The Sorrow of Bill Clinton
It’s all about him.
By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru
September 28, 2001 3:40 p.m.
No president obsessed over his "legacy" as much as Bill Clinton did. He sometimes complained that he had no enormous national crisis to contend with, meaning that he didn't have a fair shot at attaining historic greatness. "The first thing I had to start with was, you know, we don't have a war," he told the New York Times in 1997. "We don't have a depression, we don't have a Cold War." Poor guy. He never really had a chance.
Some of us worried whether he was up to handling Haiti, never mind a global crisis. It's no surprise, however, that he's in a funk now, as his successor is being lauded for his handling of a national catastrophe, praised for delivering one of the great speeches in American history, and hurtled into stratospheric levels of popularity according to the opinion polls that Clinton so treasured during his tenure.
Today's New York Times describes Clinton as lamenting that such a thing didn't happen on his watch. Richard L. Berke reports, "A close friend of Mr. Clinton put it this way: 'He has said there has to be a defining moment in a presidency that really makes a great president. He didn't have one.'"
More than 6,000 people die to terrorism, and Bill Clinton still thinks it's all about him.
Economic Consequences of the War
Prospects for trade promotion authority — which lets the president's men negotiate trade deals that Congress agrees not to amend, but only to approve or disapprove — looked pretty bleak before the September massacres. Now they're looking, if not great, at least better.
Part of the reason is the bipartisan sentiment that the president should be free to conduct foreign policy. Trade liberalization tends to be achieved by strong presidents overcoming congressional parochialism and logrolling. When presidents are weak, protectionism surges. It was after the Reagan administration was crippled by Iran-contra that Dick Gephardt was able to pass legislation authorizing retaliatory tariffs against countries deemed to be "unfair traders." And it was a sign of Clinton's second-term weakness that he was unable to win trade-promotion authority (then called "fast track"). President Bush's political strength has, of course, increased dramatically since September 11.
Bill Thomas, the chairman of the ways and means committee, has made passage more likely by reaching a compromise with New Democrats. The compromise includes some provisions on labor and the environment. But as Brink Lindsey, a trade analyst at the Cato Institute, notes, that should not be a red flag to free-market advocates so long as the language is "hortatory not mandatory." Since we're not going to be able to get other countries to sign a global free-trade deal with such conditions, there's no reason for Bush's trade negotiators to take the labor-and-environment provisions too seriously.
A more serious problem is that the compromise asks negotiators to protect the country's egregious "anti-dumping" laws, which target countries that commit the crime of selling products to us too cheaply. This demand should be softened: Negotiators could be asked to safeguard the goals of anti-dumping laws, such as they are, without necessarily committing to the laws themselves. But at least the compromise ignores the proposal of Democrat Max Baucus, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, that the president's authority not extend to any deal that would require a change in American laws — which would abort negotiations before they even start.
The global economy could use trade liberalization at the moment, not that it's relevant to the political dynamics on the Hill. After the attacks, currency markets saw the typical flight to safety — which hit the economies of Latin America, especially Brazil and by extension Argentina, hard. As Mark Falcoff of the American Enterprise Institute has noted, the continent is already backsliding from democracy. We don't need instability to our south right now, or demands for U.S. aid.
Wisconsin congressman Paul Ryan, an increasingly influential voice in Republican economic-policy debates, thinks trade-promotion authority can pass. "It's important for the economy, and it's important for national security," he says. "We have no choice. We've got to pass this. It's too important."