Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  But these were small explosions. A stick of dynamite detonated during the new president’s first few days in office, when information was leaked to newspapers about the administration’s plan to allow gay men and lesbians to serve openly in the military. Clinton had pledged this change in policy on the campaign trail, and the leaks had conveyed the impression that Clinton intended to steamroll the Joint Chiefs of Staff on this issue and, weirdly, that this matter had somehow bubbled up as his top priority, superseding even the economy. It was about what many Americans expected of this draft-dodging military-hater.

  On January 25, 1993, Clinton had his first meeting with the Joint Chiefs, led by chairman Colin Powell, at the height of his public popularity in the aftermath of the successful Persian Gulf War. They came to the Roosevelt Room to let the new president know, as George Stephanopoulos put it, that “keeping this promise will cost you the military. Fight, and you’ll lose—and it won’t be pretty.” A bipartisan group of senators, led by Democrats Sam Nunn of Georgia and Robert Byrd of West Virginia, came to the White House to send the message that any legislation along these lines had no chance of passage whatsoever. Clinton shelved the matter for six months to work out a compromise, but the damage had been done: this issue, which deeply divided the country and made millions feel squeamish, dominated coverage of the administration’s very first days. The man who had created the Sister Souljah moment now looked as if he had, in fact, come to Washington to prostrate himself—and the United States military—before the very “special interests” from which he’d taken pains to distance himself as a candidate.

  In reality, Clinton spent very little time on the issue. He pushed to deliver on some other campaign promises, notably the Family and Medical Leave Act, which provided twelve weeks of unpaid leave for any employee needing the time to attend to her own medical needs or those of a family member. The legislation had been bottled up by the threat of a veto by President Bush, and the Democratic Congress wasted no time in passing the bill once Clinton was sworn in. The new president signed it into law on February 5. But Clinton spent most of his time working on his main promise: fixing the economy and preparing his first budget. But here, too, governing proved a lot more complicated than campaigning.

  The problems had started to present themselves even before Clinton took office. At a meeting of his economic team in Little Rock on January 7, 1993, advisers briefed Clinton on the latest economic indicators and informed him that various elements of his economic plan were unworkable. During the campaign, Clinton had proposed both rapid deficit reduction and a middle-class tax cut. After this meeting, he grumpily accepted the reality that it was impossible to do both. Within days, the tax cut was dropped. The Beltway arbiters of conventional wisdom, for whom deficit reduction is a perennial obsession, applauded the move, but it did constitute a reversal on a major—if irresponsible to begin with—campaign promise. The discussion at the meeting gave the president-elect a sober sense of the limitations faced even by a president, leading in time to an outburst on his part that would later become famous: “You mean to tell me that the success of my program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond traders?”

  The underlying economic dynamic Clinton was wrestling with was intensely political as well. This argument within the Democratic Party over whether it was more important to balance the budget or stimulate the economy through greater spending goes back at least to Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was always wary of too much deficit spending (until World War II, anyway), and his famous brains trust was divided between fiscal hawks and those favoring the more Keynesian approach of robust government spending. But the debate took on special urgency in Clinton’s time for two reasons.

  First, he was a New Democrat who had pledged that he was going to do things in a new way—that is, not tax and spend. Second, the deficit, usually a manageable problem in postwar America, had grown larger than it had ever been since the end of World War II. In 1993 it stood at $255 billion, or around $430 billion in 2015 dollars, and had nearly quadrupled since Ronald Reagan took office in 1981. The 1993 deficit was 3.7 percent of the nation’s gross domestic product, higher than the sustainable target of 3 percent set by most economists. Clinton made repeated promises during the campaign that he would cut the deficit in half in five years.

  Clinton had surrounded himself with forceful personalities on both sides of the issue: Treasury secretary Lloyd Bentsen and chief economic adviser Robert Rubin as deficit hawks; secretary of labor Robert Reich and most of the political team in favor of increased spending. But as early as that January 7 meeting, Clinton had decided that the deficit hawks had the better case. “If we didn’t get the deficit down substantially, interest rates would remain high, preventing a sustained, strong economic recovery,” he said. By mid-February, Clinton was presenting his plan to the American people, first in a short address from the Oval Office, and then, two nights later, in an address to Congress. The plan, as all such plans are, was huge with many moving parts, touching on nearly every aspect of governance from education to law enforcement and the rest, but fiscally it boiled down to $255 billion in spending cuts and $241 billion in tax increases, mostly but not wholly on the well-off, in the name of reducing the deficit by $140 billion in five years. The package was generally well received by nonpartisan experts. The Republicans were another matter.

  February ended in violence when a bomb exploded in the underground parking areas of the World Trade Center in New York City. The bombers had hoped to bring down both towers, killing thousands, but the explosion didn’t prove powerful enough to do that: the damage was relatively minor, and only six people were killed. But more than a thousand were injured, and the United States had its first taste of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism on American soil.

  * * *

  Clinton had learned during the campaign that there were two new realities of politics that no president had quite had to deal with before. The first was a more tenacious and invasive news media. In the old days, the political reporters, nearly all men, would have agreed not to write about Gennifer Flowers and such matters. Now everything was fair game. It was the start of the era of 24/7 media culture. CNN, which had existed since 1980, had become an influential force following its wall-to-wall coverage of the 1991 Persian Gulf War; even supermarket tabloids wrote about the new first family with gusto, running articles that fed an apparent mass desire for gossip about the Clintons that played into the presumptive caricatures: Bill as a horndog cracker, Hillary as a shrewish lesbian (in spirit if not in fact), Chelsea as a maladjusted preteen chess piece moved around the board by her parents as their unquenchable thirst for power required.

  There was one other new media entity: the conservative media. In 1987, the Reagan administration eliminated the Fairness Doctrine, which since the New Deal had forced broadcasters using public airwaves to give equal time to conservative and liberal viewpoints. It is interesting in retrospect to note that some conservatives feared this move, on the grounds that the liberal media would dispense with representing the conservative viewpoint entirely. But it didn’t take long for broadcasters to see that conservative rage drew listeners, while liberal pieties did not. Rush Limbaugh, who had once worked as director of promotions for the Kansas City Royals and had hosted a Sacramento-based political radio show since 1984, went national in 1988. His ratings went through the roof, and many imitators soon followed. Propagandists and not journalists, Limbaugh and crew would say just about anything to bring their listeners’ blood to a boil over the latest assault on America launched by blacks or professors or feminists—or Clintons.

  This avowedly ideological media was just one piece of a broader right-wing infrastructure that conservative multimillionaires had begun seeding in the early 1970s, when they feared they were losing control of the country, and that had only recently begun to show results. Conservative think tanks now produced their own social science to counter that of the Brookings Institution and other venerated
research organizations; conservative training and leadership institutes popped up to advance conservative reinterpretations of what had previously been settled history; organizations that were once business oriented but basically nonpartisan, such as the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, were reengineered as cogs in the conservative machine. Politics had never been a game of patty cake, but now it was becoming perpetual partisan war, at exactly the same time the mainstream media were developing an insatiable appetite for scandal.

  While in Los Angeles in May 1993, Clinton decided he needed a haircut. He couldn’t walk into a regular barbershop, so he decided to have his hair cut aboard Air Force One. But first he asked his Secret Service detail to make sure that the brief delay wouldn’t affect air traffic at Los Angeles International Airport. He thought nothing of it and had expected to get good press out of the trip, which had involved his playing in a pickup basketball game in the African American neighborhood of South Central. Instead, he woke up the next morning to see that the newspapers had grabbed on to the fact that he’d had his hair cut by a fancy, one-named Hollywood stylist (true—Cristophe), that it had cost $200 (not true), and that he had mangled air traffic for hours (also not true).

  An earlier controversy had revolved around the Clintons’ decision—unusual and maybe politically unwise, but hardly scandalous—to replace the employees of the White House travel office. The Clintons said that an FBI investigation had revealed financial improprieties, but critics charged that their real motivation was to install their cronies in cushy jobs. (Three years later, the head of the travel office whom the Clintons had fired was indicted for embezzlement, but he was acquitted at trial.)

  The conservative media revved itself into overdrive when Clinton nominated University of Pennsylvania law professor Lani Guinier to be associate attorney general for civil rights. Guinier was one of the country’s leading theorists on voting rights, civil rights, and the problems of voter disenfranchisement—which is to say, she’d left a long paper trail for opponents to sort through. Though she explicitly opposed racial quotas as a way of redressing discrimination, she was instantly dubbed the “quota queen.” Warned by his friend (and fellow Arkansan) Senator David Pryor that Guinier didn’t have the votes to be confirmed, Clinton withdrew her nomination, which infuriated many African American supporters.

  Matters like these pseudo-scandals, combined with the wrong-footed start on gays in the military, gave the American public a negative impression of the new administration. Clinton describes an encounter with a disillusioned voter in that bumpy first year, who demanded to know how the new president was spending his workdays.

  When he asked how much time I’d spent on gays in the military, and I told him just a few hours, he simply replied, “I don’t believe you.” All he knew was what he read and saw.

  This was not a problem that would fade away.

  * * *

  Summer brought the new president’s first opportunity to shape the direction of the Supreme Court, when associate justice Byron White retired. White was a moderate justice, liberal on some questions (federalism) and conservative on others (criminal procedure). His departure gave Clinton a chance to nudge the court leftward. He first offered the job to Mario Cuomo, who would surely have been a forceful liberal presence, but Cuomo turned Clinton down. The president then chose Ruth Bader Ginsburg of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, the second-most powerful court in the country. Ginsburg quickly became a reliable liberal on the Supreme Court, but at the time of the nomination she was viewed as more of a moderate, which Clinton emphasized in introducing her in June: Ginsburg, he said, “cannot be called a liberal or a conservative; she has proved herself too thoughtful for such labels.” It took just two months for the Senate to confirm her by a vote of 96 to 3.

  But the main event of the summer of 1993 was the showdown over Clinton’s budget. In 1981, 63 House Democrats (out of 244) had joined all House Republicans in supporting Ronald Reagan’s first budget. In the Republican-controlled Senate, Reagan’s budget passed overwhelmingly, with 30 Democratic votes. By 1993, though, times had changed. The Clinton budget failed to get a single Republican vote in either chamber, and indeed many Democrats from swing states (in the Senate) or districts (in the House) were afraid to support the budget because of the tax increases it included.

  The Clinton plan left marginal income tax rates the same for the vast majority of filers but called for a small increase on dollars earned by individuals starting at $53,000 (about $87,000 in 2015 dollars), and then more substantial increases starting at $110,000 ($190,000, adjusted for inflation). There was a 1 percent increase in the corporate tax rate, along with some new limits on deductions. The budget included a 4.3-cent hike in the gasoline tax, the only tax that directly hit middle-class people, costing the average family around $45 a year. And its arguably most notable feature was a dramatic expansion of the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC), a program that dated to the mid-1970s that gave a tax credit to working-poor families to lessen and in some cases eliminate their federal tax burden. Clinton’s position was that anyone who worked full-time at minimum wage should exist above the poverty level, and so the EITC grew in 1993 from being a modest helping hand to “a major antipoverty initiative.”

  The votes, which took place in early August, were nail-biters. In the Senate, Bob Kerrey, perhaps still smarting a little from the presidential campaign, made Clinton twist in the wind for days before agreeing to vote yes. Six of the chamber’s 56 Democrats defected to vote against their president, and Vice President Gore had to cast the vote that broke the 50–50 tie and got the bill through. In the House, the Republican wall of opposition and 41 Democratic defections had the White House sweating bullets, but Representative Marjorie Margolies-Mezvinsky, from a swing district in suburban Philadelphia, cast the deciding yes vote. Democrats cheered her as her “yea” registered on the big screen above the House floor. Republicans serenaded her with “Goodbye, Margie.” And, sure enough, she lost the next election. In My Life, Clinton writes that she earned “an honored place in history.” (In the silver linings department, the familial bonhomie forged that night never died—in 2010, Margolies-Mezvinsky’s son, Marc, would marry Chelsea Clinton.)

  It was a great victory for the president—ever since, he and Democrats have boasted that it was this budget that led to the recovery and boom of the late 1990s. And it was a great relief, because to have lost that fight would have sent the new administration into a tailspin. But all the deals the administration cut in return for yes votes came at a price, according to journalist Joe Klein: “As a result of these tactical retreats, Clinton soon gained the reputation—in Washington at least—of being a weak president, one who could be rolled.” Republicans would make a mental note of this.

  With the budget passed, Washington’s attention turned to the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Clinton’s New Democrat credentials as a candidate were predicated on a number of departures from party orthodoxy, but without question the two biggest were his support for welfare reform and for free trade with Canada and Mexico. Welfare reform would take a while, but the administration wanted to get NAFTA done in the first year. President Bush had negotiated the agreement, but the Democrats in Congress had sat on it, bucked up by the ferocious opposition of the labor unions that helped sustain the party. But now a Democratic president was taking on most of his own party and the unions that had played a big role in his victory.

  Internal White House debate centered not so much on whether the administration should pursue NAFTA; it had been a key campaign pledge, and it had to be fulfilled. Instead, it was about the efficacy and wisdom of doing it now rather than other things—specifically, instead of health care reform, which was Hillary’s baby. It had been a mere five days into his presidency that Clinton announced that his wife would head his health care task force, and she had worked for months with Ira Magaziner, the president’s old friend and a fellow 1968 Rhodes scholar, crafting a plan that she h
oped to unveil soon. But Lloyd Bentsen at Treasury again intervened on behalf of taking the conservative path. As journalist John Harris tells it:

  At a cabinet meeting, [Bentsen] slammed his fist down on the table for emphasis in front of the president. The gesture stilled the room. NAFTA was not merely good policy, he argued, it was shaping into a critical test of the president’s own principles. Did he have the nerve to fight for them?

  The push was on. Clinton and Gore held hundreds of meetings with Democratic legislators, who had leverage over the White House and used it, asking for special favors for employers in their districts, many of which were granted. But there was another problem—public opinion. On November 9, 1993, the Los Angeles Times reported the results of a Gallup poll showing 38 percent in support of the treaty and 46 percent opposed.

  That very November 9, a Tuesday, turned out to be an important date. It was that night that Gore, defending the treaty, faced off on CNN’s Larry King Live against Ross Perot, the former presidential candidate who was also NAFTA’s most prominent critic. Intense hype had preceded the debate, and the general expectation was that Perot, who’d certainly held his own with Clinton and Bush in the previous fall’s debates, was going to wipe the floor with Gore. Instead the opposite happened. The debate was scrappy, contentious, and at times rude. But the verdict was clear: Gore was more composed, Perot more flustered, and Gore had made the better case. On November 18, the House passed NAFTA, 234 to 200. More Democrats voted against than for, 156 to 102, but the Republican margin in favor was substantial (132 to 43). The Senate passed the bill easily three days later. Clinton had kept a major campaign promise but opened up an intraparty debate that continues to raise blood pressures on both sides of the argument.

  * * *

  On a range of fronts, Clinton kept pushing. Just after Thanksgiving 1993, Congress passed the Brady bill, which mandated background checks and waiting periods for firearms purchases. It was named for James Brady, President Reagan’s press secretary, who had been grievously wounded in the 1981 assassination attempt that nearly killed Reagan, but for years the legislation had been held up in Congress by the Republicans.