Economy and Clinton - Case Study Example

Discussion: Economy and Clinton The U.S. economy certainly boomed during his presidency. For this, Clinton shares credit with Alan Greenspan, and with fortunate timing. Thanks to information technology and the disinflation of the 1990s, these were likely to be good years. Clinton had the wit to strike a deal with Greenspan and the markets: a lower federal budget deficit in exchange for eased interest rates. Early in his presidency, when the Democrats controlled Congress, Clinton even achieved his deficit reduction by raising taxes on the rich rather than by slashing public services. But also, during his first two years, Clinton made big mistakes as a partisan--two in particular. First, he contrived a national health insurance scheme in a manner more befitting a parliamentary government. Congress was not much involved in the design or political management of his plan. Worse, Clinton bungled the interest-group and popular politics of health reform. The managed competition scheme was complex, and it did not fire the public imagination. Politically, Clinton hoped to make a deal with the big employers and insurance companies, but this proved naive. In the end, both turned on him--and he didnt have public opinion on his side as a counterweight. Worse still, Clinton spent what remained of his political capital in 1993-1994, to ram the NAFTA deal through Congress. The plan was a leftover from the Bush administration. It badly split the Democrats, and it was not even wise geopolitics. In the end, Clinton got NAFTA enacted with heavy Republican support, dispiriting his own party. Republicans took control of Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, and Clinton deserves some of the blame. What followed was of course a turn to the right. Clinton did play a weak hand well, helping Newt Gingrichs Republican Congress to overreach itself. But during the mid-1990s, Clinton himself tacked further to the right than the situation required. He embraced a Republican view of welfare reform. He went along with a brutal immigration bill and assaults on civil liberty in the name of crime control. He accepted the idea of a balanced budget--and then when an economic boom pushed the budget into surplus, he declared that he would pay off the entire national debt. To a point, all this was a kind of tactical Dunkirk: a strategic retreat to enable the Democrats to fight another day. But this particular Dunkirk moved the fleet not just to Dover but to Bermuda. The entire center of gravity moved to the right. On most aspects of domestic policy, Bill Clinton has been to the right of Richard Nixon. The welfare state, thanks to Roosevelt and LBJ, does a fair job of taking care of the elderly. It gives little to working families except tax bills. Now is surely the time for increased spending on child care, lifelong training, first-time homeownership, and universal health insurance. This would give working-age voters, as well as the elderly, a reason to vote Democratic. But Clinton has made the politics of budget balance sacrosanct, and Gore will needlessly lose liberal votes to Ralph Nader. In fairness, Clinton is not alone with this problem. Throughout the West, men and women of the center-left are governing on center-right programs. In general, center-left parties have failed to rein in the global market. In Europe, at least, this is seen to be a problem. Foreign Affairs & Clinton On foreign policy, Clintons presidency has been a mixed bag. He did well to advance peace in Ireland and in the Middle East. He intervened late in the former Yugoslavia--but better late than never. His Russian policy has been a failure, and his effort to launch a new World Trade Organization round was naive. His International Monetary Fund and World Bank policies are too solicitous of investors and too casual about the stability of the global system. Domestically, Clinton did take some risks for unpopular causes, as in the Elian Gonzalez case. By doing so, he sometimes made them popular. He defended affirmative action for blacks when it would have been easy to abandon it. He backed tolerance for gays. He went out of his way to find talented women and minorities for senior jobs. Yet he also left government and politics blemished by personal and financial scandal. The Lewinsky disgrace had some benefits: Americans decided that they would rather be governed by Casanova than by Torquemada. But most people would rather not have to make that choice. So while Clinton survived, even thrived, the party and the government he led both continued to fall in public esteem. After Clinton, American progressivism is weaker: more centrist, less imaginative, less inspiring to voters. As I have observed elsewhere, Clinton became the Typhoid Mary of U.S. politics--a carrier who maintained his own health while infecting others. Al Gore may contract the fatal rash. Clinton never fully governed as either a New Democrat or an old one. He understood that a Democratic president needed to blend the two. So he went for a balanced budget, but courtesy of progressive taxation; he sought to establish national health insurance, but with a plan that tried to balance state and market; he spoke more respectfully of religion and tradition than most liberals, but favored gay rights. He may have made all the mistakes on national health insurance that you suggest, but he was the first president since Truman to make a serious effort to dose the largest gap in Americas social insurance state. On the health care fiasco, Clinton is assailed from the left (he made too many concessions to the market), from the right (his plan involved too much government), and from the center (he bungled his dealings with Congress). Still, if he had pulled off health care reform, his presidency would have been very different. It would have been different, too, if he had ignored the leaders of the 1993 Democratic Congress and insisted on political reform. Democrats should be ashamed that Republican John McCain is identified by the public as the leading foe of big money in politics. Democrats have embraced the cause now, but because they blew their chance of enacting reform when they had the opportunity to do so, their current claims ring hollow. (And the campaign finance abuses during Clintons re-election effort hardly make it easy for Democrats to stand as the party of clean government.) Clinton is the first post-Cold War president. He inherited the fruits of victory, but the end was so sudden that there was no practical preparation for the post-Cold War world. The pundits who were dead wrong in predicting a protracted conflict with the USSR glibly concluded that the world was still as dangerous as it had been during the Cold War - maybe even more so! Discussion: Administrative Authority & Clinton With neither a doctrine of its own nor precedents to rely on, the administration found itself buffeted by cross currents from Left and Right, from internationalists and unilateralists. Even simple questions, such as how to define the national interest, could not be answered easily. Bewildered by this confusion, Clinton took refuge in attacking the so-called isolationists. Unfortunately, the Clinton administration did little to fill the strategic void. A mild suggestion by the under secretary of state for political affairs, Peter Tarnoff, that perhaps America ought to retrench abroad was quickly squelched. But nothing better has emerged. Efforts to articulate a strategic doctrine to replace containment - attempted primarily by the presidents national security adviser, Anthony Lake - have been vague and unpersuasive. Apparently, the president has not been very interested in foreign policy. According to former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell, National Security Council meetings "meandered like graduate-student bull sessions." It is true that the president received no foreign policy mandate from the electorate. He was justified in believing that his election reflected the electorates desire to concentrate on domestic policies. But he squandered more than two years on a fruitless debate over health care. Moreover, Clinton was elected with less than half of the popular vote, and since the 1994 midterm elections he has been the leader of the minority party. He is also the victim of the "miniaturization" of the presidency, as the columnist George Will has put it. The change in the balance of political power between the Congress and the White House was not all Clintons doing, but the result is that he is more vulnerable to congressional encroachments than were his predecessors. The United States has focused on more modest nation-building activities such as repairing some infrastructure and trying to get village leaders talking and compromising - with rather modest success so far. Even the important task of creating a professional police force to maintain order carries potential hazards. Previous American experiences with police programs in countries such as Colombia, Thailand and Iran have brought distinctly mixed results, suggesting that such efforts contain the seeds of a whole new cycle of problems. Experts who worked on such programs, such as former State Department adviser Charles Maechling Jr., have warned against trying to professionalize the Haitian police. Programs started in the 1960s to train primarily rural constabularies eventually were established in some 36 countries, but exhibited serious problems. "We assumed in the beginning that what they wanted was modern weapons training, humane rioting control, the use of shields and water cannons," says Maechling. "And we discovered what they really wanted was to have the high-tech command-and-control systems, the vehicles, the point-to-point communications and record keeping. The primary interest was making the police force more efficient, to crack down on so-called subversives. What we ended up getting was these military dictatorships breeding repression, particularly in Argentina”. In Haiti, says Maechling, "You want to have a good rural constabulary for crime. What you do not want to do is create an instrument for the next military dictatorship which will inevitably come along. You want something modest”. Naturally, some worry about the loss of American credibility around the world if the United States should pull out before stability is fully established. As Gabriel Marcella, director of Third World studies at the Army War College in Carlisle, Pa., asks, "Why go in if you are going to make an early exit, which will defeat the very purposes you went in for - one of which was U.S. credibility?" The feeling among Republicans is that the United States has done its bit and it is up to the Haitians to do the rest. Clinton v/s Bush However, the symmetry between Clintons own Clintonism and Bushs variant doesnt extend to their effect on politics. The former, by validating many conservative ideas, helped usher in the latter. When Clinton called for new defense spending and a reduction of the estate tax, he implicitly made those positions safely centrist; likewise when Gore endorsed a ban on partial-birth abortion. As a result, Bushs proposals in these areas, which are generally much more extreme, sound like mere variations on a similar theme. And while conservatives achieved long-sought policy aims as a consequence of liberal Clintonism (such as welfare reform and free trade agreements), liberals are likely to have few similar victories. Of course, Clintonism comes in two parts: one on the campaign trail, and another in power. So far, Bush has managed to reproduce only the first--and that just barely, despite vast advantages in money, party backing, and name recognition that Clinton never had in 1992. Whether he can govern as a Clintonian remains to be seen. Clintonism, in the end, requires a Clinton, a political wizard able to hold all the contradictions together. Whatever his sins, Bill Clinton was and is a man of extraordinary political talent: a formidable campaigner, an enrapturing orator, and--when push comes to shove--a brilliant defensive tactician. Bush, to put it charitably, seems more modestly equipped. References 1. Robyn L. Pangi, Arnold M. Howitt (2003). Countering Terrorism: Dimensions of Preparedness. MIT Press. pp. 154-158. 2. Anthony Kubaik (2000). Stages of Terror: Terrorism, Ideology, and Coercion as theatre History. Pp. 254-257. 3. Ami Pedahzur (2005). Suicide Terrorism. Polity Press. pp. 13-16. 4. Audrey Kurth Cronin, James M. Ludes (2004). Attacking Terrorism: Elements of a Grand Strategy. I.B.Tauris Publication. Pp. 78-85. 5. Jason Burke (2004). Al-Qaeda: The True Story of Radical Islam. Georgetown University Press. pp. 106-112. 6. David Martin Jones (2004). Globalization and the New Terror: The Asia Pacific Dimension. Edward Elgar Publishing. Pp. 98-103. 7. Nicholas Confessore. The Winner: Clintonism. The American Prospect. Volume: 11. Issue: 25. December 4, 2000. 8. Henrik Bering. Clintons Foreign Success Begs Question: What Next?. Insight on the News. Volume: 11. Issue: 7. February 13, 1995. Read More