A Patriot's History of the United States: From Columbus's Great Discovery to the War on Terror (159 page)

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.”
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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.”
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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?”
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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.

Where Elders was merely incompetent, many other appointees surpassed Grant’s or Harding’s cabinet in their corruption or outright criminal behavior. Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Henry Cisneros was forced to resign after a sexual harassment suit; associate attorney general Webster Hubbell was indicted in the Whitewater investigation; Secretary of Agriculture Mike Espy was investigated for illicit connections to Arkansas-based Tyson Foods; and an independent prosecutor examined Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt for illegal dealings with Indian tribes. Virtually all the investigations in some respect dealt with money, graft, and bribery, making a mockery of the Clinton campaign promise to appoint the “most ethical administration in history.” It was an ironic turn, given Clinton’s repeated claims that the Reagan era was a “decade of greed.” Only the investment banker Robert Rubin, who handled Treasury, seemed remotely suited to the task.

At first, Clinton’s choices for these departments seemed to reflect only his lack of executive experience, but events soon unfolded that made the placement of key individuals look suspiciously like Nixon-esque attempts to stack the system at critical positions with people who would either bend or break the law on the Clintons’ behalf. Webster Hubbell and Vincent Foster, for example, who were law partners with Hillary at the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, were brought into the Justice Department, where they could effectively block or derail investigations into the administration. Attorney General Janet Reno had to defer to Associate Attorney General Hubble on many occasions. In a shocking break with tradition, Clinton, immediately upon taking office, fired all 93 U.S. attorneys throughout the country, thereby nipping any federal investigations of him in the bud.

FBI background checks on White House personnel were also curtailed, apparently for what they might reveal about the appointees. All this only reinforced the suspicion that a number of individuals of questionable character worked in the administration, but it also proved dangerous, facilitating the attendance at White House functions of criminals such as drug-runner Jorge Cabrera. Among the other guests at Clinton functions was Wang Jun, an arms dealer who supplied Los Angeles street gangs with automatic weapons; international fugitive Marc Rich; and a steady stream of foreigners whose visits were arranged by John Huang, an indicted Arkansas restaurateur. According to the foreign visitors, they were explicitly told that they could influence the government of the United States by Huang, who himself visited the White House more often than members of Clinton’s cabinet—always, he later testified, to arrange fund-raising with foreign nationals.

Clinton’s disapproval numbers in public polls rose sharply, and surveys showed that people were increasingly convinced the government itself was getting out of hand. For the first time since before the New Deal, Americans started to become concerned about the dark side of programs deemed beneficial by the federal government.

Sex, Lies, and Monicagate

Whatever dissatisfaction the public had with government in general, nothing could hide the continued revelations about unethical and illegal activities by Clinton, his wife, or members of the cabinet. In particular, the Clintons’ involvement in the bankrupt Whitewater Development Company in Arkansas and its domino effect in bankrupting the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan forced a three-judge panel in 1994 to name an independent prosecutor, Robert Fiske, to investigate the Clintons’ actions. No sooner had Fiske been appointed than the Clinton spin machine (the administration’s media managers) initiated a campaign that would typify the Clintons’ response to any charges. In 1994, a strategy of demonizing the messenger, which was first used on Fiske, would be finely honed for subsequent, and more effective, attacks on Fiske’s successor, Judge Kenneth Starr. Starr had an impeccable reputation, but he soon found himself under daily attack by Clinton associate James Carville, who announced he would start his own investigation of Starr!

The special prosecutor’s job was to investigate conflict of interest charges against the Clintons related to the Whitewater Development Company in Arkansas and promoter James McDougal. McDougal also ran the Madison Guaranty Savings & Loan, which had failed in 1989, but by 1993 evidence had surfaced that Madison funds had gone into Whitewater. Further evidence revealed that the Clintons received preferential treatment in the form of waived fees and had had their share of the down payment in the investments put up by McDougal or others. Billing records with Hillary’s name on them surfaced, indicating that she had done substantial work on Whitewater while at the Rose Law Firm, and thus knew exactly where the money had gone, even though she later told a Senate committee that while she had signed the sheets, she had not done the actual work.

Yet the more one pulled on the Whitewater string, the more the fabric seemed to unravel. First there was “Travelgate,” in which Hillary dismissed the employees of the White House travel office (a nonpartisan group) in order to replace them with the travel firm of her friends (and high-powered Hollywood producers) Harry and Susan Thomason. Still, there had been no illegality. What turned a presidential preference into an ethical and legal violation was that Mrs. Clinton, to provide a public relations cover for firing so many loyal employees in such a callous fashion, ordered an FBI investigation of Billy Dale, head of the travel office. A midlevel civil servant who had done nothing but hold a job that Hillary had coveted for her friends, suddenly found himself having to secure lawyers to defend against charges of corruption. Dale was acquitted of all charges, but he was nearly bankrupted.