Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  The speech polled favorably but, out of public view, all was not well. Hillary and Magaziner drew heavy criticism, some of it legitimate and some from people with axes of their own to grind, for being haughty or dismissive of both policy and political advice. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the esteemed New York senator through whose committee any legislation would have to proceed, felt that he had not been treated with the deference he deserved, and he let the administration know of his unhappiness by making negative comments about the process on NBC’s Meet the Press.

  And Hillary’s role, controversial from the start, came under increasing fire—not just from Republicans, but from fellow Democrats who thought she was politically maladroit and too unwilling to compromise. Some within the administration believed the emotional and psychological dynamic at play between the president and the First Lady had a big influence on the final shape of the policy. Continuing gossip about Bill’s infidelities and his guilt that Hillary was being dragged through the mud on matters such as Whitewater made the president more likely to put aside his own political judgment (which was sharper than his wife’s) and accede to all of her desires. This dynamic, David Gergen told John Harris, put Clinton “in a situation where on health care he never challenged it in a way he ordinarily would have, had he been under a different psychological situation.”

  At the same time that outsiders were criticizing the process, the divisions within the administration over policy substance were stark, and the internal debates ferocious. Again it was the economic team, led by Lloyd Bentsen, that expressed the deepest reservations about the plan. Placing caps on premiums, the economic advisers pointed out, reeked of “price controls,” which Congress hated. After losing a series of internal arguments in the fall of 1993, Bentsen personally handed Hillary Clinton a memo expressing his misgivings about the health care plan; it was thirty-eight single-spaced pages long. Hillary, wrote journalist Elizabeth Drew, “scathingly dismissed behind their backs those who wanted to go slower—mainly, the economic advisers—as ‘the incrementalists.’”

  All these people were the administration’s friends. Among its foes, the armaments were being delivered to the front. Two weeks before Clinton’s speech, a lobbying group called the Health Insurance Association of America began running television ads featuring a wholesome-looking white couple, Harry and Louise, sitting at their kitchen table fretting about the changes coming with reform—that they wouldn’t be able to choose their own doctors and that their premiums would rise. This was largely unfair, but Harry and Louise seemed attractive and credible. The group spent nearly $20 million running the ads for a full year.

  In late 1993, the administration finally released its health care plan, which ran to 1,342 pages. It was an instant, and easy, target of attack. The number of experts who could read a document of such sprawling complexity and interpret it for Americans in good faith could literally be counted on one hand, or at most two; they were somewhat outnumbered. A scathing and award-winning (and later discredited) attack in the New Republic was highly influential inside the Beltway; elsewhere in the country, criticisms took hold that the plan constituted a government takeover of the health care system and was really just a new form of welfare extending a benefit to people who didn’t work. Most of the criticisms were exaggerations or outright lies. At the same time, the changes proposed were indeed vast. It was reasonable for ordinary people to wonder and worry about how the changes might affect them. Public anxiety like that is very easily stoked.

  Any continuing Republican openness to reform was quashed in December 1993, when Bill Kristol, a former aide to Vice President Dan Quayle and the son of the neoconservative intellectual Irving Kristol, wrote a memo to congressional Republicans urging them to move heaven and earth to block reform. Kristol warned that reform would present “a serious political threat to the Republican Party,” while “unqualified political defeat of the Clinton health care proposal … would be a monumental setback for the president, and an incontestable piece of evidence that Democratic welfare-state liberalism remains firmly in retreat.” The memo was addressed to Republicans in general, but Bob Dole was its main target. Dole was contemplating a run for president in 1996, and Kristol’s memo surely clarified for him that helping Bill Clinton pass historic legislation was not going to be the best way to win Republican hearts and minds.

  * * *

  The other defining legislative battle of 1994 was the crime bill. The early 1990s were a time of historically high violent crime rates—in 1990 New York City surpassed 2,000 homicides per year for the first time. Nationally, the early ’90s saw 23,000 or so murders being committed every year, numbers that represented steady increases from the previous decade. Clinton, in New Democrat mode, had vowed while campaigning that he would be tougher on crime than the typical liberal and repeatedly promised that he would hire 100,000 new police officers, a measure that was the bill’s centerpiece.

  At first, things went smoothly on this front. Clinton introduced the bill in September 1993; it sailed through the relevant committees and even passed the House by voice vote and the Senate 95 to 4. But as the two bodies met to work out the differences in their two bills, House Democrats decided to add to the broad crime bill a measure they had passed earlier by itself: an assault weapons ban on nineteen specific kinds of firearms and on new magazines that could hold more than ten rounds of ammunition. This changed matters swiftly. The National Rifle Association shifted into high gear against what it saw as an assault on the Second Amendment.

  Alongside the NRA, there were Republicans in Congress who didn’t want Clinton to win a major victory of any kind in advance of the 1994 midterm elections. They called attention to the bill’s more liberal-sounding provisions in an effort to persuade Americans that, rhetoric aside, Clinton was just another soft-on-crime liberal. The “liberal” crime prevention provisions included items such as new money for domestic violence programs and for youth programs, which the bill’s opponents characterized as “money for midnight basketball.”

  The NRA kept up the pressure throughout the summer of 1994. Clinton countered, cleverly, by getting police unions on his side, so that as the NRA tried to paint him as anti-gun, at least he would never be seen as anti-cop. A small number of liberal Democrats, including twelve of the thirty-nine members of the Congressional Black Caucus, opposed their president on the grounds that the law’s harsher elements expanding the death penalty and limiting parole would put far more young men in prison. And many nervous Democrats came to the White House to meet with Clinton to tell him they’d like to be with him, but if they voted against the NRA, they’d be finished in any bid for reelection.

  So this was Clinton’s second summer as president—trying to pass these two huge signature pieces of legislation. He also was given a second opportunity to appoint a justice to the Supreme Court, when associate justice Harry Blackmun retired. Blackmun was a solid liberal, so there was less of a chance to change the balance of the court than there had been when Byron White retired. Clinton chose Stephen Breyer, a former Harvard Law professor and a longtime judge on the federal appeals court in Boston. Like Ginsburg, Breyer was clearly qualified and had avoided writing or saying anything over the years that could serve as fodder for the right-wing judicial groups opposing him. Nine Republican senators voted against him in the end, but most agreed with Senator Phil Gramm of Texas that Breyer was “as good as we have a right to expect.”

  Clinton was still dealing with Whitewater, and in June—feeling that under the circumstances he could hardly veto it—he fatefully signed a bill renewing the statute that allowed independent counsels to investigate allegations of executive branch scandal. He also went to Normandy that month to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day. On the day he returned, Senator Ted Kennedy’s committee reported out a health care bill, with all Democrats and one Republican supporting it. But two days later, Bob Dole made a fateful announcement: he would see to it that Senate Republicans would block any health care legislation
. Dole controlled only a minority of senators, but under the Senate’s supermajority rules, any group of forty-one senators can block a piece of legislation from coming to the floor.

  Leading congressional Democrats urged Clinton to take the assault-weapons provision out of the crime bill, arguing that voting for it would endanger many Democrats in the November election. Clinton stood firm. On August 21, 1994, the crime bill passed the House 235 to 195, with 64 Democrats voting against. Four days later it passed the Senate, and Clinton signed it into law on September 13—a major campaign promise fulfilled.

  Health care, however, spun out in the other direction. On September 26, Senate Democratic leader George Mitchell officially threw in the towel, announcing that he would not have the votes to break Dole’s promised filibuster. “Under the rules of the Senate,” he said, “a minority can obstruct the majority. This is what happened to comprehensive health-insurance reform.” The handwriting had been on the wall for some time, but it was still a devastating day for the White House. “Maybe,” Bill Clinton reflected, “I was pushing the Congress, the country, and the administration too hard.”

  The next day wasn’t very good for Clinton, either. That was when dozens of Republican members of Congress stood on the steps of the Capitol, pledging a “Contract with America” that they would pursue legislatively if voters made them the new House majority—and made their audacious insurgent leader the new Speaker of the House.

  5

  The President Is Relevant

  It was in May 1984, as Joe Klein tells the story in The Natural, his political biography of Bill Clinton, that the Newt Gingrich era in the House of Representatives began. Gingrich was a young Republican congressman from the wealthy suburbs outside Atlanta. General William Tecumseh Sherman had marched through those parts during the Civil War; ample defense contracts modernized the area during World War II. In the early 1960s, the city of Atlanta wanted to expand into Cobb County, immediately northwest of the city. County officials responded by incorporating a new “city,” in many places only ten feet wide, the better to keep Atlanta—specifically, its black residents—out.

  This is the milieu from which Newt Gingrich emerged. Born in Pennsylvania in 1943, Gingrich moved to Georgia as a teenager in 1960 and returned to the state in the early 1970s as a history professor with a PhD from Tulane University. The northern and western Atlanta suburbs, where he eventually planted himself, were still Democratic then, but by the 1970s they were starting to think more Republican. In 1974, Gingrich came within a whisker of unseating an entrenched Democratic congressman; he lost again, also narrowly, in 1976. But by 1978, the Democrat got the message and retired, and Gingrich became a member of Congress. He broke the mold for junior House members. So many of them struggle to put three nonrehearsed sentences together and barely know much of anything beyond politics, but Gingrich knew a little something about all kinds of things. He had opinions—an explosion of them—and he wasn’t shy about delivering them at length; he also had a taste for partisan combat and a keen instinct for the kinds of attacks that would get juices flowing on both sides. People called him a bomb thrower, and he didn’t mind.

  In May 1984, Gingrich took to the House floor and gave a speech questioning the patriotism of several Democratic colleagues by name. Few other members were in the chamber at the time—but the C-SPAN cameras were there. Speaker Tip O’Neill, who came from a time when House members simply did not call out colleagues by name, especially for the purpose of smearing them, was apoplectic when he heard about Gingrich’s speech a week later. Speakers almost never go down into the House well to orate, but O’Neill did now, launching into a tirade against Gingrich and ordering that thenceforth C-SPAN cameras would pan the empty chamber so that viewers would see that speeches such as Gingrich’s were charades. A furious partisan battle ensued. The Gingrich era was under way.

  In the succeeding years, Gingrich had a hand in bringing down O’Neill’s successor as Speaker, Jim Wright, and an aide to Gingrich spread rumors about the sexual orientation of the Speaker who followed Wright, Tom Foley. He got himself voted majority whip by the columns of young conservative Republicans then emerging from southern and midwestern suburbs and exurbs. He made quite a counterpoint to the longtime Republican House leader Robert Michel, a war hero and true old-school moderate from Peoria, Illinois, who had first come to Congress in 1957. By the time Bill Clinton became president, Michel saw which way the partisan winds were blowing. He complained that the younger Republicans seemed too keen on picking fights and announced that he wouldn’t seek reelection in 1994, which teed everything up for Gingrich to lead the party in the House and seek the speakership for himself.

  The Contract with America was an audacious gamble—an attempt to “nationalize” a midterm election, to make it about national issues rather than local ones, as had been customary. The contract was a ten-item list of measures cooked up by Gingrich and conservative pollster Frank Luntz after extensive focus grouping of Americans to see what was making them angry. It committed a Republican House majority to pass a tough-on-crime law, a law cutting welfare payments, and another to limit punitive damages in tort proceedings, along with procedural reforms that would help advance conservative causes (and please some major donors). The contract galvanized conservatives across the country, and the new conservative media, now sermonizing to a radio audience in the millions, hyped it every day. Gingrich, feeling his oats in a big way, lobbed grenade after grenade over the course of the fall, even going so far, a few days before the election, as to tie a South Carolina mother’s drowning of her two young sons to a moral turpitude that was an inescapable by-product of Democratic governance and values.

  Liberals, meanwhile, were dispirited. Clinton’s approval rating was down to 44 percent. He knew things were looking grim, and in his extreme anxiety he privately got back in touch with Dick Morris, the strategist who had helped him regain the Arkansas governorship in 1982 but was now working with Republican candidates. Morris told Clinton that he expected the Democrats to lose the Senate, a prediction with which the president agreed. But Clinton was taken aback to hear what Morris said next.

  “You’re going to lose the Senate and the House,” he said.

  “Not the House,” Clinton replied. “No way.” The Democrats held an eighty-seat margin in the House, and Clinton was not alone in thinking this majority was impregnable.

  The blowout was enormous. With a voter turnout of only about 40 percent—20 points down from the 1992 presidential election—the Republicans picked up eight Senate seats to take the majority. In the House, they gained fifty-four, well above most predictions, going from 176 seats to 230—just as Morris had predicted. The election ushered in the party’s first majority in that chamber in forty years. Speaker of the House Tom Foley lost his seat, too—the first sitting Speaker to lose reelection since Reconstruction. Senator Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania, whose upset victory in 1991 on the strength of health care reform had once seemed to augur sunny days to come, lost to an ultraconservative congressman, Rick Santorum. Across the country, not a single Republican incumbent congressman, senator, or governor lost. Even the 1974 post-Watergate election hadn’t seen so stark a turnover of seats. The point was not lost on Clinton that it was the worst beating the Democrats had taken since 1946—right after, he later noted in My Life, President Harry Truman had tried to pass universal health care.

  But it wasn’t just health care. The NRA claimed to have taken out around twenty Democrats because of their votes on the assault-weapons ban. And while the economy was beginning to show signs of life, they weren’t yet recognizable enough for most people to notice. To Clinton himself, there were echoes of his 1980 gubernatorial defeat: he hadn’t listened. He later reflected that if he’d dropped health care when he knew it was going to die anyway and pushed welfare reform, he might have salvaged things. But he didn’t. Gingrich outfoxed him every step of the way.

  In the face of such a thoroughgoing rejection and with no chance of p
assing any kind of progressive legislative agenda, the president now had to figure out how to go on being the president.

  * * *

  Clinton, Dole, and Gingrich made pro forma noises about working together, but Gingrich had achieved his lofty station in part by repeatedly flashing the rhetorical knife, and he wasn’t about to sheathe it now. Just before the election, he’d called the president an “enemy of normal Americans”; immediately afterward he dubbed Bill and Hillary “counterculture McGoverniks.” Then he charged, with no evidence, that up to 25 percent of the White House staff were recent drug users. The coming battles would be over the budget and the items in the Contract with America, but for Gingrich they were really battles for the very soul of the nation.

  The Clinton White House was at sea. Hillary, known in those days for a New Age–ish penchant for searches for “meaning” and the like, invited to the White House and to Camp David visitors such as pop self-help guru Tony Robbins, a wildly successful author known for thirty-minute infomercials in which his followers walked across hot coals. There’s no evidence the president did that literally, but he was doing enough of it metaphorically. After the election, much of Washington didn’t take him seriously anymore. Then, in January, his economic advisers came to him with news that was inescapably horrible from any angle: Mexico was about to default on $30 billion worth of loans. If that happened, it would surely mean a financial crisis of the first order, with inflation, higher unemployment, and more. In all likelihood it would also mean a huge wave of illegal immigration as people fled a sinking Mexico. To prevent all that, the United States would have to extend costly loans on easy terms. Public opinion was strongly against such a bailout, but substantively Clinton had no choice but to bite the bullet and do it.

  There was still more bleak January 1995 news, this time on the Whitewater front. After Clinton had agreed to the appointment of a special prosecutor, Attorney General Janet Reno in January 1994 named Robert B. Fiske Jr., a moderate Republican and a former federal prosecutor, to conduct the investigation. Fiske began by focusing on Vince Foster’s suicide. Within six months, Fiske had issued his report: Foster was depressed and killed himself, and he wasn’t hiding anything about Whitewater or anything else related to the Clintons’ finances. Two congressional committees reached the same conclusion.