When the verdict was announced, South-Central Los Angeles broke out in Watts-like riots and looting, protesting the appearance that the white officers got off the hook. It took troops three days to restore order, by which time fifty-four people had died and thousands of buildings had been damaged or destroyed. The Bush Department of Justice quickly hauled the officers up on federal civil rights charges, and on April 17, 1992, two of them were found guilty of violating King’s civil rights and sentenced to thirty months in prison. It would not be the first racially charged case in Los Angeles to make news during the decade.
“I Didn’t Inhale”
Bush’s weakness on the economy opened the door for a serious challenge to the sitting president from the Democrats, but it was still one he should have weathered. Instead, Bush found himself besieged not by one, but by two political opponents.
Americans had become frustrated with the national debt and the annual deficits, but were unwilling to elect individual legislators who would resist the siren song of spending. A dynamic developed in which, to get elected, politicians of both parties would tout their ability to bring in dollars locally while opposing national spending programs in other districts.
Moreover, structural impediments to change had afflicted the House of Representatives, where, by law, spending bills originated. Having held the majority for almost forty years, the Democrats dominated committees, and they did so in such a way that there was little debate or discussion about many legislative items. Democrats controlled the rules committee, and simply prohibited extensive analysis of spending bills. Indeed, proposals to cut taxes, to restrain spending, and to force various caps onto the budgetary process never made it to the floor of the House for a vote. Democrat leaders killed the proposals in committee, quietly, and away from public roll calls. This process shielded Democrats from charges from opponents of being big spenders by keeping the votes secret: a politician could simply deny that he supported a particular measure and that was the end of it.
Politicians had also started to become permanent Washington fixtures. Far from the Jeffersonian ideal of citizen legislators, many of the people who ran the nation had never lived or worked outside of Washington; most of the members of Congress were lawyers who had gone straight from law school to government work. Few had ever run a business or had had to show a profit or meet a payroll. In contrast, as legislators, when government ran short of money, they either ran a deficit or hiked taxes. There was never any talk of actually cutting back, or belt tightening. Gradually, popular resentment built up against “politics as usual.”
It took the right person to tap into this well of anti-Washington sentiment. In 1992, H. Ross Perot, a Texas billionaire, burst onto the political scene. He had founded Electronic Data Systems (EDS) in 1962, turning it into a cash machine.25 In 1979 he funded a successful effort to pluck several EDS employees out of revolutionary Iran, which author Ken Follett later turned into a best-selling novel, On the Wings of Eagles. After selling EDS to General Motors, he started Perot Systems. By the time he began to appear in public forums, Perot possessed a certain amount of credibility. He initially appealed to many as homey, sensible, and practical, but at the same time, he turned off elites like those swarming around the Clinton staff. (Clinton communications director George Stephanopoulos called Perot a “weird little man who was a ventriloquist’s dummy for voter anger,” a comment that itself showed how detached insiders like Stehanopoulos were).26 Perot’s business background attracted many who were outraged by out-of-control deficit spending, and his simple-sounding solutions on the surface had appeal. He played to his role as an outsider, claiming he owed nothing to either of the established parties. Denouncing campaign spending, Perot refused federal money and financed himself in 1992. He carefully avoided any abortion position that would have alienated the sea of moderates, and he stayed away from any specifics in his policy recommendations for as long as possible. Adept with charts and graphs, Perot was the master of the political infomercial, but he faltered badly when confronted by a forceful critic.
Unlike Reagan’s, Perot’s simple-sounding solutions were often contradictory and poorly grounded in political realities. After a brief infatuation with Perot, the media turned hostile in early summer, leading the Texan to withdraw from the race in July. The withdrawal, however, was another Perot ploy to avoid close inspection. He reentered the race in October, when the press had to pay more attention to the established candidates, and although the two-month hiatus may have cost him a few votes, Perot gained much more by avoiding the media scrutiny during the summer. He hoped to gain a plurality of the vote in enough states to snatch the presidency from Bush or Clinton.
The Democrats, in the wake of the 1988 Dukakis debacle, had listened to calls to move to the center. That year, Al From decided that Bill Clinton had to be made the chairman of the DLC, and he began to organize a structure that would facilitate a White House run by the DLC chairman. It was nothing less than a breathtaking transformation of American campaign finance practices. In 1990, Clinton accepted the position with the promise that he could use the resources of the DLC as a fund-raising apparatus. Indeed, from the outset, Clinton’s primary purpose at the organization was raising money.
Bolstered by a series of New Democrat studies, Clinton supported several moderate positions, especially free trade through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and welfare reform rather than welfare expansion. Along with other New Democrats, Clinton touted law-and-order issues and railed against deficits. Above all, he sought to repackage old, dilapidated liberal ideas with new language, calling government spending “investment” and referring to taxes as “contributions.”27
At the convention, Clinton chose as his running mate Al Gore of Tennessee, whom the DLC had originally intended as its model candidate back in 1988. Awash in money and wielding a series of policy proposals designed to win back the middle class, Clinton should have been a formidable candidate. As it was, he stumbled.
For one thing, he had dodged the draft during the Vietnam war. Reporters who had known the story all along and had failed to address it finally began to home in on his flight to England as a Rhodes Scholar (where he participated in antiwar protests) and on his manipulation of his college ROTC classification. There were equally damaging allegations of marital infidelity. Gennifer Flowers, a former lover, produced a tape-recorded conversation of Clinton telling her to lie about their relationship. Once again, the press had known about that relationship and effectively buried it until it could no longer be contained. Appearing with his wife, Hillary, on a 60 Minutes television interview, Clinton evaded the Flowers allegations but admitted there had been “pain in their marriage,” and the pair continued on as the happy (and ever politic) couple.28
As the first major candidate from the boomer generation, Clinton portrayed himself as young and hip, appearing on a nighttime television show in sunglasses to play the saxophone with the band, and answering questions about the type of underwear he wore on MTV. He admitted to smoking marijuana—but he “didn’t inhale.” (His brother, Roger, had been jailed for possession of cocaine.) When it came to women, Clinton had used state troopers in Arkansas to “introduce” him to various girls and then employed the bodyguards to transport the females to and from their assignations. Most of his former sex partners remained silent. The few who did speak up came under withering fire from Clinton allies, who vilified them as “nuts and sluts.” (A female Clinton staffer was hired to specifically deal with “bimbo eruptions,” claims by other women that they had had affairs with the candidate.)
Clinton’s flagrant disregard of traditional morals outraged large segments of the public, who were already concerned about high crime rates, rising illegitimacy, soaring divorce numbers, and public schools that suffered from a plague of violence. Although George Bush confidently believed that his character would stand in stark relief to that of Clinton’s, he himself had brazenly lied about the tax hikes.
On election day
, Clinton effectively secured 43 percent of the vote. Bush netted only 37 percent, and the spoiler Perot siphoned off 19 percent. Perot’s total was significant, equaling the amount won by Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, when he had essentially denied the presidency to William Howard Taft. It would be inaccurate, however, to claim that Perot stole the election from Bush: exit polls show that he took votes equally from both established candidates. Perot did damage Bush, however, by muddying the waters on Clinton’s character, and by portraying both parties as equally guilty of deficits, insulating Clinton from tax-and-spend criticisms.
Given Clinton’s anemic popular vote, historians, who, for the most part are liberals, have distorted the 1992 election to portray it as victory for liberalism. Emphasizing the turnout, it was claimed the election “reversed 32 years of steady decline in participation.”29 Yet the additional turnout was not for liberalism or Clinton, but for Perot, and constituted a protest vote of disgust against both major parties. The election proved little. Bush had run away from his conservative base and alienated the low-tax crowd, while Clinton, portraying himself as a New Democrat, had adopted many of the Republican positions. Perot had offered no specifics whatsoever. Yet Clinton, who ran as a “moderate,” no sooner took office than he made a hard left turn.
The Clinton Presidency
Understanding the Clinton presidency requires an appreciation for the symbiotic relationship between Bill Clinton and his aggressive wife, Hillary. Mrs. Clinton, a Yale Law School grad and staffer in the Nixon impeachment, had harbored political ambitions for herself since her undergraduate days at Wellesley. Her personal demeanor, however, was abrasive and irritating and doused any hopes she had of winning a political seat on her own early in her life. When she met Clinton at Yale, he seemed a perfect fit. He was gregarious, smart, and charismatic, but not particularly deep. A sponge for detail, Clinton lacked a consistent ideology upon which to hang his facts. This was the yin to Hillary Rodham’s yang: the driven ideologue Hillary ran her husband’s campaigns, directed and organized the staff, and controlled his appearances. Since her political future was entirely in his hands, she willingly assumed the role of governor’s wife after Clinton won his first election. When Clinton gained the presidency in 1992, Hillary was fully in her element.
Clearly an understanding had been struck long before the election: Hillary Clinton would play the loyal wife in order to gain power, and once in office, Bill would reward her through policy appointments that did not require Senate confirmation. The couple even joked to one reporter that if the voters elected Clinton, they would get “two for the price of one.” Consummating the deal, the president immediately named Hillary to head a task force to review and fix the nation’s health-care “crisis.” The only real crisis was the lack of congressional will to cut costs or raise revenue for the costly and inefficient Medicare and Medicaid programs. Instead, Hillary Clinton and the Democratic National Committee diverted the debate to one of uninsurability, implying that any Americans who lacked insurance had no access to medical treatment. In fact, it meant nothing of the sort. Millions of Americans in sole proprietorships or other small businesses found it cheaper to pay cash for medical care, and there was always emergency medical care available to anyone, insured or not.
Mrs. Clinton had her opening to policy direction. Meeting with dozens of Democratic allies and experts in secret sessions—in clear violation of federal sunshine laws, as a subsequent court ruling later made plain—Hillary, with the help of Ira Magaziner, finally unveiled a health care plan so massive in scope that even other advisers were aghast. It was a political blunder of enormous magnitude. One of the administration’s own economists had argued that “one of the first messages from the new Democratic administration should not be to put 1/7th of the American economy under the command and control of the federal government.”30 The plan dictated, among other things, the specialties medical students should pursue, where doctors could practice, and which physicians individual Americans would be allowed to see. More stunning, the proposal threatened to punish by fines and jail doctors who accepted cash for providing a service and patients who paid cash for health care! In addition, “employer mandates” for even the smallest of businesses to ensure employees would have been the death knell of millions of small businesses. When word of “Hillarycare” started to leak out, it produced a firestorm of opposition.
Radio talk show host Rush Limbaugh, who had a national weekly audience of nearly 20 million, led the assault by reading on-air critiques of the health care plan by Democratic consumer writer Elizabeth McCaughey. Needless to say, few legislators, and even fewer average citizens, had read the massive 1,342-page document, but McCaughey had, and Limbaugh exposed the details on a daily basis. Legislators of both parties ran for the hills away from Hillarycare, and it went down to ignominious defeat when the majority Democrats in the House refused to bring Hillarycare up for a vote. Arguably, it was the first time in history that a single radio (or television) personality had exercised so much influence in defeating unpopular legislation. In no way was the bill the “victim of…intense partisan wrangling” or “the determination of Republican leaders to deny the president any kind of victory on this potent issue,” as liberal historians argued.31
Yet Clinton had not needed his wife’s assistance to stumble out of the gate. One of his first initiatives involved removing the military’s ban against homosexuals in active service. When military and profamily groups got wind of the plan, it generated such reaction that Clinton retreated to a compromise position of “Don’t ask, don’t tell.”
Nor did his budget measures fare well: the first Clinton budget, a deficit-reduction plan, hiked taxes (including a Social Security tax on the elderly) and required a tie-breaking vote from his vice president. Early on, Clinton’s war room of strategists had convinced him that he had to attack the deficits, and that such action would give him credibility in other (more liberal) initiatives. Treasury secretary Lloyd Bentsen impressed in unusually blunt language the significance of soothing Wall Street with his budget. “You mean to tell me,” Clinton asked his advisers, “that the success of the program and my reelection hinges on…a bunch of f**king bond traders?” Nods from around the table greeted him.32 To further portray himself as a moderate, Clinton instructed his vice president, Al Gore, to head a project called the Reinvention of Government. It was heralded as Clinton’s response to conservative calls that the growth of government needed to be checked, and Gore soon dutifully reported that his group had lopped 305,000 off government job rolls. A closer look, however, revealed an ominous trend: 286,000 of those job cuts came from the Department of Defense.33 It marked the beginning of a simultaneous slashing of military capability on the one hand and unparalleled military commitments abroad on the other. Within three years, Clinton had increased overseas deployments and, at the same time, reduced the total active-duty force from 2.1 million to 1.6 million, reduced the army from eighteen full-strength divisions to twelve (the Gulf War alone had taken ten), cut the navy’s fleet from 546 ships to 380, and decreased the number of air force squadrons by one third.
Before long, even Clinton’s most loyal staff became befuddled by his apparent lack of deeply held principles. After securing Clinton’s election, James Carville, one of his political advisers, still did not know what he valued. Carville once took out a piece of paper, drew a small square, and tapped it with his pen: “Where is the hallowed ground?” he asked. “Where does he stand? What does he stand for?”34 That his own confidants had no idea what principles Clinton would fight for was a troubling aspect of Clinton’s character. Most serious, however, was another hangover from the campaign, a savings and loan investment called Whitewater that had involved the Clintons. The issues were serious enough that the Clinton-controlled Justice Department appointed a special prosecutor—an investigative holdover from the Nixon Watergate days—charged with looking into the land speculations.
Clinton had announced his intention to appoint a “cabinet that
looked like America” by including plenty of women, blacks, and Hispanics. Yet within a few years his critics would joke that his cabinet in fact looked more like America’s Most Wanted. More than a dozen special prosecutors had opened investigations into the administration’s appointees. Clinton had invoked quotas on nearly every cabinet position, regardless of competence. Above all, party loyalists and fund-raisers were to be rewarded. Ron Brown, chairman of the Democratic National Committee, was placed in the powerful cabinet post of secretary of commerce. This later facilitated the sales of high-tech weaponry to the communist Chinese government when authority was transferred early from the State Department, which had opposed such sales, to the pliant Commerce Department under Brown. Other cabinet officials ranged from barely competent to utterly incompetent. Clinton’s surgeon general, Jocelyn Elders, committed one gaffe after another, testifying before a congressional hearing on gun control that “what we need are safer bullets” and calling for lessons in public schools on masturbation. Ultimately, the Clinton administration could not survive her inanities and dismissed her.
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