Clinton hands Congress to the Neo-liberals

Bill Clinton was one of the smartest men ever to sit in the Oval Office. On top of smarts, he had a real interest in the minutiae of government. As they said, he was a “policy wonk”. Unlike Eisenhower and other presidents who had aides boil all the world’s affairs down to single page each day, Clinton actually read the stuff that landed on his desk.
Then he talked about it. He had a brilliant, collegial financial team to talk to about national and international finance. Not since Alexander Hamilton “dined alone” has there been so much brilliance at a treasury meeting as when Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Alan Greenspan sat down with Bill Clinton to talk financial policy.
You may feel their policies were wrong headed or even disastrous in some measure, but no one can deny their brains, background and experience—with matters like nation-wide currency crises, major recessions throughout the globe, and deficit spending.
Their backgrounds were Wall Street, Washington and Harvard—plus Clinton’s experience as governor of a state for twelve years. They took a look at the spending and non-taxing (on the wealthy) policies of the United States and concluded that it could not be sustained.
One suspects Reagan felt the same thing, only he welcomed the prospect of a national train wreck that might return us to a simpler time. The impending train wreck had no appeal for Clinton. In 1993, he proposed a tax increase.
It was quite modest. It raised the tax rate on the top 1.2% of American earners to 39.6% (it’s 35% today under Bush tax cuts), while cutting rates for the bottom 15 million wage earners and cutting taxes on 90% of all small businesses.
Had conservative Republicans merely been interested in cutting the deficit or balancing the budget, they could have had minimal problems with this bill. It certainly worked to balance the budget—for the first time since the Eisenhower Administration. But that seems not to have been the Republican issue.
They stood in the aisles of Congress jeering “Goodbye” to Congressmen and women who voted for Clinton’s bill. A year later the conservative Republicans were proven right. Clinton, like George H.W. Bush before him, was to be savagely punished for his tax increase.
Right before the 1994 Congressional Elections all but two sitting Republican Congressmen signed the “Contract With America.” Among other things it promised to cut product liability laws (protecting business from responsibility for defects), to cut off food supplies to teen age mothers of illegitimate children, thereby cutting down on illegitimate births—and various other measures Jonathon Swift seems to have forgotten in his “Modest Proposal”, and generally reduce the size of government.
The Contract worked. The Republicans—the CONSERVATIVE Republicans—had control of Congress for the first time since 1954. They would basically keep it for over ten years. They could and did override some Clinton vetoes. They had power they had only dreamt of.
Clinton, a very bright man, fought them where he could, and basically let them have their head. In 2001, Republicans would add to their arsenal the most “conservative”—or “liberal” President this nation had seem since the 1920s.
In 2008, we would see the consequences. More later.