Restless Giant: The United States From Watergate to Bush v. Gore (59 page)

By then, more and more Americans seemed to share this positive view. While worrying that their children would be worse off than they were, they told pollsters that they were content with their personal lives in the present.
⁶⁹
Michigan’s Survey Research Center reported in 1998 that Americans had more confidence in the economy than at any time since 1952. Greenspan added a few months later that the combination of strong economic growth, low unemployment, and price stability was “as impressive [a performance] as any I have witnessed in my near half-century of daily observation of the American economy.”
⁷⁰

T
HE SURGING ECONOMY
had significant political ramifications. Until 1998, when scandal imperiled his presidency, it helped Clinton, a charmer, to lead a happier political life. Blessed with the good fortune to preside over an era of rising prosperity, he was able to climb out of the political hole into which he had fallen in late 1994.

Having suffered large losses to Republicans in the elections of that year, however, the president had to remain cautiously on the defensive in early 1995. Some of his troubles at the time emanated from the Supreme Court, which under Chief Justice Rehnquist started to take bolder conservative positions. Three five-to-four decisions in 1995 especially worried liberals. One,
Missouri v. Jenkins
, was the latest of several High Court rulings in the 1990s that placed the future of school desegregation plans in serious doubt.
⁷¹
A second,
Adarand Constructors Inc. v. Pena
, called for state and federal courts to give “strict scrutiny” to “all racial classifications,” such as those that facilitated set-asides for minority contractors.
⁷²

The third decision,
United States v. Lopez
, overturned a congressional statute, the Gun-Free School Zones Act of 1990, that had made it a federal offense to bring guns into a school zone. Rehnquist ruled that gun controls of this sort were matters for the states, not the federal government, to determine. The decision, limiting the reach of the commerce clause of the Constitution, suggested that conservatives on the Court were deadly serious about shoring up federalism—states’ rights—in the United States.
⁷³
For the remainder of his term in office, Clinton waited in vain for one or more of the more conservative justices—Rehnquist, Clarence Thomas, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, Anthony Kennedy—to retire from the bench.

Clinton had to worry most urgently in early 1995 about conservatives on the Hill. Gingrich, ascending to the post of Speaker of the House, ignored seniority rules so as to engineer the selection of key committee chairmen who were loyal to him. He forced through changes in party rules that concentrated power in his circle of leaders.
⁷⁴
So fortified, he led Republicans to minor victories in the lower chamber, which quickly approved a few of the goals enumerated in the Contract with America. (Not surprisingly, his colleagues rejected term limits.) Though the more moderate Republican majority in the Senate did not follow Gingrich’s lead, it was clear that conservatives were eager to approve cuts in taxes and social programs. Republican senators were also refusing to bring to the floor many of Clinton’s judicial nominees.
⁷⁵
Congressional Democrats, whose political center of gravity had shifted to the left following the defeat of a number of moderate and conservative party members in 1994, angrily resisted. On the Hill, the two parties had never been farther apart. With partisanship deadlocking Congress, Clinton seemed to be losing his way. In April 1995, his job performance rating slipped to a low of 39 percent. Attempting to refute a popular sense that what he did no longer made much difference, Clinton declared plaintively on April 18 that he was not superfluous, because “the Constitution makes me relevant.”
⁷⁶

The next day, April 19, a truck bomb fashioned by Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols succeeded in blowing up the federal building in Oklahoma City and in killing 168 people. Clinton flew to Oklahoma and delivered a moving address at a memorial service, thereby boosting his political standing. He then staged a political comeback, masterminded by Dick Morris, based on “triangulation.” This was a strategy—dictated by careful attention to public opinion polls—that enabled him to position himself as a sensible, moderate alternative at the apex of a triangle whose other two bases were liberal and conservative. In June, Clinton surprised (and distressed) many liberal Democrats in Congress by calling for a middle-class tax cut and a balanced budget within ten years.

Clinton paid special attention to issues involving cultural values. Appealing to the broad middle of American opinion, he lamented the escalation of violence on television shows (without seeking greater regulation that might have antagonized liberal Hollywood friends). In calling for a study of the role of religion in the schools, he headed off Republican moves for a constitutional amendment permitting prayer in the public schools. He reiterated his support of tough police responses against crime and of campaigns to reduce smoking among teenagers. In July, he strengthened his standing among liberals and minority groups—notably among potential political challengers such as Jesse Jackson—by speaking of his continuing determination to combat racial discrimination in employment. At the same time, however, Clinton reassured foes on the right by opposing racial quotas. “Mend it,” he said of affirmative action, “but don’t end it.” Polls showed that his position satisfied a majority of whites as well as blacks. For the time being, angry debates over affirmative action subsided a little.
⁷⁷

D
URING THESE POLITICALLY TENSE SUMMER MONTHS
of 1995, Clinton tried to reestablish diplomatic relations with Vietnam. Though his initiative aroused heated controversy, it succeeded in July after senatorial veterans of the war—John Kerry of Massachusetts, John McCain of Arizona, Robert Kerrey of Nebraska—aided him politically by stating that Vietnam was not hiding POWs.

Debates over the recognition of Vietnam, however, paled in seriousness compared to political controversies over the fighting and ethnic cleansing, ferociously conducted by Bosnian Serbs, that continued in 1994 and 1995 to ravage Croatia and Bosnia. Clinton, carefully studying public opinion polls, still recognized that most Americans (like NATO allies) remained nervous indeed about being swept into the carnage. The United Nations, equally cautious, had agreed only to keep their weakly supported force of 6,000 peacekeepers in Bosnia and (as of late 1994) to authorize minor air strikes by NATO planes. These were pinpricks that in no way deterred the Bosnian Serbs. In July 1995, the Serbs forced some 25,000 women and children to flee chaotically from the town of Srebrenica, a “safe area” in eastern Bosnia that sheltered 40,000 Muslim refugees who were supposedly being protected by the U.N. peacekeepers. The Bosnian Serbs then murdered between 7,000 and 7,500 Muslim men and boys.

This barbaric act coincided with major developments on the military front. A Croatian army, having been trained in part by the United States, joined uneasily with Muslim military forces and waged a devastating offensive that soon drove the Bosnian Serbs out of Croatia and northwestern Bosnia. President Milosevic of Serbia, who once had dreamed of controlling sizeable chunks of Croatia and Bosnia, watched glumly as thousands of Serbs fled toward Belgrade.
⁷⁸

These dramatic events spurred new approaches to the situation in the region. The massacre at Srebrenica appalled many Americans, including members of Congress who had long urged the United States to take a tougher stance against the Serbs. The impressive Croat-Muslim offensive, they insisted, indicated that forceful NATO engagement would finally win the war. Dick Morris, appearing again as a guru at the White House, warned the president that continued bloodletting such as that at Srebrenica might soon create irresistible popular pressure for American military intervention. As Clinton pondered his options, the Serbs shelled the marketplace of Sarajevo, killing thirty-eight civilians. This attack on August 28 induced the president to act. Two days later he authorized American participation in massive NATO air strikes against Bosnian Serb positions around Sarajevo.

Many Americans opposed this move, perceiving it as meddling in a faraway civil war. But seventeen days of more extensive bombing smashed Serbian positions. Together with the continuation of aggressive fighting by Croatian and Muslim ground forces, the bombing forced Milosevic to negotiate. In November, he met for three weeks with European and American representatives and with Croatian and Bosnian Muslim leaders for talks at an American airbase in Dayton, Ohio. These discussions confirmed an uneasy cease-fire and produced a settlement. Under the Dayton Peace Accords, brokered by Assistant Secretary of State Richard Holbrooke, a single state, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina, was created. It was to have a “dual government” in which Muslims and Croats were to share power. Displaced persons were to return to their homes, and an international tribunal was to try alleged war criminals. An international authority was to oversee the area. The United States agreed to send 20,000 troops to the region as part of a force of 60,000 NATO soldiers who would uphold the accords.

Because these troops, heavily armed, were expected to succeed in maintaining order, and because Clinton indicated that the American soldiers would leave within a year, most Americans seemed to acquiesce in this considerable expansion of United States military presence abroad. As Morris and others had hoped, savage fighting in Bosnia largely ceased, and the issue of American engagement did not play an important role in the forthcoming presidential election. More important, the forceful military intervention of the United States, aided by its NATO allies, was a turning point of sorts in the post–Cold War history of American foreign policies. It signified that when the world’s number one military power decided to use its awesome might as part of efforts to stamp out killing in Europe, fighting was likely to stop. It also suggested that the end of the Cold War would not enable the United States to retreat back across the Atlantic: Its international responsibilities as a military giant might be difficult in the future to limit.

Still, it had taken the United States and NATO four years to stop the murder and ethnic cleansing that had torn up the region. Until August 1995, Milosevic and his Bosnian Serb allies had been permitted to wage genocidal war on his enemies. The Dayton Accords, moreover, allowed the Bosnian Serbs to have their own state, Republika Srpska, in northern and eastern Bosnia. Their aggression had paid dividends. Muslims, disillusioned, nursed grievances against the United States and its European allies, and longed for revenge against the Serbs. As of 2005, European troops were still on the ground in Bosnia, where they were likely to remain for the foreseeable future.
⁷⁹

R
ELIEVED, THE PRESIDENT THEN FOCUSED
on reaching agreement over a very contentious domestic issue: the budget for 1996. Congressional Republicans, however, refused to compromise. When they presented him in mid-November with two resolutions that among other things eliminated a scheduled drop in Medicare premiums, Clinton boldly vetoed the resolutions. At that time, the fiscal year having ended on October 1, an earlier continuing resolution was all that was enabling the government temporarily to meet a number of obligations for the new fiscal year. Clinton’s vetoes thereby forced a partial shutdown of the government. Acrimonious negotiations ended the shutdown after six days, but the GOP then approved a conservative budget that proposed generous tax cuts for the wealthy and that called for reduced spending on social programs such as food stamps and Medicare. Its budget also sought to move welfare and Medicaid to state control. Gingrich proclaimed: “This is the largest domestic decision we have made since 1933. . . . This is a fundamental change in the direction of government.”
⁸⁰

Clinton, assured by Morris that the American people opposed cuts in social programs, vetoed the GOP’s budget on December 6, and on December 16, the government partially shut down again, this time for twenty-one days. Some 800,000 federal employees went without scheduled paychecks; national parks closed. Finally, the Republicans blinked, agreeing in January 1996 to fund departments and agencies that lacked money for the current fiscal year. They accepted Clinton’s budgetary calculations, which proposed to end deficits in seven years. The partisan battle—one of the fiercest in memory—finally abated, and normal government operations resumed.
⁸¹