Posted on 09/28/2001 1:03:58 PM PDT by VinnyTex
The Sorrow of Bill Clinton By John J. Miller & Ramesh Ponnuru |
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.
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." |
But Clinton never received a majority of the popular vote.
For all the wailing about how Bush isn't "legitimate", be advised that he received a higher percentage of the popular vote in 2000 than Clinton received in either 1992 or 1996.
You could even make the claim that more people voted for Algore than ever voted for Clinton...
Bill Clinton as president, the sophomore as Commander-in-Chief.
Now he's just a sophomore. An old one...
It's spread over the south end of Manhattan and will take about a year to complete.
Yes, he did. She sells handbags now...
Poor Clinton ... NOT!
The real losers are the people who still support him
Which brings me to the question of the day: Why is Bob Dole standing next to this guy on a platform forming a charity? I'm sure that Dole thinks this is a good cause (and it is), but does he really think anything with Clinton attached to it is going to be without scandal?
IMO Billy Boy is probably there to scope the babes. Bob Dole is probably just getting senile. Massive doses of Viagra will take their toll
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