Clinton's challenge

The State of the Union shows that it is the president -- not the reactionary Republican Party -- who still speaks for our hopes and ideals

It should have surprised no one that President Clinton's State of the Union address was a masterpiece of political theater. The televised spectacle in which the president rises above petty partisan squabbling in order to speak directly to the American people is, after all, a standard part of Clinton's repertoire. Tuesday night's performance was a far more effective argument against his removal from office than anything his lawyers have been able to offer.

The real surprise was in the substance of Clinton's proposals. For a Brezhnevian one hour and 17 minutes, the president made the case for a government that takes an activist role on issues the public cares about deeply. The future of Social Security. Health care. Public education. And though there was a poll-tested obviousness to much of what he had to say, Clinton -- and, more significantly, his enemies -- made it perfectly clear that it is he who occupies the broad middle ground of American politics. No wonder the polls show overwhelming support for the job he's doing, even as they also show that most people neither trust him nor admire him personally. Sometimes, even in politics, ideas are power, and Clinton has far more ideas than the worn-out, divided, and embittered Republican Party.

The Republican response by two little-known figures, representatives Jennifer Dunn of Washington state and Steve Largent of Oklahoma, demonstrated the party's intellectual bankruptcy far more profoundly than Clinton could. Their pathetic, programmed performance, in which they cast themselves as the soccer mom and the football dad, called to mind either a bad sitcom or a particularly vacuous local-news anchor team. And though they tried their best to come off as mainstream Americans, some pretty radical views tumbled out of their mouths. This was especially true of Largent, who chose to introduce himself to the country by speaking out against a woman's right to choose. (And Republicans wonder why Americans are scared of them.) Largent closed with a folksy story about how he didn't even know what the letters "GOP" stood for until after he was elected. Apparently there's much that he still doesn't know.

For progressives, the dilemma posed by Clinton's speech was that though it was filled with specifics, the broad vision he outlined was better than the details. Consider his proposal to devote some 60 percent of the budget surplus over the next 15 years -- estimated at $2.7 trillion -- to shoring up Social Security. As many experts have noted -- including Hans Riemer, director of the 2030 Center, who talked to the online magazine Salon after the speech -- the so-called Social Security crisis is more manufactured than real, and it could be solved through modest steps such as making the payroll tax more progressive and raising the retirement age slightly, although these steps would represent real political challenges. Clinton proposes to take a lot of money off the table that could be used for other social programs. Indeed, the president's plan looks good mainly in contrast to the Republican notion of using the surplus to fund yet another tax cut for the wealthy. Likewise, Clinton's proposal to invest some of the Social Security trust fund in the stock market is useful primarily to block a far more radical and risky idea pushed by Republicans: to force every American to set up his or her own investment account.

The principle shortcoming of Clinton's speech was that despite the specifics he offered, he was, characteristically, more interested in symbolism than in substance. After all, he knows better than anyone that few of his ideas will make it through a Republican Congress. One idea that does not require congressional approval, a massive lawsuit against the tobacco companies that the Justice Department intends to file, may be a crowd-pleaser, but it's questionable as public policy.

Certainly there is value in symbolism. His promotion of legislation to end discrimination against lesbians and gay men was a useful bit of rhetoric, and not the sort of thing one would hear from many Republicans. But Clinton, ever since his days as governor of Arkansas, has been content to declare symbolic victory even as the real problems his symbolism was supposed to address continue to fester. Take his proposed $1000-a-year tax credit for long-term health care. As American Prospect co-editor Robert Kuttner recently noted, the credit -- which would cost $1 billion a year -- would mainly benefit upper-middle-class elderly people (40 percent of the elderly are too poor to pay federal taxes), and would not come close to making up for Clinton's $20 billion cut in Medicare payments for nursing-home care, physical therapy, and home health services. The tax-credit plan, Kuttner fumed, is "utterly cynical."

Clinton has always been more a counterpuncher than a fighter. His most useful role is as a vehicle for defusing Republican radicalism -- as in 1995, when he co-opted much of the rhetoric of the Republican "revolution," even while marginalizing Newt Gingrich and company during the government shutdown (the occasion, alas, for Clinton's first meeting with Monica Lewinsky). On Tuesday, Clinton adviser-turned-pundit George Stephanopoulos observed that Clinton's carefully calibrated appeal to bipartisanship actually sheathed a highly partisan challenge to Republicans to deal with real issues they claim to care about, but to do it on the president's terms.

No doubt millions of Americans watching the speech concluded that the Senate should end the impeachment farce, censure Clinton, and get on with the country's business. That's not going to happen. But Clinton succeeded in establishing that it is he -- not the party of revenge and reaction -- who speaks for our hopes and ideals. However imperfectly.

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