Hillary's Unprecedented Greed; Bush, the Clinton of the Right
Next month sees the 50th anniversary of the ratification of the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which limits presidents to two terms. After a half-century in force, through the administrations of 11 presidents, it has been of only hypothetical use?until now. Of those presidents who managed to get elected twice, Richard Nixon was bounced from office, and Eisenhower and Reagan were too aged and sickly to contemplate running a third time. In Bill Clinton, still a youngish 54, we had our first plausible three-termer since FDR. More than plausible?if not for the 22nd Amendment, Bill Clinton would now be serving the first days of his ninth year in office.
Which, it turns out, they were. Since November, California supporter of the Clintons?Rita Pynoos is the name?has been hounding various Democratic donors into paying $5000 apiece into the equivalent of a wedding registry, allegedly at Borsheim's Fine Jewelry and Gifts in Nebraska. Note how many of the gifts fall just below a $5000 increment: $9683 for the china cabinet and humidor from Lewinsky patron Walter Kaye; $4920 for the china from Steven Spielberg, $4992 for the china from financier Iris Cantor. (That's leaving aside the $7375 in coffee tables Hillary received from pardoned tax evader Marc Rich's ex-wife.) What's more, the donors were told to hurry up, since Hillary would fall under the Senate's gift ban once she was sworn in in the first week of January.
De jure, the Clintons' high-end gifts may be indistinguishable from, say, a sampler President Carter was given by the Girl Scouts of America. But, de facto, since they're things Hillary had picked out herself, they constitute a set of laundered bribes.
The Clintons have responded the way they did to every political scandal they faced in the White House: flinging calumnies back at anyone who raises questions about their conduct. The general line involves using the rhetoric of moral equivalence when there's nothing remotely equivalent about the offenses. ("Yeah, I supported Stalin, but you supported McCarthy, so, y'see, there's guilt on both sides.") So it's noted that Ronald Reagan's supporters bought him a $2.5 million ranch in Bel Air?as if it were a matter of no importance that Hillary is going to be serving in the Senate, subject to the same gift ban as all her colleagues.
This is nickel-and-dime stuff by comparison, the Clintonites seem to claim, much as they did during Whitewater. But the Reagan parallel raises a point that has not been much explored: Why didn't Bill accept the gifts after leaving office? (After all, he's not in the Senate?not yet.) One possibility is that he feared he would lack the compliance-inducing clout to solicit them. The second possibility is that the stuff is all going into Hillary's house?and that he's not going to be living there. Ever.
The trashing of White House offices and the Old Executive Office building brought the phony-moral-equivalency rhetoric to a new pitch. "High-spirited" Clintonites took part in what were invariably described as "hijinks" or "pranks," including gluing file cabinets shut, breaking keyboards, and cutting the wires on the phone system. If you broke into your high school and did it, you'd be sent to reform school?and one certainly doesn't remember this level of tolerance for high spirits during the Clinton administration's investigation of the Tailhook incident. But the indignant Clintstones complained that staffers from the Bush administration had also committed pranks: Namely, some of them had left Bush-Quayle stickers on their desks. "? So, y'see, there's guilt on both sides."
The vandalism and looting with which the Clintons finished out their days in Washington resolve a lot of issues on which opinions had differed widely. Chief among these is Clinton's legacy. Anytime Clinton said anything remotely thoughtful about race or Medicare or democratization, the Washington press corps would whisper reverently, like color commentators during a golf putt, "He's working on his legacy now ..." At this point, Clinton's attitude toward his legacy can be summed up as: "Legacy, schmegacy."
But an even more intriguing question concerns the Clintons' psychological state. Everyone is looking for a metaphor to explain the strange "return of the repressed," as Freud would call it, that saw the Clintons revert to a brazen insouciance about concealing their corruption that Americans hadn't seen since the first 18 months of their administration. What had happened to the Clintons? Were they merely saying "Fuck you" to their foes? Or was there some more primal release at work? Maybe they really wanted to act dignified and statesmanlike until the end of their term but found, like a boy who sprints to the nearest public restroom and arrives in time but finds it locked, that they just couldn't hold off nature any longer. Or maybe it was like the last day of a two-week vacation, when you realize you have to pack and arrange your ride to the airport, and that leads to thoughts of calling the office to let them know you'll be in in the morning, and you suddenly realize that you may be in Puerto Rico or London or wherever, but your time in the sun is over.
Bill Fold
George W. Bush had a successful first week. Now that Alan Greenspan has endorsed his tax cuts and Georgia Democrat Zell Miller has agreed to cosponsor them in the Senate, Bush is in a position to deliver on his most popular (although the press won't tell you this) campaign promise.
But Bush's success in other areas is to be deplored: his left-wing education plan, for instance, which he spent the week focusing on. Democrats ought to vote for this thing unanimously. It vastly expands the federal role in education, and pours billions into the very Title I programs that policy analysts have proven to be feel-good failures. It does have a $1500-per-student voucher program?the centerpiece of Bush's campaign education platform. It's anathema to Democrats like Sen. Joe Lieberman, who said: "He's got a lot of good stuff in his education-reform package. Does he want to sacrifice it all because he won't take out his voucher program?" So no sooner had Bush proposed it than his spokesmen announced that he'd probably have to compromise on it, and it wouldn't be in the final plan.
Bush has two options?or had two options, until he let the cat out of the bag: (1) Use the voucher plan to pass the whole education package with a mostly Republican bipartisan coalition. Or (2) Scrap vouchers, and hope Republicans will be moved by partisan loyalty to join a near-unanimous Democratic delegation delighted with a left-wing bill. That Bush chose the cowardly latter option is one more indication that he seeks to rule as the Clinton of the Right.
Meanwhile, one begins to suspect there's something very locked-in-1990 about Colin Powell, who's been talking with the Chinese of late. His spokesman Richard Boucher says Powell told Chinese ambassador Li Zhaoxing that "China needed to be ?exposed to the powerful forces of free-enterprise systems and democracy." This is in the interest of showing ourselves to be China's friend. But what kind of friend insists that you be exposed to his "powerful forces"? Answer: a very naive one.
Bushies tend to think that imposing capitalism on foreigners is no imposition at all; it's like "imposing" money on someone, or "imposing" enough to eat on a starving man. They're right, to a degree. But what the Chinese understand and Bushies don't is that capitalism (or market liberalism) is an ideology. It's a full-blown system of social organization, involving individualism, free speech, free movement of capital, breakdown of traditional hierarchies and much more. If Powell had opened a newspaper anytime since Tiananmen Square crackdown, he'd realize that that's just what the Chinese hate about it.