Bill Clinton

by Michael Tomasky

  On those same college campuses, however, activists were impatient for far more change. Students—and many faculty, who had come up through the cultural studies departments of the 1970s—began scrutinizing textbooks and curricula, denouncing the dominance of the “dead white males” and arguing for more inclusive reading lists. “Hey hey, ho ho, Western Civ has got to go!” students at Stanford University chanted in 1988, with no less a figure than Jesse Jackson at their side. (They were objecting to a survey course called “Western Civilization,” not the entire project of Western man, but still.) Some gay activists began “outing” closeted gay celebrities, trying to force them to be part of their movement. AIDS had taken a ghastly toll by this time, and the group ACT UP staged huge “kiss-ins” in front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. These and other matters were the fronts in “the culture wars,” a phrase that seeped into general usage in the early 1990s.

  As the first “first couple” to come from the Woodstock generation and not the Depression–World War II generation, the Clintons themselves constituted a front in these wars. This was particularly true of Hillary: she had, in fact, dabbled in radical politics when she was young (but only dabbled). Bill, with his mainstream political ambitions, had never really been drawn to that kind of activism. To their critics, mere facts like these didn’t matter nearly as much as the overarching perception that the Clintons were somehow out to subvert the virtues that had sustained America through its era of abundance and dominance.

  As candidate and president, Clinton had tried to split the culture war difference. On the one hand, he was a progressive-minded person whose worldview had been extensively shaped by his abhorrence of the casual racial discrimination he witnessed constantly as a child; beyond that he was an astute pol who saw the increasing voting power of women, African Americans, Latinos, and gay and lesbian voters. He therefore sought to be the leader of that coalition. On the other hand, as a New Democrat who had pledged to middle America that he would sand off all those “McGovernik” edges, he sought to sound more culturally conservative than Walter Mondale or Michael Dukakis had in the 1980s. And so it was that as a candidate he had pledged to make abortion “safe, legal, and rare.” The “safe” and “legal” parts were intended to reassure the progressive coalition, while the “rare,” which did, in fact, cause consternation among some pro-choice activists, was meant to signal to Americans outside the coalition that he bore them in mind, too—that his pro-choice position, while inevitable and necessary for a Democrat, was not meant to imply that he endorsed licentiousness.

  This kind of straddling came naturally to Clinton as a matter of personality. Some presidents—Dwight Eisenhower and George W. Bush most notably—sought comparatively little information and made decisions quickly. Clinton was their opposite. He had an endless appetite for policy detail and could usually articulate the opposing position better than most of his actual foes. In the words of Joe Klein,

  Clinton’s decision-making process was never truly complete until he had gone all the way and actually advocated—usually briefly, always privately—the opposite position from the one he would eventually take. This was difficult for even many of those closest to him to endure.

  Clinton’s equivocal style served him well at times—for example, when it came to negotiating a budget. But it did not suit the culture wars, on which battle lines were so resolutely drawn. After the 1994 midterm disaster, Clinton sought to put a little more distance between himself and cultural liberalism—he mused that perhaps school prayer, outlawed back in 1963, wasn’t such a horrible idea. In August 1995, his Department of Education promulgated a few down-the-middle guidelines: organized prayer would still be banned, but private prayer groups and the carrying of Bibles would be permissible. The department also put forward a plan to let school districts legally impose policies requiring schoolchildren to wear uniforms.

  A still-thornier issue was affirmative action, which had been initiated by Lyndon Johnson in 1965 and by the late 1980s was the target of a massive and well-organized conservative backlash. Gingrich and Dole had pledged that they would do all they could to destroy affirmative action and “racial quotas.” In February 1995, Clinton had been speaking of affirmative action when he said that “we shouldn’t be defending things that we can’t defend.” The administration then commenced a policy review; liberal groups waited nervously over the next few months, expecting that Clinton was going to cave.

  He did not. Instead, in July, he gave a speech built around the ameliorative catchphrase “Mend it, don’t end it.” He defended government racial-preference programs and avowed that they would continue, while at the same time he promised to crack down on fraud in minority contracting, which was supposedly rife. Liberal and civil rights groups had so persuaded themselves that Clinton was going to ditch them that they accepted this quasi-compromise gladly.

  On a third issue, Clinton was more resolute, and even courageous, as it was arguably the most fraught of the three. Intact dilation and extraction, or “partial-birth abortion” as it was rechristened by foes of abortion rights, involved the (usually) late termination of a pregnancy through means that were undeniably gruesome in their detail—in essence, a fetus’s brain is suctioned out so that the skull collapses, allowing for easier extraction. Conservative opponents of abortion, always looking for an Achilles’ heel to probe, had found a good one here; what person could possibly support such a procedure being conducted on a fetus that was in many cases close to fully formed?

  The Republicans in Congress brought forward, in the fall of 1995, a ban on partial-birth abortions. It passed the House by a better than two-to-one margin and the Senate 54 to 44, with nine Democrats joining forty-five Republicans in support of the ban. Throughout that year and into the next, the year of Clinton’s reelection, Republicans hammered at the issue as the political world awaited an announcement from the White House as to what Clinton’s position would be.

  That announcement came on April 10, 1996, when the president said that he would veto the ban. It was a tough day for Clinton; it was the same day he attended the memorial service for his close friend Ron Brown, the insider lawyer who had headed the Democratic National Committee in 1992 and was serving as secretary of commerce. Brown and several of his aides had died in a plane crash on a government mission to Croatia. On the abortion question, Clinton had closely studied the science, he writes in My Life, and learned that the procedure was “predominantly performed on women whose doctors had told them it was necessary to preserve their own lives or health,” including their ability to bear children again. No one had demonstrated to him that the procedure was avoidable in these limited cases.

  White House stagecraft around the veto included the presence at Clinton’s side of five women who had undergone the procedure, three of whom thought of themselves as pro-life. But few were mollified; the House overrode his veto, while the Senate fell a few votes short. The veto stood, but Clinton knew it was lousy politics for him. And the Republicans weren’t done with cultural politics yet.

  * * *

  Welfare reform was not a cultural issue per se; it was too weighed down by boring policy details. It nevertheless had its cultural aspects, because it was a proxy for race. Indeed, of all the subtle racial signals Clinton had sent to the white middle class in 1992, his pledge to “end welfare as we know it” was surely the central one. For a decade or more, conservatives had been pushing for welfare reform, advancing arguments against a status quo that they said was the epitome of the failure of big government. Many political scientists and economists had written extensively on the core need to move people from welfare to work, and other conservatives who had academic credentials but were polemicists more than scholars, notably Charles Murray, the author of the influential anti-welfare-state book Losing Ground, vituperated against the system ceaselessly.

  They had a point. What had started as a modest program of relief for widows and orphans during the New Deal had morphed into an expansive set of benefits that o
ffered perverse incentives to women: more money if they were single than married, and more money with each new child in the household, in most cases. Clinton had an intellectually honest desire to change that. And the fact that it was good politics didn’t hurt.

  But as long as the Democrats were running Congress, welfare reform wasn’t going anywhere. Many Democrats recognized the problems in the system, but many others were distrustful, sometimes with good reason, of the motives of those who advocated “reform.” Some conservatives did want the system to work better, but many others just wanted to slash spending and make poor people fend for themselves. Large majorities favored ending, in the oft-invoked phrase of the day, the “cycle of dependency.” Welfare was the most prominent and controversial of a set of issues, which also included affirmative action and higher education standards, on which liberals were obliged to defend a hard-to-support status quo that deep down many knew wasn’t working.

  When Gingrich and the new Republican majority took over in January 1995, welfare reform was brought back on the table. Clinton knew he had a campaign pledge to deliver on, so he was willing to deal. But there was a fundamental difference between his approach and that of the Republicans: Clinton, while aware that part of the point over the longer haul was to save the government money, believed that, in the near term, reform would require generous investments in work training and child care to help wean the most destitute Americans off the system. The Republicans wanted nothing to do with that—they just wanted to give none-too-generous block grants to the states and let them handle the matter however they saw fit. Clinton also wanted legal immigrants to be eligible, and Republicans firmly did not.

  These and other differences led Clinton to veto the first two versions of welfare reform the Republican Congress sent him. Vetoing one of the measures, on January 9, 1996, Clinton said it was too punitive, especially toward the children of recipients. “The Congress should not use the words ‘welfare reform’ as a cover to violate the nation’s values,” he said. “We must demand responsibility from young mothers and young fathers, not penalize children for their parents’ mistakes.”

  Even with the two vetoes, the Republicans had the upper hand, and they knew it: Clinton’s 1992 pledge probably meant that he was going to have to sign something; pressure would surely mount as the election drew nearer. Republicans had miscalculated with respect to the government shutdown, but this time they got it right. They passed a third welfare reform bill in July 1996, and up it went, awaiting Clinton’s signature.

  Thus arrived one of the defining moments of Clinton’s presidency. The new bill did constitute an improvement over the two earlier versions. It retained a federal guarantee of medical and food aid and actually increased federal childcare assistance by 40 percent over current levels. But it had nothing near the levels of support for transition-to-work programs that Clinton would have preferred, and it still gave states wide latitude to use their block grant money punitively if they desired, which many of them would eventually do. Moreover, the bill had passed both houses of Congress comfortably. In the House, only 30 Democrats voted for it, while 165 opposed; but in the Senate, the Democrats were evenly split, 23 votes on each side. This was the context in which Clinton gathered his top aides and cabinet on the morning of Wednesday, July 31, 1996. He opened the meeting by asking simply, “What should we do?”

  George Stephanopoulos wrote that the atmosphere at the meeting was “self-consciously statesmanlike, as if we were gathered for a council of war.” The assembled took their turns. Most wanted Clinton to veto. Donna Shalala, the secretary of health and human services, argued strongly against the bill, as did labor secretary Robert Reich, chief of staff Leon Panetta, deputy chief of staff Harold Ickes, chief economic adviser Laura Tyson, and even the more centrist Treasury secretary Robert Rubin (who had replaced Lloyd Bentsen the previous year). Stephanopoulos was on this side as well.

  Most of them made straight policy arguments; Stephanopoulos mixed in some politics, trying to persuade the president that he had taken other unpopular stands and survived those. Mickey Kantor, the U.S. trade representative, and political aide Rahm Emanuel wanted Clinton to sign. So did Bruce Reed, the president’s chief domestic policy adviser and the aide most closely affiliated with the Democratic Leadership Council, which very much wanted Clinton to sign. Reed acknowledged the bill’s many flaws, especially its exclusion of legal immigrants, but he argued that a third veto would break faith with the voters who had supported him expecting him to keep this promise.

  The man who was perhaps the president’s most influential adviser on the question wasn’t present. Dick Morris had spent the summer warning Clinton that if he vetoed another welfare reform bill, he could lose the 1996 election. Morris’s polling showed that signing the bill would rocket him to a fifteen-point lead over Bob Dole, who had secured the Republican nomination, whereas vetoing it would put the president in a three-point hole and give Dole a huge club to swing at Clinton all fall. Also not present was Hillary Clinton. It was common knowledge among this group that she wanted a veto, but the failure of health care and the continuing Whitewater grief—Ken Starr had actually hauled her down to a Washington courtroom to appear before a grand jury in the spring, ending the courtesy of visiting the White House to interview the Clintons—put her in a tough position. If the president vetoed the bill and suffered for it politically, she sure didn’t want to be seen as the reason.

  Clinton concluded the meeting taking no position, although aides could see that Reed’s arguments seemed to sink in. The president’s concluding comment was equivocal: “This is a decent welfare bill wrapped in a sack of shit.” He then retreated to the Oval Office with Leon Panetta and Al Gore. The vice president had been the only one besides Clinton who had not expressed a view in the larger meeting, but now he told the president that he supported signing, arguing that Clinton would never have another chance to keep this central campaign promise. And that tipped things. Panetta sent word to Democrats on the Hill that Clinton would sign. The president went to the White House briefing to deliver the news to reporters himself. He would sign the most fundamental departure in federal poverty policy in six decades.

  A furor ensued among liberals. Some high-level staff resigned in protest, among them Peter Edelman, a prominent poverty expert and the husband of Marian Wright Edelman, a longtime friend of Hillary’s. Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, who had supported a milder welfare reform effort in the 1980s and who was regarded in Washington as a high authority on the subject, was furious. The previous fall, Moynihan had warned: “If this administration wants to go down in history as the one that abandoned, eagerly abandoned, the national commitment to children, so be it. I would not want to be associated with such an enterprise, and I shall not be. I cannot believe this is happening. It has never happened before.” When Clinton signed the bill, he said simply: “The president has made his decision. Let us hope it is for the best.”

  * * *

  The legacy of welfare reform is, of course, complex. The direst liberal predictions did not come true. In states that genuinely tried to move people to work with proper support, the results were tolerable and sometimes even good—caseloads declined, more than half of the mothers who left welfare found work, and child poverty went down. In other states, basic monthly benefits were slashed dramatically and have stayed that way. But the short-term political benefit was undeniable. Bob Dole had nothing, really, to run on.

  In another situation, Dole might have been a more formidable candidate. A World War II hero who had lost the use of one arm from a battle injury, he was a rock-ribbed heartland conservative, without being radical. He faced no serious competition for the nomination. Only Steve Forbes, the multimillionaire publisher who had one issue (the flat tax), and Pat Buchanan, the paleo-conservative culture warrior, won primaries, but just a few—Dole took all but five contests. He had, so far as anyone knew, lived a life of integrity. His wife, Elizabeth, was an asset, too. She had been a cabinet secretary u
nder both Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush, and during her time as secretary of transportation she had actually accomplished something—something visible to most Americans on a daily basis: she instituted the requirement of the brake light in every new car’s rear windshield.

  But after all the vexation in 1992 about whether the country was ready for a Woodstock generation president, it turned out that voters didn’t want to go back to the generation that had fought in World War II. By 1996, Seinfeld and The Simpsons were part of the cultural furniture, and Dole seemed to have come from another America. At one sad point in late September, at a Los Angeles fund-raiser, he mistakenly referred to the Los Angeles Dodgers as the “Brooklyn Dodgers”—the team had, of course, moved west in 1957.

  Clinton had his problems, too. The Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago a month after he announced he’d sign the welfare bill. There was unrest afoot, and Jesse Jackson and Mario Cuomo criticized Clinton’s decision from the podium. Clinton’s own speech, laying out his agenda for a second term, was less than inspiring. He offered tax cuts and tax credits, more testing of students, a balanced budget. The president had started the year by saying, in his State of the Union address, that “the era of big government is over.” Now he was filling in that picture. This was Morris’s theory of “triangulation”: that Clinton should keep his distance from some old-line liberal ideas, adopt and modify a few Republican ones, and exist as an independent third force separate from both parties.

  Morris was out of the picture by the fall, having been felled by the revelation that he’d been regularly seeing a prostitute (and a dominatrix at that!), sometimes letting her listen in on the extension as he talked with the president. But his ideas were alive and well. And it’s hard to say, in pure electoral terms, that Morris was wrong. Signing the bill clearly made Clinton’s political path easier, and besides, he did have genuine differences with the party’s left wing. He had campaigned in 1992 emphasizing those differences, so papering over them in 1996 might have cost him support in the middle and would have constituted a reneging on some key campaign promises.