Bill Clinton Goes Right Toward Consensus
Little Rock, Arkansas By early evening on the first day, newspaper reporters had filed their stories and gone to dinner, but Bill Clinton was still at the conference table, talking and taking notes. The president-elect listened intently as Albert Shanker of the American Federation of Teachers explained why children in Europe have higher test scores. A captive audience of important CEOs sat stiff backed and benumbed, while some leading political figures fidgeted sullenly, bit players in another politician’s seemingly endless photo op.
On the first day of his pre-inaugural economic conference, Clinton presided over eleven hours of high-minded discourse. On the second, he canceled the luncheon for more talk. Altogether, he and his partner, Vice President-elect Al Gore, presided over nineteen hours of sober dialogue — listening, lecturing, prodding and congratulating conferees on their insights. Afterward, exhausted participants wondered: Good grief, is this what the next four years are going to be like?
Probably. Bill Clinton will be the talking president — both teacher and student, as well as earnest moderator in search of “consensus.” If the summit sometimes took on the cloyingly wholesome air of a student-council meeting, its content was as challenging as a graduate-school seminar. Clinton’s grasp of government and economics (not to mention his extemporaneous verbal skills) is awesome; he’s more confident and zestful than any leader since Lyndon Johnson.
The PR benefits were obvious — a message to the nation via C-SPAN and the evening news that the new president was on the case. But the exercise was more serious — and revealing — than just another photo op. A child of the Sixties, Clinton began his presidency early by conducting a grand national teach-in. “I want my administration to celebrate ideas from the first day to last,” he declared, “and I want and need your ideas.”
As a teach-in, it taught us a lot about him. At some moments, Clinton gently argued against his own case, trying to provoke a livelier back and forth among the conferees. At other times, he plunged past generalities into fine print — instructing the nation on the immunization crisis or Taiwan’s diminishing trade surplus. “And let me complicate this one step further by making sure everybody knows this,” he said before deftly recounting the history of Social Security taxes.
In a modest way, the teach-in also gave us a new picture of ourselves. Though corporate leaders and academic policy fighters dominated the table, their impact was leavened by community leaders and citizen advocates of various hues. About forty percent of the 329 conferees were women and racial minorities. “There was a certain magic to the diversity of this conference,” Gore said afterward. “That didn’t happen by accident. We worked at it.”
But the summit also suggested the division of labor that may play out in this administration — “diversity” with a twist. Liberals and labor will be plentifully represented, allowed to speak for the afflicted and propose various remedies. But the big game will belong to the center right: leaders from business, finance and academia who argue for a more painful approach to economic problems. At the end of the talkfest, one dispirited participant said, “Liberals are going to get projects. Conservatives are going to get the economy.”
That reality is clearly reflected in Clinton’s appointments. To manage the economy, he picked folks mostly from the business wing of the Democratic party. Robert Rubin, cochairman of Goldman, Sachs and one of Wall Street’s most successful Eighties titans, will coordinate the debate as Clinton’s White House economic adviser. Treasury will be run by Lloyd Bentsen, a skillful advocate for business as chairman of the Senate Finance Committee. The deputy treasury secretary is Roger Altman, another Wall Streeter. To run the Office of Management and Budget, Clinton chose two deficit hawks: Representative Leon Panetta and Alice Rivlin of the Brookings Institution. His chief of staff is an old boyhood friend, Mack McLarty, CEO of a Fortune 500 natural-gas company.
The only exception — and it’s minor — is Laura D’Andrea Tyson, the Berkeley professor who will chair the Council of Economic Advisors. Harvard liberal Robert Reich will be operating in a post — secretary of labor — that is a long, long way from the inside action at the White House. Other voices will doubtless be heard, and the internal arguments are sure to be rich and contentious. But conservatives have secured the front-row seats.
Still, as the summit amply demonstrated, Clinton at least does his own thinking. He is a new kind of leader, or at least very different from his immediate predecessors. He needs neither policy instruction nor constant handling from his close advisers; he thrives instead on provoking arguments among them. Perhaps the most important debate in the Clinton years will be the one going on inside his own head.
Clinton’s conservative tendencies were also evident in the exasperation he expressed after listening to a stream of liberal economists detail the weaknesses in the economy and suggest $30 billion to $60 billion in stimulative spending. The president-elect didn’t say they were wrong. But he did keep changing the subject.
“We’re all talking about this stimulus package … as if the whole future of the republic depended on it,” he said. Later he described the impact of pump priming as “peanuts” compared with the stimulus that might be derived from other actions — easing bank regulation or reducing burdensome health-care costs on domestic manufacturers.
Clinton’s dilemma is, which comes first, the deficit or growth? A new president doesn’t have unlimited time or political capital. Elaine Kamarck of the Progressive Policy Institute reminded him that a new administration typically has a honeymoon of six months or so in which to sell its basic program. Therefore, she urged, Clinton should do the hard part first: Reduce the deficit by cutting entitlements, raising taxes and adopting other unpopular measures.
“Every single one of them is a political nightmare that you will have to get through to make honest-to-goodness, long-term deficit reduction,” Kamarck warned. “Spending money, on the other hand, is an easy thing to do. We Democrats do it quite well. We do it quite often.”
Panetta, the new budget director, seconded the warning: “If you do the stimulus first, you may not get to deficit reduction. Congress loves to pass the sugar, but it hates to deal with the vinegar.”
The starkness of their comments energized Clinton, who seemed to relish the dimensions of his own bind. “If Elaine is right, and I think she is, then we’ve got six months to deal with health-care reform if we’re going to get it done,” he said. “It’s ridiculous.”
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