Fault Lines

by Kevin M. Kruse

  Meanwhile, as politics became ever more polarized, new fault lines opened in several sectors of American society. The American economy recovered from the recession at the decade’s start and soared to new heights, but the benefits of the boom were not broadly shared. Indeed, stark levels of economic inequality and a growing sense of middle-class insecurity only continued to worsen over the course of the 1990s. Many of the jobs that Americans now held lacked union protections and thus provided neither substantial benefits nor long-term security. Low wage, temporary jobs were growing rapidly from 1 million to 3 million workers a day between 1990 and 2000.1 Americans were working longer hours in the 1990s but earning lower real wages than they had in the 1970s. For many struggling to survive in the middle class, holding two or three jobs was becoming more common. “The number of people working part-time but wanting full-time work,” two economists concluded in their survey of the nation mid-decade, “or who are too discouraged to look for work, has grown. Millions more are holding at least two jobs to make ends meet, making do with lower wages in some self-employed venture, or stuck in a temporary job.” 2

  Social conservatism, meanwhile, increased its hold on American politics. Among other milestones, the increasingly conservative Republican Congress secured legislation defending “traditional marriage” from homosexuality and impeached the president over his lies about an extramarital affair. But outside the political arena, trends in society continued to move the other way. Sexually graphic language and pornography became ever more common in popular culture, opening up a new divide between the complaints of the culture warriors and the broad base of American consumers and voters who saw no reason to complain.

  The Incredible Shrinking President

  When President Bill Clinton took office in January 1993, most Americans expected his administration to focus on economic reform above all else. His campaign, after all, had strongly emphasized economic populism. “For the last 12 years, government has served the rich and special interests,” Clinton noted in his campaign book Putting People First. “Millions of middle-class Americans have paid more to government and gotten less in return.” He promised to change the system to benefit ordinary Americans who “work hard and play by the rules.” The populist message resonated with voters, as Clinton took in 43 percent of the popular vote and Ross Perot, who likewise campaigned on the “broken” economy of the Reagan-Bush era, pulled in another 19 percent. With 62 percent of the nation siding with vocal critics of Reaganomics, and a Democratic Congress waiting to work with him, the new president seemed to have a clear mandate for economic reform.3

  Clinton welcomed the task, and seemed well suited to it. In his twelve years as governor of Arkansas, he had developed a reputation as a policy wonk, someone who knew intricate details on a wide range of domestic issues. He loved to talk about the specifics of policies, often at great length, and believed that government could be effectively changed to work more efficiently for ordinary Americans. Moving away from the traditionally liberal policies of his party, Clinton had worked throughout the 1980s to craft a more centrist agenda that would lead Democrats back to the White House. He had been a prominent figure in the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a group that elite Democrats founded in 1985 to push their party toward the center in the age of Reagan. Cagey as a politician—critics called him “Slick Willie”—Clinton understood how to play hardball and co-opt the message of his opponents. At the same time, he was a skilled retail politician with an ability to connect with ordinary voters. Perhaps most important, he began his term with large Democratic majorities in Congress. In the House, Democrats outnumbered Republicans 258 to 176; in the Senate, they led 57 to 43.4

  Despite the seemingly favorable climate for economic reform, Clinton soon discovered that Washington would prove tougher to change than he had once hoped. The new president and his advisors, many of whom were old friends from Arkansas, seemed out of their depth on the national stage. Meanwhile, opponents stood on both sides. A cohort of conservative Republicans, whose ranks and influence in Congress had been steadily growing since the 1970s, were determined to prevent any serious rollback of the Reagan agenda. At the same time, some liberal Democrats, inside and outside of Congress, looked uneasily to the new president, seeing his DLC past as a sign that he would abandon the party’s traditional principles. During the transition period, Clinton’s nominees to key cabinet positions came under fire, and spokesmen hedged on major campaign promises. Even before the president-elect had been sworn in, many in the press were already starting to write him off. “End of a Bumpy Road,” announced a New York Times headline days before the inauguration. “Clinton Aides Wondering, ‘Where’s Our Honeymoon?’ ” 5

  Seeming slow and indecisive, the new administration stumbled into a series of unforced errors. The first significant one came on the issue of gays in the military. Early in the presidential campaign, Clinton told a gay rights group that, if he were elected, he would work to overturn the ban against gays and lesbians in the armed forces. After that comment, it was largely a nonissue, resurfacing only after the election when a reporter checked in to see if Clinton intended to follow through with his promise. The president-elect said he would, but noted that he would do so slowly and after full consultation with the national security apparatus. Despite Clinton’s timid approach to the issue, General Colin Powell, a Bush appointee still serving out the remainder of his term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, publicly rebuked the new president. Meanwhile, conservative members of his own party turned on him. Senator Sam Nunn of Georgia, the powerful chairman of the Armed Services Committee, threatened to hold up all legislation in the Senate if Clinton made any effort to lift the ban.6

  As a result of these threats, Clinton—who had hoped to get off to a quick start on economic issues—instead found himself almost immediately mired down in matters of the culture wars. Just nine days into his presidency, he announced a compromise commonly known as “don’t ask, don’t tell.” In essence, it reaffirmed the decades-old policy that the armed forces would bar gays and lesbians from serving, with the minor cover that military officials would not actively investigate the sexual lives of servicemen and women to expose them. While the compromise settled the immediate controversy, it badly hurt the new president’s standing with multiple constituencies. Gays and lesbians felt deeply betrayed, seeing this as confirmation that critics who warned them about Clinton’s slickness were right; members of the military, meanwhile, worried for reasons of their own that the new commander-in-chief was not to be trusted. Most important, middle-class voters who were looking for action on economic issues seemed baffled that the president had become preoccupied with the particular needs of a “special interest.” 7

  Partisanship would not subside, consuming almost everything in Washington. For all the chatter about the appeals of centrism to pundits and the public alike, the structures of Washington had increasingly entrenched partisanship in a variety of ways. For most participants in the political process, from interest groups to individual members of Congress, there were considerable incentives that pushed them deeper into partisan warfare. Media outlets were steadily more partisan, primary voters and party activists strongly drawn to the extremes, funding outlets attracted to the most strident voices, and congressional districts gerrymandered to present more ideologically inflexible electorates at the local level. Any president seeking a centrist path would have problems in this environment, but with Clinton there was the added handicap that many conservatives saw him as the embodiment of everything they hated about the revolutions of the 1960s: he was married to a working woman; he admitted to experimenting with drugs; and he seemed to them morally suspect.

  From the start, Clinton’s administration became embroiled in a series of small but still damaging scandals. During the campaign, the candidate had promised to select a cabinet that “looked like America.” In particular, he was determined to appoint the nation’s first female attorney general, but ran into repeated probl
ems. His first nominee, Zoe Baird, an accomplished corporate lawyer, had to withdraw her name from consideration when it was revealed that she had employed an undocumented immigrant as a nanny and failed to pay Social Security taxes for her. Clinton’s second nominee, Kimba Wood, was a federal judge who had been appointed by President Reagan. But it was soon revealed that she, too, had employed an undocumented immigrant as a nanny, although she had paid proper taxes. Wood withdrew her name as well. Though it was a fairly insignificant scandal, the media played up the drama of “Nannygate.” The attention to it again hurt the administration’s image with ordinary voters, who increasingly came to see Clinton’s talk of valuing people who “played by the rules” as empty rhetoric. Talk radio programs and cable TV shows amplified the sense of betrayal. One caller to NPR host Diane Rehm spoke for many: “I thought Clinton was supposed to be different.” 8

  The Clinton administration didn’t find its attorney general until March 1993, with the confirmation of Janet Reno, a Florida prosecutor with a tough reputation (and, notably, no children and thus no nanny problems). Reno’s term, however, got off to a rocky start of its own. A few weeks before her confirmation, David Koresh—the leader of a religious cult known as the Branch Davidians—led his followers in a gunfight with agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, a battle that ended with the deaths of four federal agents and two members of the cult. Koresh and his followers then barricaded themselves inside their compound outside Waco, Texas, as the FBI, now under Reno’s command, surrounded them in an effective siege. On April 19, 1993, the FBI battered down the compound’s walls and shot tear gas inside to force the Branch Davidians out. But Koresh ordered his followers to set the building on fire, resulting in the deaths of more than seventy members of the cult, including Koresh. The raid turned into a public relations nightmare for the new administration; for members of the far Right, Waco confirmed their worst fears about the intrusive power of the federal government.9

  Taken together, the controversies around Clinton’s Department of Justice—from overblown scandals like “Nannygate” to the more serious crisis in Waco—set the stage for a presidency that would be plagued by a variety of scandals. Shaped by the now-dominant cable news and the crowded landscape of its twenty-four-hour coverage, the media searched for gripping stories that would win the attention of viewers and readers. Newspapers and weekly news magazines, desperate to stay alive in an era of dwindling advertising revenue and subscriptions, believed that investigative journalism about corruption and wrongdoing at the highest levels would attract readers. Many reporters were also genuinely committed to the lessons of Vietnam and Watergate, especially the idea that the press had to hold those in power accountable. Scandals fit the bill perfectly on all fronts. Though they came in all shapes and sizes, the media seemed intent on sensationalizing the administration’s missteps, often attaching the “-gate” suffix in an effort to make mountains out of molehills. In the spring of 1993, for instance, when Clinton tried to fire the staff of the White House travel office—employees with no civil service protection who could therefore be replaced at will—the press presented the story as “Travelgate.” A few years later, when the White House director of personnel asked for and received files containing FBI background checks of applicants, the revelation was reported as another major scandal: “Filegate.” 10

  Even when the administration focused on economics, it still floundered. House Democrats, in particular, believed Clinton made serious missteps in moving away from the party’s traditions. One of his first major moves was to oversee the ratification of the North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA), the agreement with Mexico and Canada that President Bush had signed as a lame duck in December 1992. Many top Democrats, including House Majority Leader Dick Gephardt, vehemently opposed the trade agreement as a threat to American workers and the unionized workforce. But Clinton, who embraced many of the tenets of free-market economics, insisted on sticking with the agreement. He cobbled together a bipartisan coalition to pass the legislation that would implement the terms of the treaty in August 1993. With his own party’s congressional leaders standing against NAFTA, Clinton had to rely on his erstwhile enemies. Indeed, more Republicans voted to ratify the bill than Democrats: the House passed NAFTA by a vote of 234–200, with 132 Republicans and 102 Democrats in favor; the Senate approved it by a vote of 61–38, with 34 Republicans and 27 Democrats in favor.11 Though NAFTA represented a rare bipartisan victory for the president, it ultimately cost him the support of several important allies in Congress and other constituencies, while it gained him no new ones.

  As the administration stumbled repeatedly during its first year, alienating Democratic supporters in Congress and the general public alike, it increasingly came to be seen as incompetent. The president’s poll numbers, notably, plummeted at an incredible rate. In February 1993, Clinton’s approval rating in the New York Times–CBS poll had been an impressive 64 percent. Three months later, at the end of May, it had fallen all the way down to 37 percent. This drastic collapse in public support led to another round of stories in the media pronouncing a premature end to his presidency. “The pundits have stuck a fork in this administration and decided it’s very nearly done,” the Washington Post reported in late May. Most famously, in June 1993, Time magazine ran a cover story calling Clinton “The Incredible Shrinking President.” His administration was less than six months old, but many in the media were already pronouncing it dead on arrival.12

  In the second half of 1993, President Clinton hoped to restore his image as a moderate by pushing for some economic and political reforms. First, he worked in the summer of 1993 to address the federal debt built up in the Reagan and Bush era. This had been an issue that third-party candidate Ross Perot made central in the 1992 campaign, and Clinton, burnishing his DLC credentials, wanted to demonstrate that Democrats could be the party of fiscal responsibility. Specifically, he fought to pass a budget package that would reduce the federal debt by $500 billion over the next five years. To make this happen, however, Clinton had to abandon his campaign promise to work for a middle-class tax cut and instead implement a tax hike on corporations and individuals at the higher end. Like his predecessor, he reluctantly braced himself for the political fallout of raising taxes. Specifically, his plan called for a slight 1 percent hike in the highest corporate tax rate and an increase in the marginal tax on incomes over $250,000 to 39.6 percent. These tax hikes were then coupled with modest spending cuts. For Republicans, the plan was a nonstarter. From the beginning of Reagan’s term, the party had made opposition to any tax increase a core issue. Despite the steadily growing federal debt, they believed that raising taxes would be a massive mistake because it would, in their minds, stifle investment and provide revenue for even bigger government programs. The only way to curb deficits, they insisted, was to “starve the beast” of government. House Republicans were unanimous in their opposition to the budget plan, and convinced a number of conservative Democrats to join them. As a result, the margin of victory in the House was as narrow as it could have been—218 to 216. Likewise, in the Senate, Vice President Al Gore Jr. had to serve as the tiebreaker when the chamber deadlocked at 50–50.13

  In the long run, the 1993 budget would prove to be one of Clinton’s most important accomplishments. Over the next six years, federal expenditures steadily decreased as a percentage of the gross domestic product—falling from approximately 20.4 percent in 1993 to about 17.6 percent in 2000, the lowest percentage since the late 1960s. Over the same period, thanks to tax increases, government revenues steadily rose, from $1.15 trillion in 1993 to $1.72 trillion in 1998. In that year, the federal budget showed a surplus of $70 billion—the first federal budget surplus America had seen since 1969. Even higher surpluses followed for the remainder of Clinton’s time in office, averaging $156 billion a year between 1999 and 2001.14 For the first time since 1930, the federal government ran a surplus for four straight years. Economists calculated that if the string of surpluses con
tinued, the United States would be able to pay off the entirety of its federal debt by the year 2010.15 The long-term impacts of Clinton’s budget package were not immediately clear at its passage, of course, and in the short term the plan was seen as a political loser. The program’s tax increases on corporations and individuals in the top brackets allowed Republicans to portray Clinton as an out-of-touch liberal intent on growing government at the expense of the private sector. “It is a tax-and-spend bill, pure and simple,” said Republican congressman Jim Bunning of Kentucky. “It won’t reduce the deficit, but it will injure the country and decimate the economy. It’s a job killing bill from the word go.” 16

  The image of Clinton as a “tax-and-spend liberal” was reinforced when he unveiled his health care plan a month later, in September 1993. The crisis in American health care had become abundantly clear. Private expenditures had more than tripled over the course of the Reagan and Bush years. At the same time, more than 35 million Americans had no insurance at all while another 20 million had only partial coverage. Health care reform had long been on the liberal agenda, but it had eluded accomplished presidents such as Harry Truman and Lyndon Johnson. Despite the long odds, Clinton was determined to make it work. “If I don’t get health care done,” he said at the time, “I’ll wish I didn’t run for president.” 17