After law school, Clinton served as Arkansas attorney general and six two-year terms as governor. He had high ambitions for himself and the Democratic Party. To regain the White House and national dominance, Clinton believed that Democrats had to recapture white middle-class voters who had moved over to the Republicans, especially men in the South and the suburbs who were put off by liberal positions on cultural issues and the increased influence of blacks within the national Democratic Party. Clinton rejected the moral perfectionism that had marbled the New Left. When he met Hillary, he recalled, “She was as tired as I was of our side getting beat and treating defeat as evidence of moral virtue and superiority.” Clinton believed in doing what it took to win. In the mid-1980s, he joined with other moderates and conservatives in the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC) to push the party toward the center and provide a counterweight to liberal groups that played a large role in setting party policy, like the National Organization for Women, Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition, and the AFL-CIO. During his 1992 presidential campaign, he flew back to Arkansas to make sure that the execution proceeded of a brain-damaged murderer, Ricky Ray Rector, in an apparent effort to prove that he did not share the alleged Democratic Party softness on crime.
Clinton retained a nostalgic affection for the cultural and political rebellion of the 1960s. At his presidential inaugural concert, held on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial where Martin Luther King Jr. had given his most famous speech, Bob Dylan, who sang at that occasion, returned to sing his 1964 song “Chimes of Freedom.” But Clinton also invited two Pentecostal friends to sing at another inaugural event, about whom he said, “Knowing people like them was one reason I got elected President.”
The 1992 Election
Before the 1992 campaign began, most observers expected that George Bush would easily win reelection because of his extraordinarily high approval rating in the wake of the Gulf War. With many leading Democrats staying out of what looked like a losing race, Clinton won the Democratic nomination, overcoming revelations about his draft avoidance and extramarital affairs. (“Bimbo eruptions,” a campaign aide called them.) He then focused his campaign almost entirely on domestic affairs, especially the economy, unfavorable terrain for the incumbent.
Bush had a thin record of domestic achievement. The major laws of his years in office, the Americans with Disabilities Act and the Clean Air Act Amendments, had not been his initiatives, though he did work with Democrats to win their passage. The Disabilities Act required businesses, public buildings, and transportation facilities to provide access for people with disabilities and outlawed discrimination against them in hiring and job assignments. The Clean Air Act Amendments contained enforcement provisions for urban air standards, regulated sulfur dioxide emissions (which were causing acid rain), lowered permitted levels of industrial and vehicle emissions, and took the first steps toward countering the depletion of the ozone layer, measures that over time led to very significant improvements in the environment. But beyond these laws, for which he could take only partial credit, Bush had little to show. He lost a great deal of support in the conservative base of the Republican Party when in 1990, in negotiations with congressional leaders to deal with the massive deficit, he agreed to a large tax increase, breaking the “Read my lips; no new taxes” pledge he had made two years earlier.
Bush’s failure to act when the economy went into a tailspin in 1990 proved costly. By mid-1991, the unemployment rate neared 8 percent. Even as conditions worsened, Bush, fearful that a stimulus program would add to the still large budget deficit and drive up interest rates, did little, even vetoing a measure to improve unemployment benefits. His approval rating plummeted from 84 percent at the end of the Gulf War in February 1991 to just 29 percent in mid-1992.
Complicating the 1992 election, multimillionaire Ross Perot ran as an independent, capitalizing on broad public distaste for politicians of all stripes, evident in the continuing adoption of state term limit laws for elected officials. An opponent of the Gulf War, Perot made the federal deficit and opposition to free trade the centerpieces of his idiosyncratic campaign. For his part, Bush could not overcome the public perception that he was a privileged patrician, disengaged from the problems of ordinary Americans. During one campaign stop, he expressed wonder at a bar code reader at a supermarket checkout (of the type that had been in use for a decade), inadvertently revealing that he simply did not share, and had not done so for a very long time, the common experiences of everyday life that bound people together.
A massive riot in Los Angeles early in the campaign brought home the urgency of addressing domestic affairs. The acquittal by an all-white jury of four California highway patrolmen who had been captured on videotape beating Rodney King, an unresisting black motorist, touched off the worst riot the country had experienced since the Civil War. Looting and arson hit widespread areas of the city. Television pictures of a brutal assault by black assailants on a white truck driver who happened to be passing through South Central Los Angeles contributed to the initial perception that the city was experiencing a race riot. But while there were racial aspects to the carnage—including the heavy targeting of Korean American–owned stores—both the perpetrators and victims of violence came from a wide array of ethnic and racial backgrounds. Over half those arrested and a third of those killed were Hispanic. In its own way a testament to the increasing demographic complexity of the country, the riot, which lasted four days, took more than fifty lives, and resulted in well over two thousand injuries, was more a dark carnival of violence, theft, and desperation by the poor than a racial disturbance of the sort that had occurred during the 1960s. Clinton, by arriving in the city before the president, managed to turn the horrendous event to partisan advantage.
In the end, Clinton won the election by focusing on the economy and adeptly repulsing personal attacks from the Republicans. He succeeded in winning back a sizable number of centrist onetime Democrats, while retaining the support of African Americans, unionists, and liberals, who had nowhere else to go. But it was far from an overwhelming victory. Perot, with little in the way of a campaign organization, managed to win 19 percent of the popular vote, the best showing for a third-party candidate since Teddy Roosevelt’s Progressive Party run in 1912, leaving Clinton with a plurality of 43 percent of the vote, to Bush’s 38 percent.
Democracy Contained
During his transition and first year as president, Clinton learned hard lessons about where power lay. Confronted by the common wisdom of the financial industry, well-organized business lobbies, and congressional conservatives, he found himself endorsing measures to the right of his centrist campaign platform.
The dynamic became clear as he crafted his first budget. As a candidate, Clinton had linked a commitment to deficit reduction to federal investment in infrastructure, worker training, and job creation, which he believed would stimulate the economy and lay the basis for future growth. But in staffing his administration, he gave key economic posts to Wall Street backers and Democratic centrists who put much greater stress on balancing the budget than on reducing unemployment or providing paths for upward mobility. Goldman Sachs co-head Robert Rubin, whom Clinton appointed director of the National Economic Council and then as secretary of the treasury, emerged as one of the president’s closest advisers and a highly effective advocate for policies benefiting the financial sector. Like Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, Rubin and other “deficit hawks” argued to Clinton that the key to economic recovery would be low interest rates, which meant convincing bond dealers that he would attack the deficit and reduce federal borrowing requirements.
Clinton bought the argument, while verbally lashing out at the ability of capital to undermine the economy. “You mean to tell me,” he blurted out at an economic planning meeting shortly before his inauguration, “that the success of the [economic] program and my reelection hinges on the Federal Reserve and a bunch of fucking bond trad
ers?” Clinton dropped his campaign proposal for a middle-class tax cut and most of his proposed stimulus and investment programs. James Carville, who had helped mastermind Clinton’s victory, told the Wall Street Journal, “I used to think if there was reincarnation, I wanted to come back as the president or the pope or a .400 baseball hitter. But now I want to come back as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.”
The bond market was not the only constraint Clinton faced. In Congress, conservatives in both parties wanted less spending and lower taxes. To get a budget plan through, Clinton removed a proposed broad energy tax, designed as an environmental measure as well as to produce revenue, replacing it with a small hike in the gasoline tax. He did manage to keep small increases in corporate taxes and income taxes for the wealthy and a boost in the Earned Income Tax Credit, a program, first established in 1975, that gave refundable tax credits to low-income working families.
In addition to deficit reduction, Clinton embraced another favored Wall Street policy, free-trade treaties that reduced tariffs on imports and opened up other countries to U.S. investment and agricultural products. Clinton had waffled during the campaign, endorsing the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Canada and Mexico, which Bush was in the process of negotiating, but saying that he would insist that it be accompanied by side agreements protecting labor and environmental standards. Once in office, he broke with the labor movement, which feared NAFTA would lead to job losses and wage reductions, lobbying hard for its passage with toothless environmental and labor supplements. Clinton won the battle, with House Republicans providing more votes than Democrats.
In April 1993, Clinton said with some bitterness to a group of his advisers, “I hope you’re all aware we’re all Eisenhower Republicans. We’re Eisenhower Republicans here, and we are fighting the Reagan Republicans. We stand for lower deficits and free trade and the bond market. . . . At least we’ll have health care to give them, if we can’t give them anything else.” But as things turned out, Clinton could not give his supporters health-care reform either.
The cost of health care had been rising for years, amounting to over 13 percent of GNP by the time Clinton took office, while the percentage of the population under age sixty-five without health insurance had risen to over 17 percent. The thirty-nine million people without health insurance were not the poorest Americans, who by and large received Medicaid, or the elderly, covered by Medicare, but members of working- and middle-class families who could not afford or chose not to buy coverage if they did not receive it through an employer. A surprise victory by Harris Wofford in a 1991 special election for a Pennsylvania Senate seat, after a campaign in which the former Kennedy administration official stressed his support for national health insurance, convinced the political class of the saliency of the issue. Within months, virtually every major politician was putting forth some sort of plan to improve the health insurance system.
Clinton’s plan, developed by a task force headed by Hillary Clinton and Ira Magaziner, aimed to provide universal insurance coverage and slow the escalation of health-care costs without greatly increasing government spending, reflecting the president’s reluctance to add to the large deficit he had inherited or allow himself to be tagged as a tax-and-spend liberal. His plan proposed expanding the employment-based system of health insurance that had grown up since World War II, rather than moving to a government system that would build on Medicare and Medicaid (what its proponents euphemistically termed a “single-payer” system). All employers would be required to offer their employees health insurance. To contain costs, in most cases they would be compelled to join large regional purchasing groups. With savings from cuts in Medicare and Medicaid and an anticipated slowing of health-care inflation, individuals who could not afford insurance would receive subsidies and Medicare recipients would get prescription drug and long-term-care coverage.
Clinton’s complicated plan, unveiled in September 1993, initially won a high level of public support and considerable bipartisan backing. But health- care interest groups—employers, insurance companies, drug companies, and doctors—soon began to resist. Some opposed the basic thrust of the plan or the need for any plan at all, while others objected to particular provisions that would cost them money or impose unwanted regulations. A trade group of small and midsize insurance companies, which believed that the plan would favor their larger rivals, ran memorable television advertisements featuring a fictional middle-class couple, “Harry and Louise,” who expressed their fears that the Clinton plan would create a vast new government bureaucracy and deprive them of their right to choose their doctors. Conservatives and Republicans joined the opposition, seeing an ideological opportunity to win support for less government and a political opportunity to deal the Clinton administration and liberals a blow.
The combination of interest group and partisan opposition proved deadly. Most Americans already had health insurance, and the endless drumbeat of criticism of Clinton’s plan convinced many of them that the uncertainty and new regulatory regime that would come with it outweighed its potential benefit. The Clintons proved unable to get even those who generally supported their approach to fight hard for their proposal. After a year of battling, the plan died in Congress without even receiving a formal vote.
Washington at War
The defeat of Clinton’s health plan ended the possibility of health-care reform for another generation and energized the Republican right. Clinton’s election had not ended partisan combat, which if anything intensified once he entered the White House, as a kind of permanent political war settled into place in Washington. Partisanship had been growing since the early 1980s. Conservatives had achieved power through bold rhetoric and combative tactics, which had shaped a harsh political culture during a period when neither party proved able to win long-lasting, decisive electoral victories. The end of the “Fairness Doctrine” allowed the growth of highly opinionated talk radio, largely on the conservative side of the political spectrum, with Rush Limbaugh and other radio hosts, who depended on rage and intemperance to attract listeners, increasingly driving political discourse. The burgeoning Washington-based class of operatives who made their living off partisan politics—lobbyists, pollsters, media advisers, think tank denizens, and party staffers—gave the parties expanded capacity for extended combat, while constituting an interest group that needed conflict to keep salaries flowing.
The cultural and social divides that began in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the intensity of the political battling. “To me,” said Republican Dick Armey, shortly after he became House majority leader in 1995, “all the problems began in the Sixties.” His colleague, conservative Republican Newt Gingrich, identified the “counterculture” as the principal source of the nation’s woes, faulting the Democratic Party for indulging a “multicultural nihilistic hedonism that is inherently destructive of a healthy society.” Conservatives could not let the 1960s go because, to their fury, in spite of their decades of growing political influence and twelve years of Republican control of the White House, accepted norms of behavior continued to move in a more liberal, permissive direction. While conservatives reshaped national thinking about political economy and the role of government, they failed to recast the national culture in their image or regulate personal behavior, especially in the realm of sexuality.
For many conservatives, the Clintons—Hillary as much as Bill—embodied all that they hated about the 1960s. Bill’s political success in spite of his draft avoidance, opposition to the Vietnam War, dabbling in the counterculture, womanizing, and embrace of the language of therapeutic self-help (even though many of his harshest critics, like Gingrich, had avoided the draft themselves and were far from model family men) worked conservatives into a frenzy. So did Hillary’s success as a lawyer, failure to adopt Bill’s last name until it seemed necessary for reviving his political career after he lost his first reelection bid for governor, assertiveness, and occas
ional flashes of contempt for housewives (“I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession,” she said during the 1992 campaign). The religious right would not forgive Clinton for ending its influence on federal policy, even though organized religion played a much larger role in his life than in Bush’s or Reagan’s. Clinton’s failed effort, shortly after he took office, to make good on his campaign promise to end the ban on military service by homosexuals reinforced the belief of many conservatives that, if given his way, the new president would undermine long-established legal and moral codes, threatening the very basis of the Republic.
The centrism of Clinton’s economic program and health plan did nothing to bank conservative fires. Attacks on the regulations that would have come with the Clinton health reform plan stoked antigovernment sentiment. To take advantage of it, conservative Republicans, led by Gingrich, created a national antistatist program for their party’s congressional candidates in the 1994 election, framed in the language of populist disgust with politicians. The “Contract with America” called for term limits for members of Congress, a constitutional amendment requiring a balanced budget, reform of congressional rules, anticrime measures, and new restrictions on welfare. While local issues dominated many congressional races, the unified Republican effort, attacks on the Clintons, and a strong campaign effort by the National Rifle Association, which bitterly opposed gun control measures passed with the president’s support, proved important in some tight races. So did turnout. Gun control and the increase in taxes on the wealthy brought Republicans to the polls in large numbers, while many Democrats, disgusted with Clinton’s support of NAFTA and loss of the health-care fight, sat out the election. The result was a very big win for the Republicans, who gained control over both houses of Congress for the first time since Eisenhower’s first term, with Gingrich becoming the new Speaker of the House.
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