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December 2000

Staff Editorial
There is hope in an era of Bush.
by the PERSPECTIVE staff

UC Endorsement
Steve Smith and James Coleman are the liberal's choice.
by the PERSPECTIVE staff

Canadian Comrades
It really is better up there.
by Danny Schlozman

Triumph or Tragedy?
Clinton's legacy is one of calculated compromise.
by Jeffrey Theodore

Buying Survival
Africa needs money, now.
by Ved Lekic and Alexandra Neuhaus-Follini

Pharmitas
Pharmaceutical companies fund Harvard research.
by Nathan Perl-Rosenthal

Students for What?
Folic acid has a hidden message.
by Shelby Meyerhoff

Greens Take Root
PERSPECTIVE talks to Cliff Ginn.
by Dev Purkayastha

A Year to Remember
A year from Seattle, the WTO protests go on.
by Bob Elliott

Cry Freedom
America's ideal of freedom is questionable.
by Nikhil Jaikumar

Introspective
In Defense of Money
by Brad Hershbein

Salmagundi

The Back Page
Keeping Christmas
by Julia Silvis

Speaking to Tony Blair's Third-Way conference, Lionel Jospin recently declared, “Between greed and social justice, there can be no Third Way.” The sentiment appeals to the political inclinations of many American liberals; the same frustrations drove them to vote for Green Party candidate Ralph Nader in the recent Presidential elections. And it informs their opinions of Bill Clinton, who masterfully positioned himself to the center and so dominated the political landscape for the past eight years. To leftists fed up with Clintonite centrism, the idea of a committed, idealistic leader for the Left, like Jospin in France, has great appeal. Liberals want a President who will stand up for social welfare spending and high taxes on the rich.

America, however, is not France, and in judging any leader, liberals have to remember that fact. Debates over whether we should provide social services that in other countries would be considered extremely important are, in America, mere sidebars to the question of whether our citizens will have basic human rights. The racist, xenophobic, Christian fundamentalist, anti-labor, reactionary party that in France is a marginalized, right-wing fringe group is, in America, an all-too-mainstream political colossus, bankrolled by Big Business and the wealthy. Simply put, new entitlements and tax brackets are a pipe dream. The American polity is far to the right on the ideological spectrum and it constrains the politicians, whatever their ideals might be, who work within it. In judging Bill Clinton, we must hold his achievements up not to some ideal standard of social democracy but to a set of reasonable expectations.

It is easy to see why liberals have concerns about Bill Clinton. His relentless march to the political center has led him to disavow a variety of traditional Democratic policies. He signed into law the appalling (and unconstitutional) Defense of Marriage Act, which allows states to ignore homosexual marriages performed in other jurisdictions. Locked in a tight 1992 race with George Bush Sr. in which he wanted to appear tough on crime, Clinton made a public show of returning to Arkansas to preside over the execution of Ricky Ray Rector, a brain-damaged African-American charged with killing a police officer. Not only did he use capital punishment as a political ploy, but once in office he fast-tracked it to the extent that concerns over the morality of the death penalty are no longer part of the national discourse. Similarly, Clinton has a deplorable record on civil liberties, particularly the rights of the accused. In his zeal to appear tough on crime, he has adopted the whole program of victims' rights rhetoric, and his Justice Department has submarined key Constitutional due process protections. Meaningful habeas review, a staple of legal codes since ancient times, no longer exists in the United States of America.

The above complaints pale, however, in the face of liberal condemnation of Clinton's capitulation on welfare “reform.” The Republican welfare bill which Clinton signed in 1996 eliminated at a stroke the principle that Americans had a right to government economic support. By abolishing Aid for Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) in favor of block grants to the states, Newt Gingrich ended welfare's entitlement status. Clinton's compromise on the seminal 1997 budget deal was particularly objectionable. His agreement with the Congressional Republicans violated the “principles” of his own budget plan and even raised taxes on the poorest 20% of Americans. The rich received a giant payoff, fully two-thirds of what the House leadership had demanded.

Liberals, however, need to recognize the extent to which Clinton has stood firm against the Republican onslaught. Had Clinton been out-maneuvered by Gingrich in 1995, he could not have rallied Democrats in Congress against the Balanced Budget Amendment. He could not have demanded and gotten, in return for the Welfare deal, an increase in the minimum wage, increased child care funding, and new job training programs. The nation would be faced with an eviscerated Medicare, no Children's Health Insurance Program, no Head Start, no estate tax, and no affirmative action. The Republicans would have wiped out thirty years of environmental law. Instead, Clinton has placed thousands of acres of forest under federal protection. He has given environmental groups unprecedented political access. He has defended public schools by spending money to hire new teachers and vetoing voucher plans. He has made a good-faith attempt to integrate the federal judiciary, in the face of an unabashedly racist Senate majority. This followed twelve years of Republican Presidents, who appointed African-Americans to the federal bench at a lower rate than did F. W. de Klerk in apartheid South Africa. Clinton has downsized the military. And his record on abortion is unimpeachable. He has mobilized a coalition to ensure that women have access to so-called “partial birth” abortions. He has sent federal marshals to protect abortion clinics, and he has revoked the “gag-rule” and the Mexico City policy, which prevented the USfrom supporting foreign organizations that performed or funded abortions.

The problem in judging Clinton comes in trying to reconcile the conflicting elements of his record. It would be too simplistic merely to dismiss him as a pure centrist or someone entirely non-ideological, interested solely in maintaining his political popularity. But Clinton's political skills lie at the center both of his liberal achievements and of the compromises that many on the Left consider as failures, and so any attempt to understand Clinton must begin by considering his political environment.

In 1992 the Democratic Party was in disarray. Although it held a nominal majority in both houses of Congress, Southern and mid-Western conservatives combined with increasingly large Republican minorities to create the conservative majority that Reagan depended on. Indeed, the 1994 Congressional defeat was a long time coming. Democratic Congressional majorities had been shrinking for well over a decade, and the extent to which the majority caucus in Congress was out of touch with public opinion was obscured only by a succession of Republican Presidents. A unified Democratic government was bound to cause a political backlash. The same voter frustrations which swept Clinton into office in 1992 swept Congressional Republicans in two years later. And when Gingrich and his minions entered Congress in 1995, they were prepared to gut the entire welfare state to a degree Ronald Reagan had not even dreamed of. The Contract with America specifically targeted the New Deal, progressive taxation, the Great Society, and the Earned Income Tax Credit. For anyone still in the dark about the true GOP platform, a majority of the Republican caucuses in both houses of the 106th Congress- thirty-six GOP senators and 153 GOP Representatives-endorsed the “Tax Code Termination Act” which would have simply abolished the entire US Tax Code without providing a replacement code. Worse, Gingrich, who has even been on the Rupert Murdoch payroll, was prepared to stop at nothing to achieve his goals, threatening to send the US into default on its debt payments for the first time in history in order to gain negotiating leverage.

Clinton needed to discredit the Republicans while eliminating the image problems of the Democratic Party. To his credit he largely succeeded in both. Clinton's strategy was a combination of confrontation and compromise. He forced Gingrich to shut down the government and significantly moderate the Republican demands. Public opinion shifted against Gingrich and Dole, and the bulk of the Contract with America fell by the wayside. Dole's landslide defeat in 1996 was in large measure due to his inability to distance himself from the House leadership.

The catch was in the compromises Clinton had to make, specifically in the de facto elimination of Welfare. In principle such an action was inexcusable. By guaranteeing every American a certain level of income, AFDC stood at the heart of America's array of entitlements. But AFDC, by 1996, was a dying program. It was increasingly unpopular for a variety of reasons, many of them racially motivated, and benefits had been dropping in real terms since the 1970's. The Reagan tax cuts of the 1980's, which passed with the cooperation of many Democrats, including the House leadership, eliminated forever the high tax rates on the wealthy that had financed the welfare state, and signaled that liberals were no longer politically able to defend the core principles of the entitlement spending programs. In a very real sense, Welfare had become a millstone around the neck of the Democratic Party: its defense consumed precious political resources while at the same time compromising the Democrats' electoral chances. Simply put, it is arguable that a tactical retreat on AFDC was in the long-term interests of the Left.

Of course, many argue that a more liberal President would have been able to institute new social programs or at least defend old ones, but it was never conceivable that Bill Clinton, or any other President in the 1990's, would have been able to operate like Lyndon Johnson in the 1960's or even Jimmy Carter in the late 1970's. Confronted with mountainous debt, the maturation of existing government commitments such as social security, growing tax expenditures, skyrocketing economic costs of health care, weakened unions, and an increasingly powerful business lobby, Clinton faced a very different budgetary regime than his predecessors. More importantly, he faced a hard-line Republican Congress, which was prepared to fight tooth-and-nail to dismantle the welfare state, and a public receptive to its anti-tax, anti-government message.

Clinton's value, therefore, has been in his pragmatism. He has often violated the principles and dogmas of social and economic liberalism, but he has, when possible, pushed for tangible liberal goals. In certain ways, the Defense of Marriage Act is a perfect example. Because no states currently allow homosexual marriages and the law violates the Constitution's “full faith and credit” clause, it has and can have no actual consequences. If signing DOMA was what it took to get the close-minded bible-thumpers who make up so much of this country's population to vote for a Democrat, we can forgive the decision. Clinton has, as well, been able to package liberal measures in ways that make them appeal to large sections of the electorate. The Family and Medical Leave Act provided tangible benefits to America's workers, while still appealing to the mass of voters. And on almost every issue under the political radar-interpreting environmental statutes, enforcing occupational safety regulations, arbitrating labor relations- Clinton has gone to bat for core liberal positions.

In a larger sense, however, Clinton's importance to the Left has been to change the terms of political debate. In 1988, George Bush Sr. won a campaign of race-baiting, punctuated by episodes such as the Willie Horton ad campaign. The Democrats were getting hammered at the polls on defense, crime, spending, and taxes, and most Americans were disillusioned with big government. In contrast, the election of 2000 has been fought on liberal ground. If George W. Bush has won the Presidency, it is only because he rejected the themes of his father's campaign and made a show, however deceitful, of inclusiveness. Even that would not have been enough, but for Al Gore's political incompetence. In tight Congressional races, candidates all took pro-choice, pro-gun control, and pro-environment stances. James Rogan, an impeachment manager, ran for reelection to his House seat in 2000 on a platform of HMO reform and prescription drug coverage. He lost because his constituents didn't trust him to deliver. Clinton has inoculated the Democratic Party against the charges of bleeding-heart liberalism that doomed Michael Dukakis while rendering Social Security and Medicare politically sacrosanct. Henry Cabot Lodge would be turning in his grave were he able to hear Dennis Hastert promising to shore up a federal pensions program.

In crucial respects, Clinton has been an excellent President for the Left. He is, unquestionably, a left-center moderate, but it is hard to imagine that a more liberal Democrat would have succeeded in producing more liberal policies for the country. More than likely, he would have become a one-term President. Instead, Clinton has been the first Democrat since Franklin Roosevelt to be elected to two terms in office. He has broken the tide of Republican Reaction that crested with the Congressional victory in 1994. Today Gingrich is out of politics, and Tom DeLay spent the 2000 campaign hiding in the shadows. Perhaps it is the ultimate verdict on Clinton that he alone of the modern Presidents has grown in stature throughout his term in office. Johnson left office toppled by Vietnam, Nixon, ejected over Watergate, Reagan, incoherent and befuddled, and Bush, baffled by economic forces outside his control. Clinton bestrides the political landscape like a colossus, and as his political security has grown, he has increasingly championed liberal causes. It is unsurprising, then, that on January 6, 1999, Jose Serrano, a liberal Democrat from the Bronx, introduced H.J.Res.17, “Proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to repeal the twenty-second article of amendment, thereby removing the limitation on the number of terms an individual may serve as President.

Questions? Comments? Please contact perspy@hcs.harvard.edu