Do you remember David Schippers? He was on television, the rumpled looking guy with white hair and a beard, who read a long statement to the House Judiciary Committee advising it to impeach President Clinton for 15 felonies. Then, just when it seemed he’d finished, out of nowhere, he started reciting Longfellow: “Sail on, O Ship of State!/Sail on, O Union, strong and great!/Humanity with all its fears,/With all the hopes of future years,/Is hanging breathless on thy fate!”
Well, I must admit that it was at that point that I could barely watch him any longer. But I did listen, as he explained his recitation. “How sublime, poignant and uplifting; yet how profound and sobering are those words at this moment in history. You now are confronted with the monumental responsibility of deciding whether William Jefferson Clinton is fit to remain at the helm of that ship.” To be courteous, let’s say I found this cornball ending less than poignant, if not inappropriate, given the reason this 68-year-old attorney was testifying.
In fact, I was embarrassed for him and the committee. David Schippers was the House Judiciary Committee’s chief investigative counsel, and this was his grand debut. But his report and advice to the committee had been a waste of time, not to mention sophomoric. Aside from the grade school poetry, he had merely summarized and reworked Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s so-called Referral (aka “The Starr Report”) — with which all concerned were familiar. Starr had listed 11 possible grounds for impeachment, including perjury, witness tampering, obstruction of justice and abuse of power; Schippers upped the ante by stacking on four additional alleged crimes, using the same evidence, but including conspiracy and misprision (failure to report a crime) charges. Stacking is one of the nastier games prosecutors play. Starr had not stacked.
Just when I thought Schippers was finished, he pulled a stunt I’d never witnessed in over three decades of observing events on Capitol Hill. He asked committee chairman Henry Hyde if he could make a personal observation. A personal observation! On what basis could he step out of his role as a committee counsel? I was confused. As staff man, his personal observations were out of order, and totally irrelevant. Surely, he knew this. I expected Hyde to politely push the request aside, because if he didn’t surely one of the members of the committee would object, but the avuncular chairman quickly responded: “Certainly.” At the time, I was unaware of Schippers’ special relationship with Hyde.
As I listened in utter amazement, Schippers invoked Sir Thomas More, the English lord chancellor who’d opted for death rather than recognize a fallen-Catholic king, Henry VIII, as the head of the Church of England — but this “Man for All Seasons” reference had no bearing whatsoever on the Clinton impeachment proceedings. Then Schippers declared that “15 generations of our fellow Americans, many of whom are reposing in military cemeteries throughout the world, are looking down and judge what you do.” Before Schippers finished, I was on my feet.
“This is very strange stuff,” I said to a friend who was watching the hearings with me. “Sir Thomas More! Fifteen generations of dead Americans! This is actually sad. This man doesn’t have a clue about what he’s doing,” I added, feeling badly for Schippers.
At the time, I was in Florida to give a speech to a group of New York investment bankers who had invited their best clients (and spouses) to a Palm Beach resort for sun and fun mixed with seminars and speakers. Arthur Schlessinger Jr. and I were the dinner speakers for their final evening. They wanted my best estimation of what was going to happen to Clinton. As a former chief minority counsel of the House Judiciary Committee, I was about to explain the inappropriateness of Schippers’ behavior to my friend, when he pointed back at the television.
California Rep. Maxine Waters was on the screen. She was angry, and understandably outraged. She was demanding that Hyde explain why he had not stopped Schippers, who was “out of order” (using the applicable parliamentary vernacular) for violating the standing rules of the committee, not to mention the decorum expected of staff. To squelch the incident, Hyde immediately assured Waters that Schippers’ personal remarks would be stricken from the record (and they were).
That was my introduction to Schippers, on Oct. 5, 1998. Throughout the impeachment proceedings, I continued to notice him. I was in Washington covering the events full time as an on-camera consultant and commentator for MSNBC. Accordingly, I was reading and watching everything. Also, I was talking privately with others associated with the House Judiciary Committee, both members of the committee and the professional staff. It was painfully clear, and not only to me, that Schippers was playing out of his league. He was operating in a world he did not understand, or appreciate. At the time, I felt sympathy for him. But no longer.
Schippers has written a book (with journalist Alan P. Henry), “Sellout: The Inside Story of President Clinton’s Impeachment,” which had, when I last checked, and to my astonishment, climbed to the No. 5 spot on the New York Times bestseller list. Oddly, Schippers thanks friends and family for helping with the book, but not journalist Henry, who — whatever his role — produced a book that sounds exactly like Schippers, who is out promoting it. The book is a bad-tempered, often sarcastic screed, and a poorly argued polemic. Beginning with his pejorative title, Schippers shouts, insults, rants, raves and points his accusing finger at everyone who disagrees with his assessments. Remarkably, he remains oblivious to his own lack of understanding; in short, he continues to embarrass himself.
What’s initially most striking about the book is Schippers’ apparent unawareness that he was a pawn, used by the Republicans for political cover. Schippers writes that when Hyde first called him on Jan. 14, 1998, the chairman said he “wanted a Democrat, someone who’d been around for a while, someone with a lot of experience in court,” to assist the committee with its congressional oversight investigation of the Department of Justice, an agency that Schippers had worked for 30 years earlier.
On Jan. 21, 1998, before Schippers had agreed to come to Washington, the Lewinsky story broke. So when Hyde and Schippers next spoke, Hyde told him, “Dave, I think there is a possibility that we may have … to go into an impeachment inquiry.” Schippers reminded Hyde he was a Democrat, and not anxious to get “into an ugly, partisan impeachment process.” Hyde downplayed the impeachment prospect, and Schippers was convinced to move to Washington to take on the oversight investigation of the Department of Justice.
Hyde is an accomplished, shrewd and savvy politician. By having a registered Democrat do the digging (whether into the Justice Department or William Jefferson Clinton) Hyde was protecting himself, and his Republican colleagues, from charges of partisan behavior. There is no shortage of experienced, able and knowledgeable lawyers in Washington, but Hyde had a special relationship with Schippers that made him, despite his inexperience in national politics, an ideal choice.
Hyde could be as certain of Schippers’ loyalty as he was of a pope’s religion. These men first met in 1968 when Hyde was in the Illinois legislature and they were both members of the Illinois Crime Investigating Commission. In 1974, when Hyde ran for Congress as a Republican, Schippers — a lifelong Democrat — backed him. As one reporter discovered, “Shippers did everything he could, despite his Democratic ties, to get Hyde elected.”
In 1996, the Hyde-Schippers friendship was cemented even further when both men were knighted by the Catholic Church’s Equestrian Order of the Holy Sepulcher, an order that traces its origins to the First Crusade in 1095. Knights are recommended by their parish priests and bishops based on outstanding service to the church and community, and are approved by the pope. In the investiture ceremonies, the knights dress in formal attire and an archbishop dubs them three times on the shoulder with a historic sword; they are said to be quite moving. The Catholic Church awards no higher honor to its priests and laity than the knighthood shared by Hyde and Schippers.
Schippers enjoys an excellent reputation in Chicago as a former federal prosecutor and as a criminal defense lawyer, where for three decades he represented a range of clients from exotic bird smugglers to porn stars, along with a few serial killers. Yet nothing in his background, nor in his 40 years of law practice in Chicago, provided any training or experience for the task he would ultimately be given when working for Congress — impeaching a president of the United States. He had no Washington experience, nor real political experience. To the contrary, as reading his book makes clear, he is not a politically sophisticated person.
And political sophistication was very much called for in this situation. An impeachment proceeding is a purely legislative and political proceeding, and very different from court proceedings. While there are precedents, the rules are constantly being adjusted by Congress from proceeding to proceeding. No other branch of government can pass judgment on impeachment proceedings, for (as the Supreme Court has ruled) there is no appeal to the courts, and by the terms of the Constitution an impeached and convicted official cannot be pardoned by a president. Impeachment by the House of Representatives, and conviction by the Senate, simply remove an official from office.
Impeachments, thankfully, are rare. Before Clinton’s proceeding, there had been only 15 occasions when the House of Representatives had impeached. The first proceeding was in 1799 and the last before Clinton was in 1989. There have been only 13 Senate trials, since two of the impeached officials resigned before the Senate acted. Before Clinton, only two presidents had been involved in impeachment proceedings: Andrew Johnson, who was impeached by the House but found not guilty by the Senate in 1868, and Richard Nixon, who resigned after the House Judiciary Committee voted to impeach him but before the full House voted, in 1974. Impeachment procedures and precedents are a relatively small body of congressional jurisprudence.
In 1970, when House Minority Leader Gerald Ford called for the impeachment of Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, I was an associate deputy attorney general (for legislative affairs). Attorney General John Mitchell requested that I visit my former colleagues at the House Judiciary Committee to find out what was likely to happen with Douglas. Nothing, I learned. The charges against Douglas were baseless.
At that time, I spent several long afternoons and evenings studying old files from the House of Representatives involving impeachment proceedings relating to federal judges dating back to the 1930s. Those files, and Ford’s efforts, left no doubt in my mind that impeachment was (and is) a purely political process, from start to finish. Law professor Michael Gerhardt, who was a CNN commentator during the Clinton proceedings as well as an expert witness before the House Judiciary Committee (I respectfully declined an invitation), has recently revised his highly respected work, “The Federal Impeachment Process: A Constitutional and Historical Analysis.” He found the Clinton proceedings were consistent with the impeachment process that has evolved over the past two centuries, which he notes is inherently a political process designed to expose and remedy political crimes. Schippers’ book makes clear he does not appreciate this fundamental nature of the process.
I have read most of the books written about impeachment, not to mention countless law and academic journal articles on the subject. When I heard Schippers was working on a book, I looked forward to it. Insider books can be highly informative. Unfortunately, Schippers’ book is not. He offers no real insights, except to confirm that the Republicans and he were hellbent on removing President Clinton from office, notwithstanding the wishes to the contrary of the American people, and their elected representatives in the Senate. Schippers believes everyone, both Republicans and Democrats, and in particular the House and Senate leadership, “sold out” because they failed to assist Hyde and the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee, and later the House managers, in their effort to oust Clinton. His only praise is for his compatriots, of course.
Diatribes (which Schippers’ book is) don’t usually merit detailed refutations. I’ll offer a typical example of my problems with his analysis instead. I’ve selected one of his table-pounding assertions, a case where I know, from firsthand knowledge, that he is wrong. When arguing that Clinton should have been charged with abuse of power, Schippers declares “what [Richard] Nixon did — and it was bad — did not remotely approach the abuse of office perpetrated by Clinton and his cronies. Nor did President Nixon attack the constitutional rights of private citizens the way Clinton did.”
This entire statement is untrue. Apparently, Schippers is not familiar with the comparative evidence. Any summary sampling of Nixon’s abuses of power would, at minimum, include:
Nixon’s plans to remove restraints on domestic law enforcement agencies in order to gather intelligence by means of surreptitious entries, electronic surveillance and mail covers (opening and examining first class mail) to obtain information relating to political dissidents and protesters.
Nixon’s ordering aides to break and enter, and steal information, at the Brookings Institute in Washington.
Nixon’s approving the breaking and entering into the office of a psychiatrist treating Daniel Ellsberg to obtain information that could be used to discredit Ellsberg after he leaked a Pentagon study of the war in South Vietnam to the news media.
Nixon’s ordering the wiretapping of journalists and White House staff members to obtain information about potential news leaks.
Nixon’s misuse of the departments and agencies of government (such as the Justice Department and CIA) to conceal illegal, improper or unethical conduct undertaken by the president or his staff on his behalf.
Nixon’s suborning perjury and use of his high office to obtain secret grand jury information that he personally provided to grand jury targets.
Nixon’s condoning the use of illegal, improper and unethical activities in the presidential election campaign of 1972, directed from the White House, including: breaking, entering, bugging, wiretapping and making copies of information within the offices of political opponents; the disruption, hindrance, impeding and sabotage of the political campaign of opponents; fabrication, dissemination or publication of false charges or other false information for the purpose of discrediting political opponents; using the powers of incumbency for political advantage by assisting those friendly to the president and “screwing” his enemies; and his selling ambassadorships for hefty political contributions.
Schippers offers no evidence that Clinton’s behavior as president was even close to Nixon’s litany of abuses — for there is none. The abuses of presidential power by these men is not similar, nor is there any rational basis to say that Clinton’s behavior was more egregious.
As a further example, take the action that truly triggered the impeachment drive against Nixon — his firing of special prosecutor Archibald Cox because Nixon did not want produce the subpoenaed tapes that Cox demanded. It will be recalled that Nixon’s attorney general and deputy attorney general resigned rather than take such an unjustified action. Nixon’s firing of Cox (along with his police-state tactics employing wiretapping and break-ins for political purposes) frightened the American people and their elected officials. While Clinton’s actions may have been morally troubling, he never terrified anyone with his alleged abuse of presidential power. Big difference.
I have never been a partisan in the Clinton impeachment proceedings, and I have no credentials (nor inclination) to pass moral judgments on others. But I do understand how Washington works. So when speaking to the investment bankers and their clients in Florida, on Oct. 7, 1998, two days after watching Schippers, I advised them in my talk (as well as in written materials) that based on the available evidence produced by Starr, Clinton would be impeached by the House, but found not guilty by the Senate. I doubt I was alone in foreseeing these results, for my predictions proved accurate.
It is equally apparent what will happen next. Schippers will soon be gratified by an indictment of William Jefferson Clinton, as a former president of the United States, for perjury and obstruction of justice by Independent Counsel Robert Ray. It will happen early next year. But Schippers will no doubt be displeased when the former president is not sent to prison (with his Secret Service detail). And he will surely see this as yet another “sellout.”
John W. Dean served as counsel to President Nixon from 1970 to 1973. He now writes a column for Findlaw and is the author of several books, with the next to be published in January 2004, a biography of Warren G. Harding. .
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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) 
