How Clinton Failed

It wasn't because of Paula Jones or the cocaine ring at Mena Airport or the stories about Arkansas troopers soliciting girls for Bill Clinton that I wrote "The Trickle-Down Economy” in 1993 for Barron's.

No, that article was about economics and jobs, not sex and drugs. I quoted Winston Churchill: “Some see private enterprise as a predatory target to be shot, others as a cow to be milked, but few see it as a sturdy horse pulling the wagon.”

On the campaign trail, candidate Clinton had talked as though he knew that small business was the horse, the one healthy sector of the economy that was creating most of America's jobs. "My plan will not add new taxes on small business," he promised. “I know that 85 percent of all the new jobs in this country are generated by small businesses and I am committed to helping them prosper.”

Instead, what we got right out of the chute was a Clinton plan to “grow the economy” through the largest tax hike in history, disproportionately targeting precisely the job-creating small businesses that he'd pledged to help prosper, a new Labor Secretary that was anti-entrepreneurial, and a proposed broad expansion of government mandates that would dramatically raise small business costs. Clinton, in short, was quickly, energetically, and thoughtlessly pushing an agenda that would kill the Golden Goose of job creation in the U.S. economy.

The impact was immediate. The 4.8 percent annual growth rate in GDP that Clinton inherited from the final quarter of 1992—the strongest growth in five years, a condition that Clinton labeled "the greatest recession in American history" —had collapsed to an annual rate of 0.7 percent by the first quarter of 1993.

For many small business owners, and I was one of them, the caution lights began flashing in 1992 during Bill Clinton's Democratic Convention speech. “I have news for the forces of greed and the defenders of the status quo,” he declared. “Your time has come and gone.” It was a safe bet that he wasn't talking about money-hungry trial lawyers or overpaid bureaucrats, or people who steal silverware and sell pardons.

For others, the clearest signal of the Clintons' combination of arrogance and ineptitude came during a 1993 visit to Capitol Hill by Hillary Clinton. Asked by Virginia Congressman Norman Sisisky what could be done to ease the burden of her health care mandates on small business, the First Lady retorted in her best let-'em-eat-cake style, “I can't go out and save every undercapitalized entrepreneur in America.”

Her verdict on business owners who couldn't afford to give 100 percent health care coverage to 100 percent of their employees was loud and clear: Go out of business if you can't pay for my vision. “Your time has come and gone.”

In Reich's Ivy League version of reality, “the American myth of the Triumphant Individual may have outlasted its time.” Plugged into the First Lady's collectivist paradigm, Reich declared that “success can be measured only in reference to collective results.” He warned against an economy that relies too much on individualistic endeavor, explaining that the “investments of wealthier Americans no longer trickle down to the rest of the American people.”

These were strange words to the ears of America's entrepreneurs and small business owners, a truly foreign philosophy—anti-individualistic, anti-capitalist, anti-rich, anti-investment, anti-growth, anti-freedom.

The result was a backlash that hit in the 1994 elections, giving Republicans control of both houses of Congress for the first time in nearly half a century. House Speaker Newt Gingrich pointed to the pivotal role played by small business in this political upheaval: “It began in 1994 when millions of small business people, outraged by the Clinton administration's health care reform plan, became politically energized as never before. They had simply had enough and were determined not to take it anymore from a big government. The elections of 1994 and 1996 have witnessed the first full muscle-flexing of the small business community.”

With 215,000 member companies across America in every line of business, 96 percent with fewer than 100 employees, Richard Lesher, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, has his finger directly on the pulse on Main Street U.S.A. He, too, saw firsthand the same grass roots earthquake: “Rage against regulatory overkill—especially among small business people—was a critical factor in the political revolution of 1994. Every new regulatory program, every new mandate, every haughty bureaucrat, every new federal record-keeping requirement reinforces their perception of a government out of control. In 1994, this cauldron of discontent exploded, sparked by Clinton's health care plan, the single most polarizing issue that forced small business to the barricades in almost unanimous opposition. It was that one single issue, more than any other, that led to the massive turnover in Congress later that year."

I was there, at the barricades, and Lesher and Gingrich have it exactly right. The Clintons were de-railed by Main Street, brought down by people who wouldn't let the American dream of business ownership be turned into a nightmare by government elitism, bureaucracy run amok, confiscatory taxation, a blizzard of paperwork and an epidemic of zany lawsuits.

Simply put, the entrepreneurial men and women who value their independence, the people who wouldn't buy the idea that they were obsolete, and the business owners who get up every day and create the bulk of the nation's new jobs had a message for the Clintons: “Your time has come and gone.”

And now, right in The New York Times no less, we're told by Paul Krugman in his article "The Smoke Machine" that none of that happened, that Bill Clinton's downfall was engineered from behind a curtain by a small right-wing gang of super-rich crazies, that all the hoopla was about an innocent Whitewater investment and things that should have remained private, like sex.

Commenting on David Brock's new book, "Blinded by the Right: The conscience of an ex-conservative," Krugman argues that Brock shows that the "scandal machine that employed Mr. Brock was, in effect, a special-interest group financed by a handful of wealthy fanatics --- men like the Rev. Sun Myung Moon, whose cultlike Unification Church owns The Washington Times, and Richard Mellon Scaife, who bankrolled the scandal-mongering American Spectator and many other right-wing enterprises."

And, says Krugman, we were all too dumb to realize that these "wealthy fanatics" had simply manipulated us into hating Clinton: "It was effective because the typical news consumer didn't realize what was going on."

Bottom line, Mr. Krugman paints the criticism of Bill Clinton as just so much smoke, generated by, in columnist Andrew Sullivan's words, "a plutocratic-funded smear machine."

—Ralph R. Reiland, the B. Kenneth Simon of free enterprise at Robert Morris University and the owner of Amel's Restaurant in Pittsburgh, was a delegate to the White House Conference on Small Business during the Clinton years.

It is hard for me to understand how the Clintons believe in higher taxes and the "your time has come and gone" attitude toward business while they line their pockets with $$$ from book deals, speeches and pardon selling, etc. We can see how Clinton lied before the 1992 election and how he was able to convince the populace of the economy going south. I believe the only reason he won in 1996 was b/c he did not have a strong enough republican challenger. Further proof that the democrats will lie and deceive the American people to get what they want.

Bill Clinton won in 92 for two reasons:

1) GHWB did not want to be president anymore but did not want to make a LBJ-like speech, thereby leaving his heart out of the campaign, and

2) Ross Perot

This is a great article from a great magazine, The American Enterprise. However, the frequently quoted example about all the new jobs coming from small business establishments is misleading. These statistics include new establishments of large corporations as well as small businesses. For example, if Fortune 100 corporation X opens a new branch sales office in Des Moines where 50 people work, that is counted. Much of the employment of large corporations is in relatively small offices, with large facilities being limited to perhaps a few manufacturing plants and the corporate headquarters.

If my memory serves me,I believe that"HitLery"(when informed that many small-businesses couldn't afford to provide their employees with"HitLery Health-Care")replied "I'm Not Responsible For Under-Capitalized Businesses"Apparently,Mr.&Mrs"BeelzeBubba"are not responsible for ANYTHING!!Lying Under Oath,Obstructing Justice etc.etc...And to top it,after declaring that"The Era of Greed"(Ours)Is Over",I guess that theirs is just getting going!!!!!!!!!!!!

Piling on was Robert Reich, straight from Harvard, tapped to be Bill Clinton's Secretary of Labor. Charged with maximizing jobs for “labor,” Reich looked at the nation's millions of successful entrepreneurs and small business owners, the people who create most of America's jobs, and proclaimed that their time had, as his boss had said, “come and gone.” In Reich's Ivy League version of reality, “the American myth of the Triumphant Individual may have outlasted its time.” Plugged into the First Lady's collectivist paradigm, Reich declared that “success can be measured only in reference to collective results.” He warned against an economy that relies too much on individualistic endeavor, explaining that the “investments of wealthier Americans no longer trickle down to the rest of the American people.” These were strange words to the ears of America's entrepreneurs and small business owners, a truly foreign philosophy—anti-individualistic, anti-capitalist, anti-rich, anti-investment, anti-growth, anti-freedom

He'll fit right into Taxuschewshits!

"It was effective because the typical news consumer didn't realize what was going on."

Typical of the Vast Kneepad Conspiracy; blame the "stupid" rabble. Well, the rabble aren't stupid. We can see what the Vast Kneepad Conspiracy is trying to do to W.

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