended this institution and how many that; how many were married to important journalists and how many were married to important college professors. It was such a tight little network of enlightened strivers, all these hard-working, well-graduated people who not only knew the answers but who knew one another, too. “The Clinton Administration was to fulfill Cecil Rhodes’s dream,” wrote the British journalist Walker. “Seldom has any foreign country been run so completely by such a narrowly defined elite.”12

  Clinton had famously promised to appoint a cabinet that would “look more like America than any previous administration.” Look like us they did—black, white, brown, male, female. Examined from any perspective other than their external appearances, however, they were not representative at all. In 1992, the Democratic convention had laughed at George H. W. Bush’s posh-boy entourage for being ignorant of life as it’s lived in some Appalachian hollow, and now came the news that there were more millionaires among the populist Bill Clinton’s cabinet than there had been in Bush’s. In addition, more than three-quarters of them were lawyers. The country had merely exchanged one elite for another; a cadre of business types for a collection of high-achieving professionals.

  One point where Clinton’s obliviousness to the situation of ordinary people became conspicuous was in the brief tussle over his first choice for attorney general: one Zoë Baird, a typically well-connected corporate lawyer who was married to a famous law professor at Yale. Between the two of them, Baird and her husband made more than six hundred and fifty grand per year, but still they saw fit to pay their two undocumented domestic servants a little more than $250 per week, without having initially made the required Social Security payments. Had Baird been a Bush appointee, this would no doubt have constituted a living lesson in how class and inequality work—a teachable moment, as people like to say. But of course it wasn’t that at all. It was scarcely anything. The Clinton vetting team wasn’t put off by it in the least. They thought it was just a “yuppie crime,” the columnist Clarence Page joked. Offensive to you, maybe, but in the circles in which these people traveled it was about as dreadful as the rule-breaking fun of Ferris Bueller and his pals.13 Congress did not find it so petty, however, and the Baird nomination had to be withdrawn.

  Bill Clinton was often described as the leader of his generation, but it’s more accurate to say he was the leader of a particular privileged swath of his age group—the leader of a class. And this was the moment for his cohort to take their turn at the controls. As the sentimental music of Judy Collins played, one privileged group was taking over from another. A few journalists got it at the time: looking over the rosters of Clinton appointees, their spouses, and their interlocking circles of friends, Jacob Weisberg of the New Republic fretted about the “increasingly cozy relationships between press, law, academia and government” that he saw there. “There’s rarely been a time,” he concluded, “when the governing elites in so many fields were made up of such a tight, hermetic and incestuous clique.”14

  There was something else Weisberg understood in those early days of the administration. “The Clinton circle has a pronounced class consciousness that tells them they’re not just lucky to be here,” he wrote. “They’re running things because they’re the best.”

  4

  Agents of Change

  Everyone remembers the years of the Bill Clinton presidency as good times. The economy was booming, the stock market was ascending, and the mood was infectious. You felt good about it even if you didn’t own a single share.

  And yet: What did Clinton actually do in his eight years on Pennsylvania Avenue? While writing this book, I would periodically ask my liberal friends if they could recall the progressive laws he got passed, the high-minded policies he fought for—you know, the good things Bill Clinton got done while he was president. Why was it, I wondered, that we were supposed to think so highly of him—apart from his obvious personal affability, I mean?

  It proved difficult for my libs. People mentioned the obvious things: Clinton raised the minimum wage and expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit. He secured a modest tax increase on the wealthy. There was his ban on assault weapons. And he did propose a national health program, although it was so poorly designed it could be a model of how not to do big policy initiatives.

  Other than that, not much. No one mentioned any great but hopeless Clintonian stands on principle; after all, this is the guy who once took a poll to decide where to go on vacation. His presidency was all about campaign donations, not personal bravery—he rented out the Lincoln Bedroom, for chrissake, and at the end of his time in office he even appeared to sell a presidential pardon.

  It’s easy to remember the official, consensus reasons why we’re supposed to admire Bill Clinton—the achievements which the inevitable Spielberg bio-pic will no doubt illustrate with poignant and whimsical personal glimpses. First was the economy, which did really well while he was in office. So well, in fact, that we had something close to full employment for several years while the Dow hit 10,000 and the Nasdaq stock index went effing vertical—flush times that are almost inconceivable from our present-day vantage point. Surely that trumps everything.

  The other great source of the Clinton myth is the insane vendetta against him launched by the Republicans—what his former aide Sidney Blumenthal has called the “Clinton Wars.” The attacks began soon after Clinton took office—the Whitewater pseudoscandal actually made page one of the New York Times in 1992—and the Clinton Wars were so patently, so outrageously unfair that you couldn’t help but stand behind their victim. Clinton’s enemies spent millions trawling Arkansas for his old paramours. Congress actually impeached the guy for lying about a blowjob.

  For many of the authors who have examined the Clinton presidency, the Clinton Wars eclipse everything else. For instance, take Carl Bernstein, the eminent journalist who wrote a meticulously researched biography of Hillary Clinton, Bill’s wife and “co-president.” So many of the pages Bernstein allots to the couple’s White House years are filled with details about Vince Foster and the Travel Office and the Independent Counsels and the Grand Juries and the missing billing records that Bernstein ultimately relegates Bill Clinton’s actual achievements as president to a few desultory paragraphs here and there.1

  The Clinton Wars were what politics was all about, and Bill Clinton won those wars. The priggish, boorish, pharisaical right raged against him, and he soldiered on. He defied the Republicans and got himself reelected even as his party lost control of Congress. He outmaneuvered the GOP during the budget wars of 1995 and ’96 and convinced the public to blame it for the government shutdown.

  Flush economic times and victory in the Clinton Wars: These two are enough to secure the man a spot among the immortals.* In fact, before the Crash of 2008, my fellow Washingtonians tended to regard the Clinton administration as a transparent triumph. This was what a successful Democratic presidency looked like. This was the model. To do as Clinton did was to follow the clearly marked path of wisdom.

  YESTERDAY’S GONE

  Evaluating Clin
ton’s presidency as heroic is no longer a given, however. After the bursting of the dot-com bubble in 2000, the corporate scandals of the Enron period, and the collapse of the real estate racket, our view of the prosperous Nineties has changed quite a bit. Now we remember that it was Bill Clinton’s administration that deregulated derivatives, deregulated telecom, and put our country’s only strong banking laws in the grave. He’s the one who rammed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) through Congress and who taught the world that the way you respond to a recession is by paying off the federal deficit. Mass incarceration and the repeal of welfare, two of Clinton’s other major achievements, are the pillars of the disciplinary state that has made life so miserable for Americans in the lower reaches of society. He would have put a huge dent in Social Security, too, had the Monica Lewinsky sex scandal not stopped him. If we take inequality as our measure, the Clinton administration looks not heroic but odious.

  Some believe it is unfair to criticize President Clinton for these deeds. At the time of his actions, they recall, these initiatives were matters of almost universal assent. In the tight little group of credentialed professionals who dominated his administration as well as the city they worked in, almost everyone agreed on these things. Over each one of them there hovered a feeling of inevitability and even of obviousness, as though they were the uncontroversial policy demands of history itself. Globalization wanted these things to happen. Technology wanted them to happen. The Future wanted them to happen. Naturally the professional class wanted them to happen, too.

  The term Clinton liked to use to summarize this sense of inevitability was “change.” This word is, obviously, a longstanding favorite of politicians of the left; what it means is that We the People have the power to shape the world around us. It is a hopeful word. But when Clinton said in a speech about free trade in 1993 that

  Change is upon us. We can do nothing about that,

  he was enshrining the opposite idea as the progressive creed. Change was an external force we could neither escape nor control; it was a reality that limited what we could do politically and that had in fact made most of our political choices for us already. The role of We the People was not to make change but to submit to its dominion. Naturally, Clinton thought to describe this majestic thing, this “change,” by referencing a force of nature: “a new global economy of constant innovation and instant communication is cutting through our world like a new river, providing both power and disruption to the people and nations who live along its course.”2

  Clinton spoke of change the way other politicians would talk about God or Providence; we could succeed economically, he once announced, “if we make change our friend.”3 Change was fickle and inscrutable, an unmoved mover doing this or that as only it saw fit. Our task—or, more accurately, your task, middle-class citizen—was to conform to its wishes, to “adjust to change,” as the president put it when talking about NAFTA.

  Worship of “change” was standard stuff in the business literature of that period, but Clinton brought it into the public sphere. For him, this was how politics worked: Every deal was always a done deal. Every legislative program was a way of reckoning with some irresistible onrushing historical force that he and his advisers had divined. The role of Congress was to figure out how to bow to the new reality as Clinton’s cohort perceived it.

  BAD BRAINS

  The first time I myself tuned in and noticed some version of this inevitability-speak was in 1993, during the fight over NAFTA. The deal had been negotiated by the departed president, George H. W. Bush, but the Democratic majority in Congress had balked at the original version of the treaty, forcing the parties back to the table. As with so many of the achievements of the Clinton era, it eventually took a Democratic president, working with Republican members of Congress, to pass this landmark of neoliberalism.

  According to the president himself, what the agreement was about was simple: “NAFTA will tear down trade barriers,” he said when signing it. “It will create the world’s largest trade zone and create 200,000 jobs in this country by 1995 alone.” The stationery of an outfit that lobbied for the treaty was emblazoned with an even briefer version of this reasoning: “North American Free Trade Agreement—Exports. Better Jobs. Better Wages.”4

  But it wasn’t reason that sold NAFTA; it was a simulacrum of reason, by which I mean the great god inevitability, invoked in the language of professional-class self-assurance. “We cannot stop global change,” Clinton said in his signing speech. The phrase that best expressed the feeling was this: “It’s a no-brainer.” Lee Iacocca uttered it in a pro-NAFTA TV commercial, and before long everyone was saying it.5 The phrase struck exactly the right notes of simplicity combined with utter obviousness. Globalization was irresistible, the argument went, and free trade was always and in all situations a good thing. So good, it didn’t even really need to be explained. Everyone knew this. Everyone agreed.

  Yet there were people who opposed NAFTA, like labor unions, for example, and Ross Perot, and the majority of Democrats in the House of Representatives. The agreement was not a simple or straightforward thing: it was some 2,000 pages long, and according to reporters who actually read it, the aim was less to remove tariffs than to make it safe for American firms to invest in Mexico—meaning, to move factories and jobs there without fear of expropriation and then to import those factories’ products back into the U.S.6

  One reason the treaty required no brains at all from its supporters is because NAFTA was as close to a straight-up class issue as we will ever see in this country. It “boils down to the oldest division of all,” Dirk Johnson wrote in the New York Times in 1993: “the haves versus the have-nots, or more precisely, those who have only a little.” The lefty economist Jeff Faux has even told how a NAFTA lobbyist tried to bring him around by reminding him that Carlos Salinas, then the president of Mexico, had “been to Harvard. He’s one of us.”7

  That appeal to technocratic unity gives a hint of what Clintonism was all about. To owners and shareholders, who would see labor costs go down as they took advantage of unorganized Mexican labor and lax Mexican environmental enforcement, NAFTA held fantastic promise. To American workers, it threatened to send their power, and hence their wages, right down the chute. To the mass of the professional-managerial class, people who weren’t directly threatened by the treaty, holding an opinion on NAFTA was a matter of deferring to the correct experts—economists in this case, 283 of whom had signed a statement declaring the treaty “will be a net positive for the United States, both in terms of employment creation and overall economic growth.”8

  The predictions of people who opposed the agreement turned out to be far closer to what eventually came to pass than did the rosy scenarios of those 283 economists and the victorious President Clinton. NAFTA was supposed to encourage U.S. exports to Mexico; the opposite is what happened, and in a huge way. NAFTA was supposed to increase employment in the U.S.; a study from 2010 counts almost 700,000 jobs lost in America thanks to the treaty. And, as feared, the agreement gave one class in America enormous leverage over the other: employers now routinely threaten to move their operations to Mexico if their workers organize. A surprisingly large number of them—far more than in the pre-NAFTA days—have actually made good on the threat.9

  Mexico has not fared much better. In the decades before NAFTA, its economy often grew rapidly; since NAFTA was enacted, Mexico has experienced some of the feeblest growth of any country in Latin America, despite all the stuff it now makes and exports to the U.S. The country’s poverty rate has not changed much at all while every other country in the region has made considerable progress. One reason for all this is the predictably destructive effect that free trade with American agribusiness has had on the fortunes of millions of Mexican family farmers.10

  These results have never really shaken the “no-brainer” consensus. Instead, that contemptuous phrase returns whenever new trade deals are on the table. During the 1997 debate over “fast track,” re
stricting the input of Congress in trade negotiations, Al From, the founder of the Democratic Leadership Council, declared confidently that “supporting fast track is a no-brainer.” The New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who is fond of the phrase, has gone so far as to claim that free-trade treaties are so good that supporting them doesn’t require knowledge of their actual contents. “I wrote a column supporting the CAFTA, the Caribbean Free Trade Initiative,” he told Tim Russert in 2006. “I didn’t even know what was in it. I just knew two words: free trade.”11

  Twenty years later, the broader class divide over the subject persists as well. According to a 2014 survey of attitudes toward NAFTA after two decades, public opinion remains split. But among people with professional degrees—which is to say, the liberal class—the positive view remains the default. Knowing that free-trade treaties are always for the best—even when they empirically are not—seems to have become for the well-graduated a badge of belonging.12

  THE JOURNEY

  One of the strangest dramas of the Clinton literature, in retrospect, was the supposed mystery of Bill’s developing political identity. Like a searching teenager in a coming-of-age movie, boy president Bill would roam hither and yon, trying out this policy and that, until he finally learned to be true to himself and to put Democratic tradition behind him. He campaigned as a populist, he tried to lift the ban on gays in the military, then all of a sudden he was pushing free trade and deregulating telecom. Who was this guy, really?

  How the question seemed to vex the president’s friends and advisers! There was “a struggle for the soul of Bill Clinton,” said his aide David Gergen just after the Republicans took Congress in 1994. A month later, Clinton’s press people (to quote the hilarious deadpan of the Washington Post) were actually forced to deny “that Clinton lacks a sense of who he is as president and where he wants to go.”13