Clinton's defense team prepares a tortured legalistic argument that may help him escape legal jeopardy, but it will only make impeachment all the more likely.
As the White House braces for a sweeping report to Congress on the Monica Lewinsky affair by independent counsel Kenneth Starr, President Clinton is preparing a narrow, legalistic defense that ultimately may only weaken him further in the ultimate court of public opinion, legal experts and others familiar with this strategy have told Salon.
After four years of investigating Whitewater, Travelgate, Filegate, the suicide of Vince Foster and the Lewinsky affair, Starr is now expected to submit to Congress a detailed report sometime later this month. The White House is anticipating a highly partisan report that will include evidence that Clinton committed a variety of crimes, including perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power. Clinton’s advisors clearly hope Starr’s report will focus primarily on the Lewinsky affair, but there have been mixed signals from Starr’s camp on whether that will be the case.
“What this case is about is sex,” one senior White House advisor argues. “Of course, Starr will try to prove that it’s more than sex, that it’s about obstruction, perjury and God knows what else. But this is not a legal case. This is about two people who had consensual sex. Now, that in itself is not very appropriate, but it’s not illegal. There’s nothing here that’s impeachable.”
As David Kendall, the president’s lawyer, gathers information for a rebuttal that might be presented as an answer to Starr’s report, Clinton’s legal and senior political advisors are confident they can knock down whatever evidence Starr produces about Clinton’s alleged crimes. As a sign of their willingness to fight, the president’s men have reconstituted the legendary “War Room,” where Clinton’s campaign and policy teams responded quickly to crises and criticism. The White House is also considering the hiring of new staffers to bolster the president’s defense team.
On the expected evidence of perjury, Clinton’s advisors are sticking to the line that despite his Aug. 17 admission of having had an “inappropriate” relationship with Lewinsky, the president’s insistence that they had no “sexual relationship” is still, as the president phrased it, “legally accurate.” With regard to Starr’s efforts to prove obstruction of justice, Salon has learned that Kendall has devised a new, if questionable, timeline to show that Lewinsky returned the gifts she had received from Clinton before the gifts were subpoenaed by Paula Jones’ attorneys. And on the issue of abuse of power, the president’s legal team snorts at the notion that Clinton’s use of White House lawyers to fight Starr’s subpoenas constituted a crime.
But legal experts, including lawyers familiar with the president’s strategy, say his defense plan is far too dependent on legalisms and linguistic hair-splitting to protect Clinton from possible impeachment. They note that once Starr submits his report to the House Judiciary Committee, the Lewinsky affair becomes a legal and political hybrid. Which is to say that what might work for Clinton in a court of law may not work before Congress, where members will be responding as much to public disgust with Clinton’s admitted behavior as they will to the law.
“His defenses to all of these charges seem to be very legalistic,” says Michael Zeldin, a former independent counsel who has frequently spoken in defense of the president on television talk shows. “They’re not based on innocence so much as they are on nuance and parsing of language.
“In the court of public opinion, that’s very bad for Clinton because now that he’s admitted to being a liar, it’s harder for him to ask for people to bear with him on these other explanations, which are highly legalistic to begin with,” Zeldin told Salon. “He seems to be ignoring the reality that once you’ve lied about one thing, there’s almost a presumption that you’re lying about something else.”
Starr’s office has given no indication of what kind of evidence will be included in his report, but among White House officials, the president’s legal advisors and independent legal experts, it is widely believed that the report will focus on three major criminal areas: perjury, obstruction of justice and abuse of power.
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On the question of perjury, Clinton’s legal advisers are assuming Starr will argue in his report that the relationship between Clinton and Lewinsky meets the definition of sex set forth by Judge Susan Webber Wright during Clinton’s Jan. 17 deposition for the Paula Jones sexual misconduct trial. That definition included “contact with genitalia, anus, groin, breast, inner thigh or buttocks of any person with the intent to arouse or gratify the sexual desire of any person.” Recent news reports say Lewinsky provided Starr with the details of at least six encounters with the president that meet Judge Wright’s definition of sex. In the now-dismissed Jones civil case, Clinton denied under oath that he had a sexual relationship with Lewinsky, and therefore Starr is expected to claim that the president perjured himself.
Legal experts say Clinton’s insistence that his denial was “legally accurate” is based on an extremely narrow reading of Judge Wright’s definition of sex. Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor at George Washington University and another commentator who has been sympathetic to the president, notes that Clinton’s perjury defense centers on his claimed passivity during his sexual encounters with Lewinsky.
“According to Judge Wright’s definition of sex, Clinton had to have engaged or caused contact with Lewinsky’s private parts — in other words, he had to be active,” Rosen says. “Clinton’s defense is essentially that she gave him oral sex, which means he was passive.” Rosen also notes that if Starr produces evidence confirming reports that Clinton masturbated while Lewinsky stimulated herself in front of him with a cigar, the president again could argue he was passive.
“If it’s true that Clinton had the amazing self-restraint and legalistic discipline to spend the entire time masturbating, then maybe he’s in the clear,” Rosen says, his voice laden with skepticism. “But it seems very implausible. All Starr has to show is that Monica claimed that he touched her private parts, and that defense collapses. Politically, the perjury stuff is going to be really embarrassing. I don’t know if it would make sense to put all their eggs in that particular basket.”
A better defense, Rosen says, would be for Clinton’s lawyers to argue that lying under oath about sex in civil cases is the sort of thing that prosecutors ordinarily don’t pursue. “That’s a good argument,” he says. “That’s a better argument than ‘All I did was jack off.’” But even with this defense, Clinton would be in trouble politically. Asked on ABC’s “This Week” if presidential perjury in a civil case were an impeachable offense, Sen. Daniel Moynihan minced no words. “Yes,” the Democratic senator replied. The same was true, Moynihan added, if Starr produced evidence showing Clinton perjured himself during his Aug. 17 grand jury testimony.
Clinton’s next big worry is evidence pointing to obstruction of justice, another impeachable offense. Clinton’s legal advisers expect Starr’s report to focus on the president’s alleged efforts to retrieve a book of poems, a pin and other gifts he gave to Lewinsky and to conceal them from Jones’ attorneys, who had subpoenaed them.
“The president will have to come up with an innocent explanation why he would want a potential witness to return all gifts to the White House,” says Jonathan Turley, a law professor at George Washington University who has been highly critical of the president’s legal strategy. “Most people are not in the habit of calling around and collecting last year’s fruit cakes.”
Turley adds that Clinton’s confession to having had an “inappropriate” relationship with Lewinsky, which he then admittedly tried to cover up for seven months, will both strengthen Starr’s efforts to demonstrate obstruction and make any impeachment proceedings on that charge that much easier for Congress. “It is easier to make an obstruction or subornation case if you have an admission and therefore the basis for a criminal act,” Turley notes. “It gives motive and criminal context for the other theories of obstruction and subornation.”
In developing their response to the expected obstruction evidence, the president’s lawyers have built upon a major discrepancy about the return of the gifts reported between the grand jury testimony from Lewinsky and that of Betty Currie, the president’s personal secretary. Currie has reportedly testified that Lewinsky called her and asked her to come by Lewinsky’s Watergate apartment to retrieve a package. Lewinsky has reportedly told Starr’s investigators that Currie appeared uninvited at her apartment to collect the gifts after Lewinsky and Clinton had discussed the subpoena Lewinsky had received from Jones’ lawyers. In that conversation, it has been widely reported, Clinton told Lewinsky words to the effect of “You don’t have to turn over anything you don’t have.”
While acknowledging that Clinton and Lewinsky discussed the subpoena for the gifts, the president’s legal advisers flatly deny that Clinton ever made any such suggestion to her. Clinton’s lawyers plan to argue that the president, who gives gifts to many people, never regarded the mementos he gave Lewinsky as proof of an illicit relationship that needed to remain hidden, legal advisers told Salon. To strengthen this argument, Clinton’s lawyers will claim that even after the gifts were subpoenaed, Clinton gave Lewinsky other presents.
The president’s lawyers also will claim that Clinton did not know that Lewinsky turned over the gifts to Currie until he read about it in the newspaper. Clinton also will claim that he never gave Currie instructions to collect the gifts from Lewinsky or coached her on what to say to Starr’s grand jury. As further proof of Clinton’s honorable intentions, his lawyers will point out that once the gifts were subpoenaed, they were never destroyed, these advisers say.
Moreover, Salon has learned, Clinton lawyers are now preparing to argue that Lewinsky, on her own, returned the gifts to the president’s secretary before Lewinsky even received the subpoena for the gifts from Jones’ attorneys on Dec. 19 last year.
“My understanding is that Monica called Betty up out of the blue and asked if she could keep some things for her, and Betty agreed to do so,” a lawyer familiar with the president’s defense strategy told Salon. “Betty stops by Monica’s on her way home from work. Monica comes down with a gift box, on the outside of which is written, ‘Do not destroy,’ or something like that.”
The lawyer stressed this happened before Dec. 15, because on that day Currie received the news that her brother had been killed in an accident and took leave from work until after Christmas.
Resuming his account of Lewinsky’s hand-over of the gifts to Currie, the lawyer added: “I don’t know what their conversation was, but Betty knows Monica is moving to New York, understands that she’s going to safeguard these things for her, takes it home, puts the box under her bed and doesn’t open it. The box is opened only when it gets subpoenaed. Monica’s lawyers take it and produce everything that’s in the box.”
Asked to explain the discrepancy between this version of events and Lewinsky’s reported account, the lawyer said: “I’m not saying anybody acted in bad faith, but two people can understand a conversation, recall a conversation, differently. I think that’s what may be at work here.” Translation: Clinton’s and Currie’s word against Lewinsky’s.
As much as he’d like to, Zeldin, the former independent counsel, doesn’t buy it. “If his defense to the gifts is that he never intended to obstruct justice, it’s laughable,” he says. “As a prosecutor, I would say, ‘Right, you’ve lied about the relationship, and now you’ve got a motive to cover up that lie. That motive now manifests itself by your having a conversation with the only other person in the world who could possibly disprove the lie that you didn’t have an affair. You’re engaging in a conversation with her, in which you’re posing hypotheticals that deal with the question of whether she has to give over evidence that may corroborate the relationship, and you’re telling us that you didn’t have that intent? Then I would make an exasperated, disbelieving face that the jury can’t miss and I’d sit down. Then I’d let him get up and explain why he’s not lying about this as well. Very difficult.”
Zeldin also terms as “ridiculous” the claim by Clinton’s lawyers that only the destruction of the gifts qualifies as obstruction of justice. And as for the president’s insistence that he never asked anyone to lie, Zeldin recites a piece of advice from Earl Long, the famously elusive governor of Louisiana: “Don’t write anything you can phone; don’t phone anything you can talk face-to-face; don’t talk face-to-face anything you can smile; don’t smile anything you can wink, and don’t wink anything you can nod.”
“It doesn’t happen very often that people write down, ‘Remember to tell Monica Lewinsky and Betty Currie to obstruct justice,’” Zeldin said. “Much more frequently, it’s done with winks and nods. As I try to be neutral and detached, yet as supportive of the president as I can be, I don’t have an easy explanation or even a rationalized answer for how the return of the gifts came to pass,” he said. “But frankly, the president’s defense defies common sense.”
Rosen goes even further. Referring to the claim that Lewinsky returned the gifts before she received her subpoena from Jones’ lawyers, he says: “That makes no sense at all. Regardless of whether Monica contacted Betty Currie, or whether Betty Currie just showed up at Monica’s door, why on earth would Monica have any interest in returning the gifts and saying, ‘Do not Destroy’ before she was served with a subpoena? It’s an absurd story. It’s like the 18-minute gap [in the Nixon Watergate tapes]. No one is going to buy that.”
Legal experts say Clinton’s defense team also may have a hard time convincing Congress that he didn’t abuse the power of his office in fighting Starr’s investigation. Calling the abuse-of-power charge “vaporous,” one of the president’s lawyers told Salon that he cannot see how “defending the White House from overbroad and invasive subpoenas and going to court and legally litigating executive and attorney-client privileges can possibly be an abuse of power.”
It can become abuse of power, however, if Starr can present strong evidence that Clinton perjured himself when he said he never had sexual relations with Lewinsky and then used official resources — White House lawyers, aides and taxpayer money — to interfere with Starr’s investigation, dragging it out for seven months. Once again, legal experts say, Clinton’s admission of an inappropriate relationship with Lewinsky undermines his defense.
“When there is compelling evidence of crimes against a president, those allegations tend to carry collateral charges like abuse of office,” says Turley. “If Clinton can defeat substantive charges of perjury and obstruction, it’s unlikely he will be in serious jeopardy for abuse of power. But if any central charges can be proved, abuse of office charges tend to have more traction. It all depends on the mood in Congress,” which will weigh Starr’s report and decide whether Clinton should be impeached and on what charges.
On Capitol Hill, with midterm elections only nine weeks away, the mood is about as dark as it gets. Last week’s speech on the floor of the Senate by Sen. Joseph Lieberman, in which the Connecticut Democrat flayed Clinton for his “immoral” behavior, prompted other prominent Democrats to publicly distance themselves from Clinton. Maryland’s Democratic Gov. Parris Glendening announced he had canceled a fund-raiser with Clinton on Oct. 2. Moynihan told ABC’s “This Week” that the country should not fear Clinton’s impeachment.
But even amid such angry political currents, Starr’s report and Clinton’s defense still will be viewed through a legal prism. “The judiciary committee, composed of lawyers, will look at this as a threshold matter in legal terms,” says Zeldin. “The question will be: Does the president’s conduct violate the criminal laws of the United States, or is it so close to violating the criminal laws as to corrupt the office of the presidency?”
Desperate Mitt Romney is not only taking credit for the auto bailout he opposed, and pretending to be a “job creator” rather than a Bain Capital job destroyer. Now he’s regularly praising former President Bill Clinton as a centrist whose legacy has been betrayed by the “liberal” President Obama. Actual liberals laugh, but can Romney’s gambit work?
Of course not, but Mitt’s not giving up.
In Lansing, Mich., last week, Romney derided Obama as an “old school liberal” compared to Clinton, whom he called a “new Democrat.” Where Clinton “said the era of big government was over, President Obama brought it back with a vengeance,” Romney told a crowd of college students. A campaign official told CNN that Obama “really turned his back” on Clinton’s policies, including welfare reform and middle-class tax cuts.
Huh? Of course Obama cut taxes for the middle class in the 2009 Recovery Act, which Republicans consistently lie about, and Clinton controversially raised taxes on high earners (Romney would lower them) to cut the deficit in 1993. Meanwhile, Obama has left President Clinton’s welfare reform alone, despite rising rates of poverty and unemployment in the recession.
On Tuesday Romney took his attack up a notch, suggesting that “a personal beef” between the two men accounts for Obama allegedly rejecting Clinton’s centrism.
According to Romney, Clinton understood that “Democrats should no longer try to govern by proposing a new program for every problem. President Obama tucked away the Clinton doctrine in his large drawer of discarded ideas, along with transparency and bipartisanship. It’s enough to make you wonder if maybe it was a personal beef with the Clintons … but really it runs much deeper.”
There he is again, mean ol’ Mitt, trying to hype reports of personal tension between the last two Democratic presidents. It’s silly. Nobody denies there was trouble on the 2008 campaign trail during the Democratic primary, when the former president smarted at Obama camp charges that his overenthusiastic support for his wife’s candidacy, and diminishing of Obama’s, smacked of racism. And today, nobody suggests that the two guys are sneaking off to basketball games together or planning their next joint family trips. But whatever personal strain may persist, they put their problems behind them a long time ago.
Clinton stumped enthusiastically for Obama in 2008, and on behalf of the president and beleaguered Democrats in the 2010 midterms. Who can forget the current president calling on the past president to help him sell the idea of a compromise on the Bush tax cuts (to liberals, by the way) in December 2010 – and then walking away and leaving Clinton by himself at the lectern happily holding forth with the White House press corps (as Obama reportedly went off and did some Christmas shopping)? Currently Clinton is, of course, working hard to help Obama beat Romney. He recently attacked the presumptive Republican nominee for backing failed Bush policies “on steroids.”
As to the notion that Clinton was a centrist and Obama is a liberal: I think they’re both politicians with liberal hearts and centrist political instincts, working to make life better for the non-wealthy in an age when Republicans have become strident, extremist servants of the super-rich. President Clinton raised taxes on the rich. He signed the Family and Medical Leave Act, belatedly letting parents take time off after the birth of a child or when needed by a sick family member. He let Newt Gingrich’s GOP shut down the government rather than agree to Medicare cuts; on that point, he might be more traditionally liberal than Obama, who entertained the idea of Medicare cuts while trying to get a “grand bargain” on the deficit last summer. (Since then, though, Clinton himself has come out in support of Simpson-Bowles, which would trim Medicare.)
Clinton vastly expanded the Earned Income Tax Credit, which is one main reason why low-income people don’t pay any federal withholding taxes – a scandal (according to all the GOP presidential contenders) that Romney’s tax plan would remedy by imposing taxes on low-wage earners. The EITC is the absolute best proof that it’s Romney who’s moved away from the appealing mainstream ideas of his party’s past, not Obama. The low-wage tax credit Clinton and Obama expanded was originally a Republican notion (inspired by Milton Friedman) to make poorly paying jobs an alternative to welfare. Signed into law by President Gerald R. Ford, it was expanded by George H.W. Bush, and also supported by George W. Bush.
It’s true that Clinton tried to pioneer a “Third Way” attempt at Democratic centrism, balancing the budget and ending “welfare as we know it.” He thought if he met increasingly radical Republicans halfway, the country might make progress. He thought wrong. Instead Romney’s party attacked the man Romney now purports to admire; attacked him viciously, from Day One, culminating in a nihilistic effort at impeachment for sexual indiscretions that are common in Washington, D.C.
What Romney is really trying to do now, of course, is cause trouble with the segment of the electorate that admired Hillary Clinton but took a while to warm up to Barack Obama in 2008, particularly the white working class, as well as white female Democrats and independents. I don’t see it working. I’m on record saying repeatedly that dismissing Clinton’s support with working-class whites as merely racism was mistaken and divisive when Democrats did it four years ago. Working-class voters had valid reasons to doubt the charismatic newcomer whose economic platform was marginally less progressive than Clinton’s, and who talked riskily – and naively, as it turned out – of a post-partisan rapprochement with Republicans.
But that doesn’t make those voters easy targets for Romney. His record as Bain Capital job destroyer combined with his enduring prep-school entitlement should make him less simpatico than Obama to those voters. Romney lacks Bill Clinton’s “I feel your pain” empathy for working-class folks; he comes across as the guy who’s more likely to cause them pain.
Oh, and Romney, by the way, wasn’t always such a Clinton admirer. In his book “Turnaround,” he tells the story of visiting the White House in 1999, while Clinton was president (h/t Andrew Kaczynski):
When we got through the Secret Service checkpoint for clearance at the West Wing, the agent handed each of us a badge to wear around our necks. Mine had a big, red A. I turned to Cindy and, in front of the agents, said, “Why do I have to wear this?” Thinking I was confused, she tried to explain that all visitors to the White House had to wear a badge. “I know that,” I responded, “I’m asking why I have to wear the red A around my neck. I’m not the one that cheated on my wife. He should be wearing the scarlet A- not me.” I grumbled all the way up the drive and into the West Wing lobby. The look on Cindy’s face was priceless.
President Obama, surrounded by members of the Secret Service, upon his arrival in San Diego, Sept. 26, 2011. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)
It’s hard to work up much outrage about the Secret Service prostitution scandal, in which 11 members of the president’s elite protective service and various military personnel were found to have picked up escorts in Colombia, where they were doing advance work for the president’s visit. I guess it is probably not a good idea for the people in charge of protecting the president to leave themselves vulnerable to sexual blackmail, but on the other hand we do not live in a John Le Carré novel or “24″ episode, and I don’t think the threat of a honey-trap assassination conspiracy plot is very credible. If members of the Secret Service want to get drunk and hire escorts after work, that is their business. (As Melissa Gira Grant says, the only actual scandal here — and the reason this became an international incident — is that all these guys tried to bilk one of the women out of the money she was owed.)
But the predictable Washington mixture of prurient interest and moral posturing has turned this incident into grist for the scandals-and-investigations mill. And now we have the attempts at somehow making this a winning partisan issue for Republicans. Chuck Grassley, the senator from Iowa who triumphed over adversity and became the ranking Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee despite being functionally illiterate, would like to know whether any White House staff also slept with escorts that evening. No one has made the claim, but Grassley’s asking just in case. (For a live peek at a future paranoid right-wing myth in its embryonic stage, read the comments on that Washington Times story: “I can just hear those paper shredders going a mile a minute in the white house, and the document forgers are being called in, you know the same ones that did the birth certificate.”) Grassley was on Fox last night to make sure viewers repeatedly heard baseless speculation as to the involvement of White House staff.
Rep. Pete King, Long Island Republican and stalwart publicity monger, has sent Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan a list of 50 questions about the scandal in order to make it appear that he is very seriously investigating this very serious incident.
For those outside Congress, for whom insinuating escort patronage by unnamed White House staff seems a bit of a reach, the game is to attempt to use the scandal to prove some point the fecklessness of Obama as a leader and his shameful failure to make everyone in Washington stop being so awful and wasteful all the time.
NRO’s Mark Steyn, after praising the fiscal discipline of the agent who attempted to bilk his escort (ugh), suggests that the moral of the story is that we pay too much for presidential security, and that all those agents and fancy bullet-proof Suburbans are wastes of taxpayer funds and evidence of broke post-Imperial America’s profligacy. Sarah Palin, who had every right to be personally aggrieved for once, after it was reported that the agent at the center of the scandal wrote gross sexist things about her on Facebook, was among the first to declare that the problem was with the “culture” Obama has created at the White House. (Karl Rove, smarter than most of these people, suggested that politicizing a Secret Service scandal was dumb and counterproductive. Secret Service Director Mark Sullivan, coincidentally, was elevated to his position under George W. Bush.)
The makeup of the Secret Service, obviously, has very little connection to the political party of the person occupying the White House. Like most American law enforcement agencies, it’s primarily white and overwhelmingly male, and, historically, the culture of the agency has had more than a whiff of machismo. These are not exactly the sort of public sector employees right-wingers get off on demonizing.
In fact, the right has had for years a sort of Clint Eastwood-inspired fantasy of the Secret Service agent as folk hero. Decent, hard-working men putting their lives on the line to protect a bunch of elitist ingrates. That ingratiating phony Bill Clinton and his frigid, hectoring monster of a wife weren’t deserving of such stolid, unflinching loyalty and service.
The fullest expression of this fantasy is in this classic chain email that made its way to every inbox in the nation during the second president Bush’s first term. According to this email, attributed to the unnamed author’s former neighbor, the president’s security detail was constantly disrespected by those awful Clintons and their terrible staff. Hillary Clinton was “arrogant and orally abusive.” “She forbade her daughter, Chelsea, from exchanging pleasantries with” agents. “Al Gore resented Bill Clinton and thought he was to centrist. He despised all republicans.” Agents prayed for Bush to win the election, and their reward was the joy they all felt in the presence of President Bush and his amazing, wonderful wife.
This nonsense has its roots in fake anti-Hillary attacks, attributed to imaginary Secret Service members, that Republican operatives spread to sympathetic media voices starting more or less the day Bill took office. Former Secret Service agents do plenty of gossiping and bitching, most frequently to Ronald Kessler, but their complaints don’t tend to track quite so directly to right-wing fantasy narratives.
But a popular trope is of the upstanding agents blanching at being asked to look the other way as libidinous Democratic presidents — Kennedy, Johnson, and Clinton — womanized. (Clinton was said to have threatened to fire agents who stymied his attempts to have trysts with Monica Lewinsky, though the agent who made the claim admitted to having invented it.) The pat moralism of the conservative Secret Service fantasy makes the agency’s lurid misadventure a bit funnier. It also explains why various people have to somehow convince themselves that the Obama administration somehow degraded the agency, through a lack of “management skills” or the widespread embrace of sexual deviance that is the logical end result of repealing the military’s ban on out gays and lesbians.
Alex Pareene writes about politics for Salon and is the author of "The Rude Guide to Mitt." Email him at apareene@salon.com and follow him on Twitter @pareene
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Bill Clinton sat down for an long interview with Bill O’Reilly last night on Fox News, where the two discussed everything from economic and immigration policy, to the horse-race politics of the 2012 election. Clinton issued a favorable forecast for Barack Obama’s re-election — saying his prospects were better than 50/50 — and commented that the president’s current, tougher political posture would help him in the long run.
“[Obama's] out there running against himself now,” Clinton said. “Soon as he gets an opponent, it will be about the next four years — who do you think is going to take us in the right direction.”
Clinton also weighed in a few of the Republican candidates, saying of one-time nemesis Newt Gingrich that he respected the man’s ability to “think and do.” The former president was, however, momentarily lost for words when O’Reilly followed up by asking if he respected Gingrich “as a man.” Clinton tip-toed around the answer, then spent the next few moments criticizng the former speaker’s “scorched-earth” political approach.
When questioned about Mitt Romney, Clinton damned the former Massachusetts governor with praise for his Massachusetts health reform legislation. He stopped short, however, of issuing any endorsements for the Republican primary, saying only that he would vote for Barack Obama regardless in the general election. In fact, the closest he would get to voicing support for any of the candidates was when he mentioned that he liked Jon Huntsman — though he then quickly poked fun at the Utahan’s meager support in the polls.
I got to debate Jonathan Chait about his much-discussed New York magazine piece, “When Did Liberals Become So Unreasonable?” on “Hardball” Tuesday night. He’s aiming at President Obama’s liberal critics, but in fact his article proves that criticism is nothing new. Apparently, we’ve always been unreasonable, because Chait’s survey of Democratic presidents going back to FDR finds that the left has always found a reason to squawk. But he seems to think we’re particularly unreasonable when it comes to Obama. With Thanksgiving ahead, I found myself wondering whether liberals should be more grateful to the president.
First, let’s take in the list of Obama’s accomplishments as Chait describes them. They’re considerable:
His single largest policy accomplishment, the Affordable Care Act, combines two sweeping goals—providing coverage to the uninsured and taming runaway medical-cost inflation—that Democrats have tried and failed to achieve for decades. Likewise, the Recovery Act contained both short-term stimulative measures and increased public investment in infrastructure, green energy, and the like. The Dodd-Frank financial reform, while failing to end the financial industry as we know it, is certainly far from toothless, as measured by the almost fanatical determination of Wall Street and Republicans in Congress to roll it back.
Beneath these headline measures is a second tier of accomplishments carrying considerable historic weight. A bailout and deep restructuring of the auto industry that is rapidly being repaid, leaving behind a reinvigorated sector in the place of a devastated Midwest. Race to the Top, which leveraged a small amount of federal seed money into a sweeping national wave of education experiments, arguably the most significant reform of public schooling in the history of the United States. A reform of college loans, saving hundreds of billions of dollars by cutting out private middlemen and redirecting some of the savings toward expanded Pell Grants. Historically large new investments in green energy and the beginning of regulation of greenhouse gases. The Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act for women. Elimination of several wasteful defense programs, equality for gays in the military, and consumer-friendly regulation of food safety, tobacco, and credit cards.
We could, and I do, quibble about details in each of Chait’s examples, but his overall point is important: Even if every measure he lists has its flaws, the list itself is impressive. That President Obama took office in the middle of the worst crisis since the Great Depression, and with a nominal Democratic majority in both houses, helps explain why some people still expected more, but we should still stop more often and acknowledge what’s been accomplished in the last three years.
Having conceded that, I think Chait’s piece suffers from big definitional problems. First, how do we define liberals? Polls show self-described liberal Democrats are happy with Obama – in Gallup’s weekly tracking polls upward of 75 percent approve of the job he’s doing (and the same was true for Clinton), and that’s been true since he took office. There’s no crisis of liberal support for the president.
Also, Chait’s roster of unreasonable “liberals” includes MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow and Starbucks CEO Howard Schultz. That’s silly: Schultz, cited along with New York Times centrist Thomas Friedman, rails against politicians who refuse to cut the deficit by trimming so-called entitlements and raising taxes. But that’s exactly what Obama tried to do with his proposed debt-ceiling “grand bargain”; Republicans wouldn’t cooperate. Those guys aren’t liberals; Friedman is a formerly liberal, formerly smart writer who got rich and stopped paying attention. (You’d think he could at least pay someone to pay attention for him, so he’d stop asking Obama to do what Obama has already done.)
What about actual liberals, people to the left of Schultz and Friedman – people like Rachel Maddow and, OK, sure, me. Yes, some of us have demanded more from Obama – on the economy, on Wall Street regulation, on gay rights, on civil liberties. But you know what? That’s our job. And when Chait goes down the list of the ways liberals have been disappointed with Democratic presidents going all the way back to FDR, I found myself thinking, Good job, liberals! Because we were usually right, and the country’s a better place for our pushing.
While liberals lionize JFK today, Chait notes, during his presidency (cut short 48 years ago Tuesday) they criticized him for not moving faster on civil rights. Yes, they did. Kennedy was trying to find a way to hold his party together and postpone the departure of the Dixiecrats, and he needed pushing. Should Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. have said, “OK, Mr. President, we’ll skip the March on Washington, we know you’re doing what you can.” Liberals were right to push Kennedy. (I am not trying to say that Obama is compromising on anything equivalent to the basic human rights of African Americans, just that on the social justice issues of their day, presidents need pushing.)
Similarly, while FDR gets more historic veneration from liberals (mainly because there’s almost no one here with us who actually lived through his presidency as an adult), his New Deal only came about because of left-wing agitation (and corporate desperation) in the first place. And liberals were right to criticize some of Roosevelt’s compromises: leaving most African-Americans out of the Social Security program (again to mollify Dixiecrats) and easing up on government spending in 1937 (to mollify conservatives and business leaders), which reversed some of the progress he’d made getting us beyond the Great Depression. Japanese internment was a shame that more liberals should have criticized.
In my adulthood, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton got elected with liberal support but wound up disappointing the left, particularly on the economy. Sadly, both men accepted the Republican premise that the economic problems and social disorder of the late ’60s and early ’70s required that Democrats trim back on government and make nice with business. Chait himself admits that while we all love the outspoken human rights defending, “Habitat for Humanity” supporting ex-president we know today, we didn’t love Carter during his term, and for good reason:
The truth is that Carter’s domestic agenda carried only small bits of liberalism, and those small bits (a consumer-protection agency, tax reform) met with total failure in the Democratic Congress. Carter’s policy accomplishments tilted right of center—he deregulated the airline and trucking industries and cut the capital-gains tax. Most infuriatingly to liberals, Carter refused to push for comprehensive health-care reform. A Carter adviser later recalled that the president “did not see health care as every citizen’s right, nor did he think the government has an obligation to provide it.”
When it comes to Clinton, I think many liberals are frustrated with Obama not because of some supposed great contrast with his supposedly liberal predecessor, but because of similarities between the two. Both of these liberal presidents spent considerable political capital trying to compromise with Republicans, and they failed. That’s been a particular problem for Obama because he didn’t have the strong economy that made Clinton’s inability to wrest concessions from the GOP less painful.
It was precisely because Clinton failed to neutralize the critique of Democrats as the “big government” party that I objected to Obama’s effort to do the same thing in a time of economic crisis. Before it all fell apart, the president defended the idea of his deficit-cutting grand bargain to progressives. “Get this problem off the table,” he argued, “and then with some firm footing, with a solid fiscal situation, we will then be in a position to make the kind of investments that I think are going to be necessary to win the future.” But Clinton already tried that, balancing the budget and endorsing a welfare reform plan largely crafted by Republicans. He believed that getting the issue of bloated government “off the table” would set the table for a progressive agenda. Of course, it didn’t work.
Before writing his New York magazine piece, Chait got a lot of attention for a scathing retort to Drew Westen’s left-wing critique of Obama that ran in the New York Times in August. Chait made a lot of good points; some of the things the left blames on Obama either didn’t happen, or couldn’t have happened otherwise given the Blue Dog Democrats in Congress. But he made one point I wanted to answer at the time, and didn’t. He accused Westen and other lefty Obama critics of romanticizing the power of the bully pulpit and the presidential speech:
Westen’s op-ed rests upon a model of American politics in which the president in the not only the most important figure, but his most powerful weapon is rhetoric. The argument appears calculated to infuriate anybody with a passing familiarity with the basics of political science. In Westen’s telling, every known impediment to legislative progress — special interest lobbying, the filibuster, macroeconomic conditions, not to mention certain settled beliefs of public opinion — are but tiny stick huts trembling in the face of the atomic bomb of the presidential speech. The impediment to an era of total an uncompromising liberal success is Obama’s failure to properly deploy this awesome weapon.
I think that’s a caricature of liberals’ criticism. I have an actual model of what I wish the president had done, and it doesn’t come from Bill Clinton or JFK or FDR, it comes from Barack Obama. Look at the way he tried to sell the deficit-cutting grand bargain, to settle the 2011 debt-ceiling stalemate, even though in the end, the GOP didn’t bite — and probably, predictably, never was going to. That let the president tell voters he was the one who really wanted to cut the deficit, but Republicans wouldn’t let him. He railed, he ranted, he ordered both parties’ leaders to work night and day on a deal. He told the American public to call their congressional leaders and demand compromise — and sure enough, they tied up the phone lines in Congress for a while. In the process, he accepted the Republican premise that deficit-reduction was more important than job creation, a hallmark of the Clintonian “third way” politics he’d supposedly rejected, but even critics had to admit it was a bold political move, and he worked hard and risked a lot for it.
Now, imagine the new president had told a comparably bold story about the recession in early 2009: that he was the one who knew how to use government to fix the economy — but Republicans and Blue Dog Democrats wouldn’t let him do all that was needed, so he was probably going to have to compromise to do what was possible. Obama failed to give voters a vision of the kind of government role that would be required to fix the economy — his advisors were telling him it would take at least $1.2 trillion in stimulus — even if he had to compromise and settle for less. And let’s be clear: He did have to settle for less. Since the Senate barely passed the $787 billion stimulus bill, even though 40 percent of it went to tax cuts, it’s hard to imagine the president getting more than that.
But what if the president laid out bigger, bolder plans for the Recovery Act? What if he’d gone on television every few days, as he did during the debt-ceiling crisis, and demanded the American people lobby Congress? Then, when the compromise stimulus worked as well as it did — and it did work, keeping the country out of a Depression and reversing the steep trend of job losses that began under Bush — but its effects trailed off, he’d have been in a much stronger position to push Congress to do more. But Obama never made that case. That was a missed opportunity that wound up hurting the president politically, and hurting the country.
One last thing about the debt-ceiling debacle: Obama’s approval numbers fell as he pushed for compromise with the GOP, and they have climbed since he’s begun pushing for a jobs bill he knows has no chance of getting Republican support. I think Obama’s liberal critics weren’t just right morally, they were right politically. But I’ll also give the president credit for what now looks like shrewd bargaining: He got the debt ceiling raised without cutting Social Security or Medicare, reckoning he could offer whatever he felt like knowing the GOP would never agree to raise taxes.
I think Chait’s right that liberals are less inclined than conservatives to close ranks around their president, right or wrong. Conservatives tend to defer to authority, by definition; our side, not so much. I think he’s right to remind liberals how much Obama has done. I’m grateful to Obama for a lot of those things, but mostly, I’m grateful to be a member of a party that fights openly about what’s right. When the president got heckled by some Occupy Wall Street protesters Tuesday in New Hampshire, he modeled that tolerance, listening to them; he didn’t have them pepper-sprayed. I guess I’m grateful for that too — but I wish I didn’t have to be.
Here’s our “Hardball” debate. Have a great Thanksgiving.
As Democrats survey the political wreckage of the last three years, the temptation to imagine more pleasant alternate realities is irresistible. What if Hillary Clinton had been elected president instead of Obama? Would events have played out any differently? Or, even more tantalizingly (albeit technically impossible), what if the Big Dog himself, Bill Clinton, had been in charge the last three years? Would he have done a better job fixing the economy? Been more effective knocking heads with the Tea Party? Established himself as a better bet to win a second term?
These are questions that obviously can’t be answered with any certainty. We’ll never know how a Clinton (or a McCain, for that matter) would have tackled the recession or jousted with John Boehner, just as we’ll never know what would have transpired if there had been no stimulus at all, or if Obama had taken a more confrontational stance against his Republican opposition from the get-go, rather than pursue a doomed strategy of bipartisan cooperation. We’re stuck with the world we’ve got.
But in the wake of the publication of Bill Clinton’s new book, “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy,” there is simply no choice but to plunge into these hypothetical waters, however impracticable they might be. Because even though, when you boil it down, the agenda set forth by Clinton is not substantivally different from what Obama has attempted to execute, the implicit theme of “Back to Work” is that there’s a better way to go about the business of government than what we’ve witnessed in the last three years. As TalkingPointsMemo’s Josh Marshall joked in a tweet, the real title of “Back to Work” should be “If I Were Still President I’d Be Ownin’ These Bitches.” Clinton periodically offers lukewarm support to Obama, but he’d much rather be recounting the successes of his 1990s glory days. Just put him back in the Oval Office, and we’d get this mess fixed, stat!
Dream on, Bill. One could reasonably argue that Clinton would have done a much better job facing down McConnell, Boehner and Cantor on the debt ceiling and government shutdown showdowns. But his program for smart governmental intervention in the economy would have constituted exactly the same kind of anathema to a Republican Party determined to prevent him from accomplishing anything as everything hitherto proposed by Obama. Clinton would also have discovered that when you come into office on the heels of a fiscal quarter in which the economy contracted by almost 10 percent, while facing a Senate opposition determined to filibuster your every move at a historically unprecedented rate from Day One, recovery would be slow and painful and politically costly. Furthermoe, any notion that Bill Clinton might have been tougher than Obama on the banks or Wall Street, while fighting for his beloved middle class, seems especially dubious. Let’s not forget, Obama’s economic team was largely staffed by veterans of the Clinton administration, and some of the key deregulatory measures that contributed to the financial crisis were passed during Clinton’s administration with the enthusiastic support of those very same men.
“Back to Work” includes a cogent analysis of where the U.S. has gone astray, is full of sensible ideas to encourage job creation and economic growth, and makes a robust defense of the notion that strong government is a good thing. But so what? The people who will buy and read this book not only already agree with just about everything that’s in it, but they also already know it all. There’s almost nothing here that hasn’t been proposed by the Obama administration, or that isn’t already a stock part of the mainstream Democratic agenda. Which makes it all completely meaningless in the context of current political gridlock. Clinton wants us to get back to a government based on doing things that work — but as has become abundantly evident in the past few years, congressional Republicans are content with a system that doesn’t work. And neither Obama nor Clinton has any leverage to change that reality, unless Democrats enjoy a surprising victory in the 2012 election.
Any imaginary history that plucks Bill Clinton out of 1992 and time-travels him into 2008 has to grapple with some mighty big historical transformations. For most of his two terms, Bill Clinton enjoyed a huge wind at his back — a stunning period of economic growth that was in large part fueled by two things he can take zero credit for: the end of the Cold War and the massive tech boom. And even without the black hole of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression sucking at his presidency from the moment he moved into the White House, Clinton still managed to make a pretty big mess of things in his first two years. His efforts to push through the first priority on his political agenda — healthcare reform — failed miserably and contributed heavily to one of the worst midterm election defeats faced by a sitting Democratic president in a century. The Obama midterm debacle was even bigger, but in some ways less embarrassing. Until Clinton came along, Democrats had held a majority in the House of Representatives for 40 years.
Today, there is a rosy glow associated with the Clinton years. We tend to forget such things as the tawdry impeachment scandal, for a simple reason: The economy grew quickly and millions of jobs were created. If you couldn’t find a job in Northern California in the late ’90s, you weren’t breathing. The warm tint of the rearview mirror imbues Clinton with the authority to lecture us all now on how we should be doing a better job getting people back to work. But what about the responsibility that Clinton should shoulder for sowing the seeds of the financial crisis in the first place?
Clinton rightly dismisses the notion that his aggressive support of the Community Reinvestment Act was the root cause of the housing bust. We’ll give him points for that. But what are we to make of the one area in which he does acknowledge making a mistake?
I do think I can be fairly criticized for not making a bigger public issue out of the need to regulate financial derivatives. I couldn’t have done anything about it, because the Republican Congress was hostile to all regulations … But I should have spoken out more, especially after Congress included a measure barring financial derivatives from being regulated as securities or commodities in an appropriations bill that passed by a veto-proof majority.
Clinton then has the gall to approvingly mention Commodity Future Trading Commission director Brooksley Born’s strongly voiced opinion at the time that “financial derivatives should be subject to the same kinds of capital and transparency requirements as agricultural derivatives.” He somehow fails to mention the fact that Born’s push to regulate financial derivatives was cut off at the knees by Clinton’s own senior economic officials, including, notably, Larry Summers and Robert Rubin. The heads of the Treasury Department, Federal Reserve and SEC released a joint statement that left no doubt as to administration policy: “We have grave concerns about this action and its possible consequences. We seriously question the scope of the CFTC’s jurisdiction in this area.”
For Clinton to suggest that he would have made a bigger public issue “out of the need to regulate financial derivatives” implies that he agreed with Born — but there is very little evidence to be found for this revisionism in the historical record. The opposite is much more true. Clinton’s administration was extraordinarily accommodative of Wall Street’s desires; their priorities were his priorities. One can assume that the health of the financial sector would have been just as high a priority for a Clinton administration in 2008 as it was in 1999. The banks would certainly have been bailed out, fueling popular resentment and creating identical political problems for the incumbent party.
Before Bill Clinton decided to write a book arguing the merits for smart government, he should have fessed up to how his own dumb government played a role in creating the financial crisis that put so many Americans out of work and has made it so difficult to restart economic growth.
That having been said, however, anyone looking for a smart to-do list of what government can do to spur economic growth would not be ill-served by reading Chapter 6: “How We Can Get Back in the Future Business.” Clinton is a bit more supportive of the debt-reduction proposals that came out of Obama’s Erskine-Bowles commission than most serious liberals will feel comfortable with, but aside from that, most Democrats will find themselves nodding their heads at his proposal to spur green job creation through investment in renewable energy, his call for a big infrastructure buildup, and his plan to fix the housing sector. Clinton’s always been a wonk’s wonk — he clearly enjoys wallowing in the nitty-gritty details of policy. There’s meat in “Back to Work.”
But he gives away the game on Page 111:
If there are any militant antitax folks still reading this book, I can hear the counterattack forming in your minds: “Clinton wants European-style social democracy! He wants to tax us to death. He’s for too much government! He doesn’t believe in American exceptionalism! He doesn’t even love America anymore, or he wouldn’t be telling us all this bad stuff!
“That’s all nonsense,” he writes.
Well yeah, sure, except for the annoying little fact that it’s nonsense that represents the expressed views of most of the Republicans currently elected to Congress. And indeed, it’s mild nonsense that doesn’t even come close to the intemperate nastiness of the rhetoric routinely hurled at President Obama.
It’s cute for Clinton to pretend that any “militant antitax” folk would even purchase “Back to Work,” much less be reading it as far as Page 111 without their heads exploding. The sad truth — and this is something that Clinton is surely aware of — is that all the well-meaning and pragmatically effective job creation tools in the world are worth nothing when matched up against the scorched earth tactics and extreme calcified ideology of the current Republican Party. Clinton’s great 1990s nemesis, Newt Gingrich, is a moderate when compared to the GOP’s Tea Party backbone — something Gingrich learned to his shock when he had the temerity to criticize Paul Ryan’s budget as “right-wing social engineering.”
It is in the context of current political reality that all of Clinton’s suggestions must be evaluated, and this is where “Back to Work” is most lacking. It doesn’t matter how compellingly Clinton makes the case for smart government (and higher taxes) in an era when the opposition party has never been more antitax or more resolutely opposed to government action. It doesn’t matter how bad we look when compared to other rich countries, when we are considered by definition incomparable. It doesn’t matter how much sense Clinton makes — in Washington in 2011, sense is irrelevant.
If you’re in the market for an alternate reality, pick up “Back to Work,” mix yourself a strong drink, and pretend to your heart’s delight that if we just had the right wonk in office, pushing the right kind of policy proposals, unemployment would be falling while the economy boomed. But if you want to change reality, just make sure you go vote.
(Credit: Reuters/Jim Young) 
President Obama, surrounded by members of the Secret Service, upon his arrival in San Diego, Sept. 26, 2011. (Credit: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) 
(Credit: Fox News) 
(Credit: AP/iStockphoto/sjlocke/Salon) 
Bill Clinton (Credit: Reuters/Lucas Jackson) 
