Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (53 page)

Many liberals further bewailed what they considered to be the baneful consequences of the scrubbing in 1987 of the so-called Fairness Doctrine by the then GOP-dominated Federal Communications Commission. Under this doctrine, radio and over-the-air TV stations had been expected to offer “reasonable opportunity” on the air “for the discussion of conflicting views on issues of public importance.” After the FCC put an end to the doctrine, liberals charged, conservative radio and television announcers felt ever more free to abet what Hillary Clinton later denounced as a “vast right-wing conspiracy” in America.

Liberals especially detested House Republican whip Newt Gingrich of Georgia, an avid partisan who led the assault against Clinton from Capitol Hill. Gingrich was a hyper-energetic, irrepressible firebrand who brimmed with ideas and who had no interest in compromising with liberals. Unlike Robert Dole of Kansas, the GOP leader in the Senate, he was an ideologue and a warrior, not a deal maker. As if to demonstrate his toughness, Gingrich decorated his office with the skull of a
Tyrannosaurus rex
. Bellicose in his rhetoric, he proclaimed that liberals were “pathetic,” “sick,” “corrupt,” “leftwing elitists,” and “counter-cultural McGoverniks.” Aided by a corps of mostly southern Republicans, such as Tom DeLay of Texas, Gingrich brought a new level of intensity to partisan battling in the House. These ideological wars, in turn, soured many Americans on politics in general.
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Although Clinton compromised on occasion, he frequently gave as good as he got, thereby further infuriating conservatives on Capitol Hill. Unsatisfied with blocking presidential initiatives, they continued to practice a politics of “R.I.P.”—Revelation, Investigation, Prosecution.
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Within the next few years they made special use of the Ethics in Government Act of 1978, which had authorized the appointment of independent counsels.
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Five of these investigated members of Clinton’s Cabinet, two of whom were forced to resign. A sixth independent counsel, Kenneth Starr, devoted more than four years to an investigation of Clinton, ultimately seeking the president’s impeachment.
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Two additional features of American politics, both familiar, further affected some of Clinton’s efforts in the 1990s. The first was the predictably weighty influence of interest groups. Some of these groups—those representing the elderly, for instance—helped him to ward off conservative threats in the 1990s to politically powerful entitlements such as Social Security and Medicare. “Public interest” lobbies such as Common Cause further bolstered liberal efforts. As Clinton was to discover, however, conservative interests were strong enough to wage war on new social programs, such as his quest for universal health insurance coverage.
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Opponents of federal gun control, led by the National Rifle Association, had considerable influence on Capitol Hill.

The second feature was equally familiar and dated to the late 1960s: widespread popular disgruntlement with politicians.
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This did not mean that a majority of people yearned to overhaul their political system. Polls showed that Americans continued to be immensely proud of their democratic institutions, which remained among the most stable in the world. Even while grumbling about the burden of taxes, most people took care to pay them. Able and idealistic citizens continued to enter public service.
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But many popular feelings that had been powerful since the 1970s—resistance to federal regulation, distrust of authority, resentment of special interests, and suspicion about conspiracies, especially governmental conspiracies—persisted in the 1990s. H. Ross Perot’s strikingly strong showing in the election of 1992, rooted as it was in denunciations of leaders of both major parties, had amply demonstrated the strength of such attitudes.

The media, moreover, continued to play up partisan disagreements and ideological confrontations, further exciting sound and fury that discouraged citizens from undertaking sustained political involvement.
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Within the next few years, twenty-five states approved term limits for selected officeholders. In the 1990s, as in the 1970s and 1980s, distrust of politicians made it hard for people with large ambitions to accomplish great things.

Clinton was such a politician. As he began his term, he was determined to overcome these and other obstacles—including persistent divisions within his own party—and to achieve a transcendent position in United States history.

E
ARLY IN HIS ADMINISTRATION
Clinton managed to win a few minor victories. Pleasing advocates of liberal abortion policies, he revoked a “gag rule” that his predecessors had enforced against abortion counseling in federally funded clinics, and he issued an executive order authorizing the use of fetal tissue for medical research. When Congress passed a Family and Medical Leave Act that guaranteed many workers up to twelve weeks a year of unpaid leave for medical emergencies—a measure that Bush had twice vetoed—he was quick to sign it.
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Like Jimmy Carter, however, Clinton quickly discovered how harsh the Washington political environment could be. Slow to find his way, often indecisive, he and his advisers—some of them old friends from Arkansas—frequently seemed to be out of their depth. Having proclaimed that he would have a Cabinet that “looked like America,” he was determined to appoint a woman as attorney general. His first nominee for that post, Zoe Baird, had to withdraw her name when it was revealed that she had hired an illegal immigrant as nanny for her children and had not paid Social Security taxes relating to her employment. A second choice, also a woman, proved unacceptable for similar reasons. It was not until early March that Janet Reno, a Florida prosecutor, was confirmed in the position. She was America’s first female attorney general. “Nannygate,” as the media termed this messy business, indicated the heightened investigatory zeal of the media when it came to high-level government appointments. It also caused people to ask if Clinton and his staff knew what they were doing.

Reno had barely settled in when she had to deal with David Koresh, head of a cult of Seventh-Day Adventists called the Branch Davidians that was suspected of illegally amassing automatic weapons at their compound in Waco, Texas. Following a gun battle on February 28 with agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms that had killed four agents and two members of the cult, Koresh and many of his heavily armed followers holed up at their compound. FBI agents, supervised by Reno, maintained a siege there for seven weeks. On April 19—the Patriots Day anniversary of the battles of Lexington and Concord in 1775—the agents battered the walls of the compound with tanks and fired tear gas inside, whereupon Koresh ordered his followers to pour gasoline around the compound and to burn it down.

The explosive blaze that broke out killed more than seventy members of the cult, including Koresh and twenty-one children, several of whom he had fathered with some of his many wives. Only nine followers survived. Reno justified the assault by explaining that she had received reports of children being beaten inside the compound, and Clinton backed her up. Many Americans wondered, however, how carefully Clinton himself had followed the situation, and whether he—or was it Reno?—had acted precipitously.
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Meanwhile, Clinton found himself tangled in protracted struggles over his early announcement—the initial act of his administration—that he would end a ban against homosexuals in the military. From the start, a wide range of opponents, including General Colin Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, demurred. Following protracted acrimony, which dragged on into July, foes of change succeeded in forcing Clinton to accept a compromise: Military personnel were not to reveal their sexual preferences, and their superiors were not to ask them about it. “Don’t ask, don’t tell,” as this policy was called, pleased no one. Over the course of the next ten years it resulted in the discharge of some 10,000 service men and women who revealed their homosexual preferences.
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Clinton blundered again when he tried to fire the White House travel staff. They were to be replaced by political supporters and friends of his wife. Though the president claimed that the employees had mismanaged their tasks, it became clear that this explanation was a cover for a partisan housecleaning of experienced workers who had served his predecessors. When critics counter-attacked, Clinton felt obliged to restore most of those whom he had fired. “Travelgate,” as the media named this imbroglio, further advertised his political clumsiness during the early months of 1993.

By then many observers were ridiculing the president, whose poll numbers were dropping steadily. The cartoonist Garry Trudeau depicted him as a waffle. A cover story in
Time
featured him as architect of the “Incredible Shrinking Presidency.” A biographer, Joe Klein, later dismissed Clinton’s performance during these early months as “amateur hour.”
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Though jolted by these controversies, Clinton consoled himself with the hope that he would succeed in achieving his major goal of 1993: securing legislation reforming America’s jerry-built system of health insurance coverage. “If I don’t get health care,” he said, “I’ll wish I didn’t run for President.” As he emphasized in calling for reform, private expenditures for health purposes were continuing to skyrocket—from $246 billion in 1980 to $880 billion in 1993.
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Yet more than 35 million Americans—around 14 percent of the population—had no medical insurance, either private or governmental, and another 20 million were said to lack adequate coverage. Most of these people were poor or unemployed. Their plight graphically exposed the persistence of poverty and inequality in the world’s richest nation.

In selecting health insurance reform as his major objective, Clinton surprised many solons on the Hill, who had expected him instead to overhaul the welfare system. After all, he had pledged during the campaign to reform welfare, and in February 1993 he proclaimed that America must “end welfare as we know it,” so that it will “cease to be a way of life.” New York senator Daniel Moynihan, a liberal, was eager to undertake revision of welfare and denied that the country faced a “health care crisis.” Most Americans, he said, had fairly decent coverage. The president ignored Moynihan’s appeals. In choosing the health issue, Clinton was sailing on a more liberal tack than he had seemed to steer in 1992, when he had campaigned as a centrist “New Democrat.”
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Reform of health care insurance, moreover, was a daunting project that had frustrated previous presidents dating back to Harry Truman. Still, he pressed ahead, entrusting development of a plan to a team headed by his wife and an old friend, Ira Magaziner.

Unfortunately for advocates of reform, Magaziner and Mrs. Clinton enshrouded their activities in secrecy. They virtually ignored Congress, including moderate Republicans, as well as the Department of Health and Human Services, where such a proposal might otherwise have gestated. They listened instead to a host of academics and other “experts,” sometimes in gatherings of 100 or more people who wrangled far into the night. When a plan finally emerged from this laborious process in September, it was bulky beyond belief—1,342 pages long.
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Liberals were upset that Clinton, perhaps fearing political repercussions in 1996 if he called for tax increases to support a governmentally financed plan, did not recommend a “single-payer” system such as the one in Canada. Rather, the plan required most employers to pay for 80 percent of their workers’ health benefits. The key to this system would be regional insurance-purchasing alliances that were expected to promote “managed competition” among private health insurers, thereby lowering premiums. The government was to pay for the uninsured, ensuring universal coverage.
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Most liberals agreed that the plan, though complicated, promised to reduce economic inequality in the United States. Some large employers, too, backed it, in the hope that it would reduce the cost of their health care benefits for their workers. From the start, however, the proposal ran into sharp opposition from interest groups, notably from small insurers, who feared that larger companies would squeeze them out of the action, and from many small employers, who bridled at being told to pay for 80 percent of their workers’ health premiums. Aroused, they spent millions of dollars on television ads denouncing the plan. On Capitol Hill, Gingrich aroused his forces to fight the effort. The Clintons, he said, “were going against the entire tide of Western history. I mean centralized, command bureaucracies are dying. This is the end of that era, not the beginning of it.”
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Foes such as these seriously damaged chances for reform, as did Clinton when he refused to consider compromises that would have settled for less than universal coverage. In 1994, when congressional committees began to consider his plans, the opposing interest groups mobilized effectively. As Moynihan had warned, moreover, it was not only “selfish interest groups” that were cool to Clinton’s plans: The majority of Americans (those with health insurance) seemed mostly content with their fee-for-service arrangements and exerted little pressure for the erection of a new and complicated system. So it was that Clinton’s most ambitious dream never even reached a vote on the floor of the Democratic Congress. It finally collapsed in August 1994. Badly beaten, the president was forced to drop the issue, leaving millions of Americans without coverage and millions more dependent on the will or the capacity of employers to provide for them.