Since the Republican Senate victory in Massachusetts on January 19 and the collapse of Obama’s domestic agenda, the parallels between Obama now and Clinton in 1994 have come into sharp focus....
To save his presidency after his stiff rebuff in the midterm elections, Clinton lurched to the political center. He adopted a strategy of “triangulation” that involved painful compromises with Republicans, who had captured the House and Senate. It worked. Clinton glided to reelection in 1996, defeating Republican Bob Dole by 7 points.
Though it’s rarely acknowledged, Clinton’s most significant successes in the White House were all in conjunction with Republicans: the North American Free Trade Agreement in 1993, welfare reform in 1996, and balanced budget legislation in 1997 that included a cut in the capital gains tax rate from 28 percent to 20 percent that spurred the financial boom and budget surplus of his second term.
Barnes' comparison is, not surprisingly, very misleading. Sure, there's an obvious parallel between Obama's 2010 political struggles and Clinton's in 1994. But Barnes can't simply point that out, because -- as he notes -- Clinton ended up rebounding and winning a re-election landslide in 1996. (Quibble: Barnes slightly understates the margin of Clinton's '96 win over Dole; it was actually 8.5 points, not 7.) And no self-respecting Weekly Standard writer is about to forecast such a happy ending to Obama's first term. So Barnes' challenge is tell us why Obama is much more screwed than Clinton was 16 years ago. Which is where he goes off the rails.
His argument, as you can see, is that Clinton turned his presidency around by essentially governing as a Republican. There is some truth here: I can certainly remember how frustrated many progressives were when Clinton signed welfare reform, or when he ran ads on Christian radio stations bragging about his decision to sign the Defense of Marriage Act.
But Barnes conveniently leaves out the single most significant moment for Clinton's post-'94 turnaround: his fall '95 confrontation with the Republican Congress over its budget priorities, which resulted in a shut-down of the federal government that November. To most voters, the incident starkly illustratrated the differences between the president and his Republican opponents. Clinton came off as a tough, decisive and principled protector of the social safety net. The Republicans looked like fanatical ideologues. After the shut-down, Clinton's re-election was virtually assured; Bob Dole never got close to him in the polls.
More galling, though, is Barnes' claim that "Clinton's most significant successes in the White House were all in conjunction with Republicans." Again, there's something to this (although any post-'94 achievment had to come through cooperation with Republicans -- since they ran Congress); and again, Barnes conveniently ignores the elephant in the room: Clinton's 1993 budget, which was passed without a single Republican vote in the House or Senate.
That budget, which raised income tax rates on the highest-earning Americans, was instrumental in arresting the runaway deficits of the Reagan era, restoring the confidence of Wall Street, and laying the foundation for the economic prosperity that marked most of Clinton's reign. Without it, Clinton would never have been able to hand off a budget surplus to George W. Bush in 2001. (And I don't need to remind you what Bush and the GOP Congress did with that surplus.)
I don't have the time to go pull quotes now, but if you're looking for a laugh, go back and read through the news coverage of Clinton's budget from the summer of 1993. One Republican after another cast it as a threat to life as we know it -- a guaranteed jobs killer that would strangle growth and investment and plunge the country back into a recession. It passed the House on a 218-216 vote and only got through the Senate with Al Gore's tie-breaking vote. Zero Republicans voted for it. (Sort of like the stimulus last year, and health care now.)
Just like all of the Republicans who voted against Clinton's budget, Barnes seems to have forgotten all about it.
4 comments:
Clinton's 1993 budget was part of the story of the success of the 90s, but the economy really didn't start to take off until after the 1995 budget - the one that was crafted by a Republican congress. And in fact the stock market literally took off right after the Republican electoral gains of 1994. Seems weird to credit the boom of 2005+ on a budget of 1993 rather than 1995, while not mentioning the sluggish economy of 1993 and 1994.
I have a feeling you have no problem crediting the boom of the 1980s on Reagan's economic program. It was passed in the summer of 1981 -- and immediatey followed by 18 months of ecomomic hell, including a three-point rise in unemployment (to well over 10 percent). It was only few years after enactment that the economy "boomed." so why should it be "weird" to suggest that it took a year or two for the fruits of Clinton's economic program to become apparent, too?
I'm not arguing that the '93 budget was the only reason for the prosperity and budget surpluses of the '90s. But it was an essential element. And to Barnes' point, it was clearly one of Clinton's most "significant" achievements -- and he did it against universal Republican opposition.
For what it's worth, I thought that the "Triangulation" strategy was something that Clinton pursued from the start, not just after the '94 elections. As always, I could be wrong.
The "economic hell" of 1981 and 1982 were due to Volker's very high interest rates that served to squeeze out inflation from the economy. I would be very skeptical of anyone who blamed the troubles of 1981 and 1982 on the Reagan budget of 1981. And in fact, I would credit the boom of the 80s less on the Reagan tax and budget policies than on Volker's successful effort at stamping out inflation.
I am less a Republican partisan than a sceptic of government in general. For example, the real cause of the boom of the 90s was a sudden jump in productivity growth starting in 1995. Where did that productivity growth come from? No one really knows.
I guess I a skeptical of the Clintonian idea that the budget of 1993 somehow lead to a lower defect, then a surplus and a booming economy. I think it is much more likely that a booming economy caused the budget numbers to improve. Pointing to the 1993 budget as some kind of historical cause seems just as arbitrary as picking 1991 or 1995. Specifically, the fact that there was a lower defeict really had nothing to do with the widespread adoption of technology (Moore's law, the Internet, the Pentium, etc.) that seems the most likely explanation for the 90s boom.
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