Clintonism explained

A Clinton aide argues that, behind the controversy, the president has achieved something remarkable: Rehabilitating progressive politics

by Sidney Blumenthal

In Washington the chief riddle of the day is this: Why is President Clinton popular? To opponents, the question itself is inexplicable. But, in fact, President Clinton has been more popular, over a long period of time, than Ronald Reagan ever was. Why is this so? Some contend that it marks a sea change in culture, a transformation of American values -- perhaps, for the theoretically inclined, the latest manifestation of the cultural contradictions of capitalism. But there is another, less opaque way to approach the problem. What has President Clinton achieved? And what kind of future are we preparing for our nation? Once we look at the question from these angles, it may be apparent that the Clinton presidency has struggled through a difficult transitional period, met and mastered many of its challenges, and established, at the turn of a new millennium, the makings of a new era.

It is often hard to gain perspective on the present through the swirl of controversy and contention. The past may be felt to be more familiar, certain, and reassuring. Soothing nostalgia and wishful thinking, after all, were animating elements of Reaganism. But the Clinton presidency has a different, more practical and ambitious mission: to make America a modern nation. The administration's policies have reshaped the economy, reformed the instrument of government, and recast progressive politics. These actions have been of the time, by the time, for the time. They have not proceeded from dogmas or, least of all, from nostalgia. The president's policies have been remedial, preemptive, and reconstructive all at once. The lead weights of the past have been thrown off in order to move forward, not to regress to a dreamtime. No progressive model of politics can avoid changing along with society and the economy. The modern imperative is to shape our interests and values to new realities.

The governing idea of the Clinton presidency is the idea of the nation: not who we imagine we were, but who we might become. The goal is to create a new social contract for a global economy. It must be one in which opportunity is widened; in which fiscal discipline fosters confidence in a government able to invest in education, the environment, child care, and health care; in which civil society, social harmony, and public safety are restored; in which a multicultural people can forge a common identity. If there is a name for the Clinton approach, it is this: one-nation politics. And the cynosure of the new social contract is the 1997 balanced-budget agreement, which included new health coverage for 5 million children and created, for the first time, tuition tax credits for everyone to attend college. For the first time in more than a generation, we now have the means to meet our ends, the capabilities to realize our purposes. We see "surpluses as far as the eye can see," in the words of Gene Sperling, the director of the National Economic Council. The Clinton administration has restored solvency, and not merely in the fiscal sense. We are able again to think about how we can shape our society and to conduct a practical politics around our ideas.

Creating the new nation, the American nation at the turn of the new century, is a project that is just beginning. But one-nation politics, the method of modernization, is rooted in a traditional concept. "The great object of the institution of civil government," President John Quincy Adams declared in 1825, in his first annual message to Congress, "is the improvement of the condition of those who are parties to the social compact." For the Clinton presidency, this project -- the great project that falls to every generation -- has not been easy. It has required confronting the burdens of the past and struggling with hostile forces that seek to confound and destroy one-nation politics and all that it promises.

On the eve of his inauguration, in December 1992, president-elect Clinton was informed by the outgoing director of the budget that the federal deficit had been miscalculated and was about $60 billion more than previously estimated. It was expected to rise to $357 billion by 1997. Since the passage in 1981 of Reagan's supply-side tax bill -- based on the fantasy that cutting taxes and increasing spending would miraculously lead to a balanced budget -- progressive social policy had been blocked. David Stockman, Reagan's early budget director, acknowledged in an interview with me for the New Yorker that once the policymakers recognized that an astronomical deficit had been produced, it had the consequence of paralyzing government. This outcome confirmed the conservative view that government was and should be ineffectual, and it solidified the Republicans politically. And there were deficits as far as the eye could see.

At the start, it seemed as if the prospect of coping with the deficit would completely thwart President Clinton. His plans would never materialize. He would be absorbed in remedial activity forever, and the political conditions that had plagued the Democrats since 1968 would be reproduced. From the agony of 1968 onward, when the Democrats disintegrated, the obstacles to re-creating a progressive politics had only increased. The election of 1980 was filled with vivid recurrences of the indictments of 1968. But added to the foreign-policy indictment and the party-strife indictment were the indictments that the Democrats couldn't run the economy and couldn't express the optimism of the national temperament. Malaise deluxe.

On the eve of the 1992 election, it appeared that even in the midst of recession, the burdens the Democrats carried were becoming heavier. There were still deficits as far as the eye could see. The tools of governance were left to rust. Government, it was said, couldn't rise above the deficit. Its only appropriate role was to stand aside. The issue of government -- and therefore of politics -- was settled. The assumption was that the Democrats could gain and hold the presidency only if unusual circumstances created an ephemeral breach in the wall of Republican dominance. George Bush's failure to fulfill the evanescent image of Reagan by surmounting the recession -- itself a result, in part, of Reaganism -- seemed to create that breach.

But something more than an aberration was possible. The ending of the Cold War had profoundly shifted the tectonic political plates that had been in place for a half-century. Even more, the end of the Cold War was the abrupt conclusion to the 20th century of total war -- "the age of extremes," as the historian Eric Hobsbawm put it. In 1990, in my book Pledging Allegiance, I wrote: "The ancient questions that had been closed for decades were now reopened. But one question strangely went unasked: the American Question. . . . Just as the Cold War's beginning had radically transformed American politics, so would its ending."

For nearly six years now, President Clinton has been remaking progressive policy and politics in office. The new economy, of course, depends upon the initiative of entrepreneurs and the energy of workers, but it would not have been able to flourish unless a new framework of policy had been created. The 1993 deficit-reducing budget of President Clinton, for which Democrats paid a steep price in 1994, was essential -- "an unquestioned factor," according to Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan (whose appointment, by the way, was itself an act of policy). The "anxious class" identified by Secretary of Labor Robert Reich has begun to see anxiety lessened and opportunities widened. For 20 years, average family income stagnated and real wages declined. But since 1993, family income has risen $2169, and last year real wages increased 2.3 percent. The minimum-wage increase championed by Reich and the earned-income tax credit have ensured that the benefits of the economy have spread to the working poor. By 1996, 4.3 million people had been lifted out of poverty by the earned-income tax credit. The poverty rate is down; it's not nearly enough, but we can begin to see the new social contract at work.

The current Republican Congress, however, cannot decide how to deal with the president's new initiatives. In losing its ideological and programmatic thrust and focus since 1994, it has become even more partisan. This may be one more sign of the acceleration of history. Republicans can choose to play a constructive role in working with the president, or they can resist -- voting down 100,000 new teachers and new school construction, as they did last month. They can act as tools of special interests, the tar and nicotine of the old politics, as Speaker Gingrich did when he joined the tobacco companies in assailing an effort to reduce teen smoking and support children's health. They can follow a strategy of trying to tear down the president as a way to build themselves up. But as Senators Al D'Amato and Fred Thompson have discovered, that approach has only backfired. Representative Dan Burton, for his part, can't crawl out of this particular hole because it's his natural habitat.

The congressional Republican Party is so fractured that it must stand still to avoid breaking apart. Its fear of movement, especially forward, expresses itself as a policy of general immobilism tending toward shutdown. And this policy is not restricted to the domestic arena.

With the end of the Cold War, the internationalism that marked the bipartisan consensus on America's role in the world has eroded. Old forms of nativism, xenophobia, and isolationism have emerged from under rocks. At the moment when the United States is at the height of its economic, military, and political power, the very idea of internationalism is being challenged as it has not been in decades. For example, when United Nations weapons inspectors were at risk in Iraq, and the International Monetary Fund was intervening to stabilize Asian economies, a handful of Republicans tied IMF funding and the payment of UN dues to their own anti-family planning agenda. Rather than debate family planning on its merits, they used it to hold US foreign policy hostage. This is more than a dangerous precedent. It is entirely possible that the US could lose its vote in the General Assembly this year for nonpayment of our debt.

We are, as never before, the indispensable nation, but our strategy to gain adherents to the standards of democracy, global prosperity, and peace means we must act along with others who share the risks and burdens of leadership.

In Latin America, the US advanced an agenda for a second generation of democratic reforms to protect a free press, train an independent judiciary, and promote education. Elections are only one part of democracy, and institutions that involve an active citizenry must be built up. As the president pointed out at last month's Summit of the Americas in Santiago, economic growth cannot be long sustained without democratic development, including raising the living standards of the poor.

With Great Britain, we have forged a new special relationship -- a 21st-century alliance, as the president called it, based not only on all our traditional mutual interests, but also on our common conviction of the necessity for a new social contract. Since last November, when First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton traveled with an American delegation to meet with a British delegation chaired by Prime Minister Tony Blair, we have held intensive discussions about the specifics of the new social contract and its politics. Next month, after the G-8 summit in Birmingham, we will hold another meeting. Whereas President Clinton has developed a progressive politics in office, Tony Blair had a model to learn from before he assumed office. Many of the criticisms of Blair from both the left and the right, by the way, are exactly similar to the criticisms of the president. Among other things, the emergence of transatlantic one-nation politics makes it increasingly clear that far more than personality is at stake.

What do you think?

What has Clinton done for progressive politics? What have been his administration's best and worst achievements? How will the historians judge the century's last president? The Phoenix welcomes your responses. You can e-mail them to letters[a]phx.com, or write to Letters, Boston Phoenix, 126 Brookline Avenue, Boston, MA 02215.

Sidney Blumenthal, a onetime staff writer for the Phoenix, has served in the White House as assistant to the president since July 1997. This story was adapted from a speech at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.