With a couple of weeks to go before he leaves the White House, President Clinton’s last forlorn attempt to pose as a peacemaker in the Middle East seems doomed to failure. After seven years of a “peace process” in which Clinton claimed to be acting as a mediator, Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat said he was willing to consider the latest in a series of proposals put to him by the outgoing U.S. president, but expressed serious reservations.
The Palestine Liberation Organization raised three main objections to the proposals. The proposals made no provisions for a viable Palestinian state, without which there could be no lasting peace. By permitting them to keep the settlements they built in the West Bank and Gaza in violation of United Nations Resolution 242, the proposals effectively rewarded the Israelis for their illegal colonization effort. And they denied the right of Palestinians exiled at the time of Israel’s birth in 1948 to return to their homes, although this right is enshrined in the United Nations’ Resolution 194, adopted half a century ago and reiterated every year since.
Even if he wanted to, Arafat would not be able to agree to these conditions for a peace settlement so blatantly weighted in Israel’s favor. His people would not sanction it, nor would they give up their “Intifada of al-Aqsa” uprising against the Israelis’ continuing denial of their right to freedom and independence. The fact is that the Palestinians have concluded that Clinton’s “peace process” is in reality a smokescreen behind which the Israelis and their American patrons have collaborated to frustrate the right of the Palestinians, accepted by the rest of the world, to self-determination.
This conclusion is widely shared here in Europe, where many people think that U.S. Middle East policy is unreasonably biased in favor of Israel as the result of the influence of the powerful Zionist lobby in Congress. Most obviously, American compliance with the building of Jewish settlements in the occupied West Bank and Gaza have plainly made it more difficult to envisage any possible agreement between Israel and the people whose land it is occupying. There is an opportunity here for President-elect George W. Bush to modify the U.S. bias toward Israel and explore the ground for a more even-handed approach to the problem of establishing peace in the Middle East.
For more than three months now, as violence has flared up all over the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, the streets of Arab cities all across the Middle East have resounded to the cry of Arab unity. This has awakened echoes for me of my first days as a newspaper correspondent in 1955, when I was reporting the Suez crisis for the old Manchester Guardian.
At that time, the Americans were regarded as friends of the Arabs. Today things are very different; it’s the Americans, along with Israel, whom most Arabs regard as their enemy. In Cairo and Amman and Damascus, and even in the sheikhdoms of the Gulf and in distant Yemen and Morocco, voices are being raised — spontaneously and insistently — by ordinary citizens who want their governments to unite in pursuit of a common objective: to save Arab Jerusalem from a blatant attempt by Israel, with the backing of the United States, to hijack the Holy City.
Some people, including President Clinton and Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, would challenge the assertion that the United States supports Israel in its determination to hold on to what it has taken by force.
Hasn’t Clinton devoted endless hours in his efforts to bring the Arabs and the Israelis together? Hasn’t he been the “honest broker,” selflessly sacrificing all his energies to the search for a just solution to their quarrel? And is not the reason for his failure — and you have only to look at the situation in the Middle East today to understand the enormous scale of that failure — due to the obstinacy of Arafat and the refusal of the Palestinians to accept the terms of peace they have been offered?
That may be the way it looks from 5,000 miles away, but to the Arabs the situation couldn’t be more at odds with that image. They see the American government pouring money and arms into Israel, to the tune of some $5 billion a year (far more than the U.S. gives any other country), while the Palestinians whose lands the Israelis have occupied and whose economy they have destroyed are condemned to live in refugee camps or, if they are lucky, to work at menial tasks for Israeli employers. And for those of us who have been in close touch with the Arab-Israeli problem for many years, this is very close to the truth.
What about the celebrated peace process then, which started seven years ago with that famous handshake on the White House lawn between Yitzhak Rabin, then Israel’s prime minister, and Arafat? Surely all these meetings at Camp David, the Wye River Valley and, more recently, Sharm al-Sheikh were attempts by the Americans to reach a fair compromise between the Israelis, with their anxiety about security, and the Palestinians, who wanted to win their independence. On the face of it, yes. But in reality the peace process (lots of process, but no peace) has consisted of a series of piecemeal deals proposed by the United States and Israel acting as one team and reluctantly accepted by the Palestinians on the basis of “concessions” by the Israelis, which were, in fact, never made.
The clearest illustration of the insincerity of Israel’s approach to the peace process is to be seen in the Jewish settlements established by successive Israeli governments all over the occupied territories. When the Israelis won their sweeping victory in 1967 and occupied the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and the Gaza Strip, the U.N. Security Council debated long and hard before reaching a unanimous decision about the peace that should follow. That decision — expressed in the famous Resolution 242, to which the United States was a party — called for a bargain between Israel and the Arabs. The Arabs were to recognize Israel’s right to exist in peace and security and the Israelis were to withdraw their forces “from territories occupied in the recent conflict.”
But within weeks of the ending of “the recent conflict,” the Israeli government established the first Jewish settlements on land confiscated from Arabs. This was against the spirit of Resolution 242 and it was illegal under international law, which forbids an occupying power to colonize the territories it occupies — as is clearly stated in the Fourth Geneva Convention of 1948.
This matter of the Jewish settlements is one of which I have a good deal of personal knowledge. In January 1968, I was in Jerusalem on a fact-finding mission and went to see the Palestinian mayor, who was still in office in East Jerusalem. (The Israelis deported him a few months later, without any pretext or accusation of ill-doing.) As we talked, an aide came in to tell him that the Israeli government had announced the confiscation of 800 acres of Arab land on Mount Scopus, overlooking the old walled city. On it they were to build in the following years the first of the settlements with which they gradually altered the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs in the city that they were to claim as the “eternal and undivided capital” of the Jewish State, brushing aside the rights and the feelings of the Palestinians whose ancestors had lived there for centuries. In May 1968, the Security Council “deplored” Israel’s unilateral action and called on it to undo it. The U.S. abstained, but when the council adopted an even stronger resolution in the following year, the U.S. voted for it, making the resolution unanimous.
But the rebuke meant little to the Israelis, who pushed full steam ahead with their unabashedly illegal project in Jerusalem. Before the end of 1968 the Israelis also expanded the settlement projects into the other occupied territories — effectively thumbing their nose at Resolution 242. At that time, there was ample opportunity for the United States, with its unparalleled connections with and influence over Israel, to put a stop to a process that was obviously damaging to any prospect of peacemaking between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Instead, the United States did the reverse.
Rather than using its ample resources as a superpower to pressure Israel into making peace with its neighbors, the United States took on the task of arming it. The pledge by President Lyndon Johnson during the presidential election campaign in the autumn of 1968 to sell Israel 50 Phantoms, then the most advanced strike aircraft in the world, shocked and alienated the Arabs. By the time Richard Nixon, who replaced Johnson in the White House in January 1969, confirmed the sale, the damage was already done.
It was an action that had reverberating and fatal consequences. Not only did it cause consternation in the Arab world, but more ominously it encouraged in the Israelis the dangerous mood of expansionism that had gripped the nation in the wake of its blitzkrieg victory in 1967. Incidentally, it also signalled the involvement of Lebanon in a conflict to which previously it had been only a bystander; the day after the announcement of the Phantoms deal, the Israeli air force raided Beirut airport in reprisal for a guerrilla attack on an Israeli airliner in Athens, and destroyed 13 civil aircraft on the ground.
For the next 20 years I visited Israel and the occupied territories at least once every year and I made a particular point of monitoring the developments of the Israeli settlement program. In Jerusalem, I watched the buildings going up on that confiscated land on Mount Scopus, noting the fortress-like style of the constructions, with stone walls and narrow windows, clearly designed to fight off any future attempt by the Arabs to recover the stolen land. I travelled the West Bank and went south to Gaza and on into Egyptian Sinai, and then north to the Golan Heights in occupied Syria. Everywhere the bulldozers were at work and Jewish settlers were on the move, the most aggressive ones, I noted, coming from Brooklyn and other parts of the United States.
The Brooklyn settlers have been involved in confrontations with Palestinians whose land they occupy and they are very ready with the firearms they always carry. Brooklyn native son Benjamin Goldstein is notorious for having gunned down 29 Palestinians in Hebron in 1994, while he was wearing his uniform as an officer in the Israeli Army. Goldstein was a follower of Meir Kahane, a Brooklyn-born rabbi who espoused violence against the Arabs until his assassination in 1990. Kahane’s divisive rhetoric often encouraged militancy in his disciples. Indeed, Goldstein claimed that he was avenging Kahane’s murder when he went on his rampage. (The bitterness engendered by Kahane persists today. Binyamin Kahane, who shared his father’s ideology, was murdered along with his wife in the West Bank last weekend.)
The settlers claim that the West Bank, which they refer to as Judaea and Samaria, was given by God to the Jewish people, and that the Palestinians, although their ancestors have been there for a thousand years, are interlopers with no rights. Therefore it is legitimate (some of them would say obligatory) for them to get rid of the Palestinians. They call this “cleansing the land.” (Hence, the phrase “ethnic cleansing,” which in other contexts Americans consider disreputable. Not here though.)
When Egypt and Syria went to war in 1973 (the “Yom Kippur war”) in an attempt to win back what they had lost in 1967, anger over the settlements was one factor that provoked them to so risky an adventure.
But it seemed that nothing could stop the Israelis from pursuing a course of action that plainly indicated their determination not to withdraw from the conquered lands. And the United States, far from trying to discourage Israel, gradually moved away from its commitment as a member of the U.N. Security Council. In American government parlance the settlements were no longer “illegal,” but became merely “obstacles to peace,” although it was plain for all to see that the enormous American subsidies to Israel were, in fact, helping to pay for them. The touchstone of America’s design for the Middle East was the welfare of Israel — at no matter what cost to the other parties involved.
In 1977, Egypt’s President Anwar Sadat took the bold decision to visit Jerusalem and to challenge the Israelis on their own home ground to make peace. At the historic Camp David summit subsequently arranged by President Jimmy Carter, Sadat met Israel’s Menachem Begin and they worked out the preliminaries of the peace treaty that led in 1978 to Israel’s withdrawal from Sinai. American officials helped to draft the treaty and took pride in the achievement of this first peace agreement between Israel and one of its neighbors. The treaty was supposed to be the first stage in a wider Arab-Israeli agreement that was also intended to bring an end to the conflict over Palestine.
But when the applause and self-congratulatory rhetoric died down and the time came to read the small print of the treaty, it appeared that a clause forbidding further settlement building had somehow been left out. And what was Begin’s first brash action after his return from Camp David? He authorized the construction of a new series of settlements. But there was no audible protest from Washington, which was still drunk from the high spirits of Camp David.
It was about this time that a rift began to appear between the United States and its European allies over the best way to handle the Middle East problem. America’s one-sided support for Israel had become so conspicuous that the European Community, as it was then called, put out the Venice Declaration, signed in June 1980 by all nine member states, distinguishing and distancing their attitude from that of the United States. The declaration stated unequivocally that the Israeli settlements in the West Bank and Gaza were illegal, and that neither side should take any unilateral action to alter the status of Jerusalem. The nine signatories reaffirmed the Palestinian right to self-determination, and they expressed their willingness to take part in and provide guarantees for a comprehensive peace settlement.
However, this European protest measure did nothing to discourage America’s partisanship for Israel, even though that partisanship was apparent in the increasingly hard-line policies of the Israeli government. When Palestinian misery and frustration boiled over in the “Intifada” popular uprising in 1987, American commentators joined in the universal criticisms of Israel’s brutal reprisals, but the government in Washington, under pressure from a strongly pro-Zionist Congress, continued its lavish military and economic assistance to Israel.
Only after the Gulf War in 1991, in which the administration of George Bush needed and obtained the cooperation of most of the Arab world, did the Americans initiate an attempt to bring together Israelis and Palestinians in a bid to work out a peace agreement that both could accept. With the active collaboration of Secretary of State James Baker, Bush succeeded in persuading the Palestinians that at last their interests were to be reflected, not subordinated to those of Israel.
In 1992, with the election of Clinton, it looked at first as though this even-handed approach was to be continued. After secret negotiations in Oslo had produced the outline of a peace agreement (without any American participation), Clinton invited the Israeli and Palestinian leaders to Washington, where on Sept. 13, 1993, the peace process to which Clinton was to devote so much of his time and from which he hoped to secure a foreign policy achievement to gild his fading reputation was launched.
As it unfolded, with promises from the Israelis of the release of Palestinian prisoners (many of whom are in prison to this day) and of the withdrawal of Israeli forces from the West Bank and Gaza (which were always delayed and were accompanied by an almost frenzied expansion of Israel’s colonization program of the same areas), it gradually became apparent to the Palestinians that they were being taken for a ride. Despite Israeli promises and American assurances, the Palestinians found themselves no nearer to their goal, while the Israelis made it plain that they intended to maintain their domination of whatever kind of Palestinian Bantustan might eventually emerge.
By late summer 2000 the frustration of the Palestinians had reached a dangerous level and their anger was fueled by the conviction that the American government, under the hypocritical leadership of Clinton, had reverted to the traditional policy of outright support for Israel, right or wrong, and of a corresponding disregard for the rights of the Palestinians. On Sept. 28, the deliberately provocative visit of Ariel Sharon, the most conspicuously anti-Arab of all the leading Israeli politicians, to the area the Israelis call the Temple Mount, but that today houses the sacred mosque of al-Aqsa (and the Dome of the Rock, the most beautiful building in the Arab world), touched off a predictable conflagration. So far there is no sign of its dying down.
The catastrophic situation in the Middle East today is not the result of Clinton’s actions alone, although he bears a considerable responsibility for it. The fact is that the unconditional support given by successive U.S. administrations to Israel has encouraged in Israel’s leaders of every political tendency a sense of megalomania, a conviction that they can get away with that behavior, however illegal and inhumane, without paying the price. It has allowed the Israelis to impose on the Palestinians a regime so repressive that it has left its victims without any legitimate means of redress.
When the new administration takes over in Washington, can the world look forward to a change in this vital area of foreign policy? Will George W. Bush be content to follow in the footsteps of his Democratic predecessor, in which case the present phase of low-level guerrilla activity is likely to develop into something much worse? Or will he, with his seasoned secretary of state, Colin Powell, return to the more detached attitude of his father and try to restore some sort of balance to America’s relationship with the protagonists in the Middle East?
What is needed from Washington is a firm decision to curb Israel’s presumption and to restore to the Palestinians their right to independence and a dignified existence in the land of their birth. The best way to go about this would be to take the dispute back to the proper forum for negotiations, namely the United Nations.
A blueprint for a solution to the Arab-Israeli conflict over Palestine was worked out long ago in the Security Council’s Resolution 242, and the search for peace should not have been diverted into a fraudulent “peace process,” with a self-interested American president masquerading as an “honest broker” but stacking the cards to Israel’s advantage. The result has been tragic for the Palestinians, damaging to the reputation of the United States and potentially disastrous for the people of Israel.
Michael Adams is the former Middle East correspondent for the Manchester Guardian. He is an honorary research fellow at Exeter University and lives in the United Kingdom.
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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) 
