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R E C E N T L Y The vendetta continues
Why Lott and Barr hate Clinton
Strong-arm and hammer
The GOP goes "liberal"
Head of Newt
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Assuming they fail in that effort, the Republicans will have to face a popular president who may actually be strengthened rather than weakened by the partisan process of impeachment. And the Republican majority in both houses of Congress, focused on their own dimming prospects for reelection in 2000, may find themselves under tremendous pressure to move on Clinton's progressive proposals for revamping Social Security, raising the minimum wage and establishing "universal savings accounts" as a supplemental pension scheme.
With the exception of his deplorable plan to spend billions on the destabilizing Star Wars boondoggle, Clinton's address represented the most direct challenge to the conventional wisdom (or, more accurately, the conventional idiocy) of conservatism in many years. Experience has taught him -- and by now should have taught the rest of us -- that the canned conservative nostrums about taxation, growth and regulation are thoroughly discredited.
Clinton's call for government-sponsored investment of Social Security funds in the stock market, a clear rejection of his old slogan regarding the demise of "big government," stunned those on the right who have been scheming for years to "privatize" the retirement system and profit from billions annually in commissions.
His demand for a substantial, dollar-an-hour hike in the minimum wage must have reminded the Republicans of their painful humiliation in 1996 -- when he and the Democrats fought for and won a similar increase, over the protest of conservatives who believe the minimum wage should be abolished.
And the same ideologues already have denounced his "USA" proposal, which would encourage savings by distributing a portion of future budget surpluses to the working poor, as potentially the greatest redistribution of wealth in American history.
Listen carefully over the next few months and you will hear the voices of Sen. Phil Gramm and Rep. John Kasich, leading economic spokesmen for the GOP, warning of catastrophe if the president achieves any of his economic objectives.
Of course, those same urgent warnings have been uttered before, with boring regularity, whenever Clinton dared to indulge the progressive wing of his coalition. Even a relatively minor initiative such as the Family and Medical Leave Act, Clinton's first successful legislation, was expected to impose an insupportable burden on businesses small and large; yet family leave has been so easily accommodated that his new proposal to extend it raised barely a peep of protest. The minimum wage increase of 1996 was supposed to ruin the labor market and lead to massive increases in unemployment, especially among the young and the poor. But somehow we are now enjoying the lowest unemployment rate in almost four decades, disposing of one of the hoariest myths of the conservative creed.
N E X T_P A G E | No gloating over GOP's inaccurate predictions of doom
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Sooner rather than later -- but eventually, in any case -- attention will shift from the impeachment coup against President Clinton to the controversial plans he articulated in his