The Clinton Years:

Progressive Or Regressive?

by Mark Rathbun, We The People News Corpus Christi Texas

How soon we forget. When Bill Clinton first ran for president against George H.W. Bush he fought off claims that he was too inexperienced with these words, "The same old experience is not relevant." Clinton went on to extol the virtues of "experience" that is "rooted in the real lives of real people" exercised so that "it will bring real results if we have the courage to change."

Flash forward sixteen years and we are treated to the same Clinton now leading the charge against the alleged inexperience of Barack Obama. Never mind that Obama has served as an elected official four years longer than Mrs. Clinton. The encoded pitch both Clintons repeatedly use brushes aside that inconvenient fact. Hilary has called it the experience of "eight years with a front-row seat on history." Bill has called it a kind of "partnership" they exercised during his presidency. While both have been understandably vague when it comes to defining Hilary's exact role as First Lady, Clinton surrogates and insiders have flanked the campaign by connecting the dots with more direct statements.

One Clinton campaign official stated that Hillary was "the face of the administration in foreign affairs." Clinton friend, trade representative, and Commerce Secretary Mickey Cantor put it like this, "In the end, she was the last court of appeal for him when he was making a decision. I would be surprised if there was any major decision he made that she didn’t weigh in on." Clinton's White House counsel Bernard Nussbaum had this to say, "They really were a partnership. She was the absolutely necessary person he had to have to bounce things up against, and he was that for her. I sensed a tremendous need for each other."

Ultimately, on Saturday February 23rd as Hillary's once-large Texas lead in the polls nearly evaporated, Bill and Hillary's at-first-subtle message became at once crystal clear and contradictory respectively. According to the Caller-Times Bill Clinton told a Corpus Christi crowd on that Saturday "One big difference in these two campaigns is that Hillary believes we had it good in the 1990's, and we can do better now." On the same day Hillary lashed out at Obama in Ohio for allegedly falsely characterizing Clinton's pro-NAFTA stance. Apparently relying on the argument that "it all depends on what the meaning of the word 'Clinton' is", Hillary implied she was anti-NAFTA when in fact she has sung its praises publicly many times.

While many pundits have weighed in on the extent of Mrs. Clinton's influence during her husband's administration, curiously no one in the mainstream media seems to have examined just what the Clinton administration accomplished in eight years. They take it for granted the nineties were good times all around as Mrs. Clinton has so often reminded Americans from the stump. Was the Clinton administration good? Apparently, to the Clintons, it all depends on what the meaning of the word "good" is.

To provide a more concrete answer, we turned to the man who has come to be known as the most respected progressive historian in America, Howard Zinn. We examined issues on which the Clinton camp has invoked the 'Clinton White House experience' argument in Hillary's favor. Under each of those issues we provide a portion of text from Zinn's The Twentieth Century (HarperCollins, 2003) which constitutes a portion of his seminal A People's History of the United States. All Zinn passages appear in italics and are taken from the chapter The Clinton Presidency.

Universal Health Care

On the heels of losing ten straight primaries, Mrs. Clinton has lately become downright shrill in falsely accusing Mr. Obama of eschewing universal health care, recently claiming he will make millions of people "virtually invisible." Meanwhile, her husband has come up with a new line that both implies that electing Obama will be "tragic" and provides a convenient justification for his wife's failure to get universal health care inititiated when she was deputized to do so during his administration, "It would be truly tragic if the Democratic Party walked away from universal health care for the first time in 60 years when we finally got the business community and the medical community in line behind us." President Clinton's "only now are the moon and stars aligned" scenario would appear to be purely manufactured in the light of Mr. Zinn's take on history:

Despite Clinton's 1997 Inauguration Day promise of a "new government," his presidency offered no bold program to take care of those needs. For instance, although public-opinion polls through the eighties and nineties indicated that the American people would support a program of free universal medical care supported by the general treasury, Clinton was reluctant to advocate this. Instead, he put his wife Hillary, in charge of a commission whose final report was over a thousand pages long, impossibly dense and complicated, and yet offering no answer to the problem: how to assure every American medical care, free of the intervention of profiteering insurance companies.

It's the economy, stupid

When Obama was threatening her anticipated Super Tuesday sweep Mrs. Clinton played the "Clinton Years" card in spades in the Kodak theater debate in Hollywood. She invoked how well everyone was doing financially in the nineties implying she somehow shared in that alleged state of affairs. Mr. Zinn wrote the following about the economy during the Clinton years':

Clinton's small gestures would not come close to what was needed in a nation where one-fourth of the children lived in poverty; where homeless people lived on the streets in every major city; where women could not look for work for lack of child care; where the air, the water, were deteriorating dangerously.

According to business magazine Forbes, the 400 richest families owned $92 billion in 1982, but thirteen years later this had jumped to $480 billion. In the nineties, the wealth of the 500 corporations of the Standard and Poor's Index had increated by 335 percent. The Dow Jones average of stock prices had gone up 400 percent between 1980 and 1995, while the average wage of workers had declined in purchasing power by 15 percent.

It was therefore possible to say that the U.S. economy was "healthy" -- but only if you considered the richest part of the population. Meanwhile, 40 million people were without health insurance (the number having risen by 33 percent during the nineties), and infants died of sickness and malnutrition at a rate higher than that of any other industrialized country. There seemed to be unlimited funds for the military, but people who performed vital human services, in health and education, had to struggle to barely survive...According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics of the U.S. Census Bureau, in 1998, one of every three working people in the United States had jobs paying at or below the federal poverty level.

Clinton's foreign economic policy was in keeping with the nation's history, in which both major parties were more concerned for corporate interests than for the rights of working people, here or abroad, and saw foreign aid as a political and economic tool more than as a humanitarian act.

Commander-In-Chief, ready on day one

In The Greatest Story Every Sold (The Penquin Press, 2006), author/columnist Frank Rich closely analyzed the campaign of fear George W. Bush and Karl Rove orchastrated against the country during the 2002 mid-term and 2004 presidential elections. Mr. Rich exposed the fact that Bush specifically targetted women of child-bearing and child-raising years, attempting to extort their votes by creating in their minds the ever-present danger of their children being blown away in a terrorist attack.

In 2008 Mrs. Clinton's adoption of the Bush/Rove tactic went largely unremarked. It began in earnest in the wake of the Iowa caucuses where Mr. Obama unexpectedly beat her by a large margin. The very next day, while stumping in New Hampshire Mrs. Clinton predicted that "terrorists" would test out the nerve of our next president by conducting some spectacular, mass-destruction strike in America. She, of course, swore she would be ready on day one. After all, who could be better battle tested than "the face of foreign policy" in the Clinton administration.

While the mainstream media largely gave President Clinton a pass when it came to his initiated military engagements, Mr. Zinn found that while Clinton pandered to the Military/Industrial complex with ever-spiraling appropriations his military engagements were some of the most ill-advised and badly executed in the history of America.

In Clinton's presidency, the government continued to spend at least $250 billion a year to maintain the military machine. He was accepting the Republican claim that the nation must be ready to fight "two regional wars" simultaneously, despite the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. At that time, Bush's Secretary of Defense, Dick Cheney, had said, "the threats have become so remote that they are difficult to discern." General Colin Powell spoke similarly (reported in Defense News, April 8, 1991): "I'm running out of demons. I'm running out of villains. I'm down to Castro and Kim Il Sung."

Clinton seemed anxious to show strength. He had been in office barely six months when he sent the Air Force to drop bombs on Baghdad, presumably in retaliation for an assassination plot against George Bush on the ocassion of his visit to Kuwait. The evidence for such a plot was very weak, coming as it did from the notoriously corrupt Kuwaiti police, and Clinton did not wait for the results of the trial supposed to take place of those accused of the plot.

And so, U.S. planes, claiming to have targeted "Intelligence Headquarters" in the Iraqi capital, bombed a suburban neighborhood, killing at least six people, including a prominent Iraqi artist and her husband.

Columnist Molly Ivins suggested that the bombing of Baghdad for the purpose of "sending a powerful message" fit the definition of terrorism. 'The maddening thing about terrorists is that they are indiscriminate in their acts of vengeance, or cries for attention, or whatever...What is true for individuals...must also be true of nations.'

In Somalia, East Africa, in June 1993, with the country in a civil war and people desperate for food, the United States intervened late and badly...The Clinton administration made the mistake of intervening in an internal conflict between warlords. It decided to hunt down the most prominent of these, General Mohamed Aidid, in a military operation that ended with the killing of 19 Americans and perhaps 2,000 Somalis in October 1993.

The catastrophic policy in Somalia led to another one the following year, in Rwanda, where famine and murderous tribal warfare were ignored. There was a U.N. force in Rwanda that might have saved tens of thousands of lives, but the United States insisted that it be cut back to a skeleton force. The result was genocide -- at least a million Rwandans died.

By early 1997, the United States was selling more arms abroad than all other nations combined. Lawrence Korb, a Department of Defense official under Reagan but later a critic of arms sales, wrote: 'It has become a money game: an absurd spiral in which we export arms only to have to develop more sophisticated ones to counter those spread out all over the world."

International Trade: NAFTA

While Mrs. Clinton has lately adopted a Texas-Two-Step response on NAFTA questions since Mr. Obama has been pressing the point that the American-job devourer was signed during her presidential partnership, shortly after she launched her presidential bid she told Time magazine, "I think NAFTA was, in principle, a good idea to try to create a better trading market between Canada and the United States and Mexico." At other times, she has attempted to position NAFTA as something the Clinton administration unwillingly adopted from the first Bush. Again, Mr. Zinn's history tends to expose another Clinton attempt to rewrite history:

The slogan of "free trade" became an important objective for the Clinton administration, and, with the support of Republicans as well as Democrats, Congress enacted the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico. This removed obstacles for corporate capital and goods to move freely back and forth across the Mexican-United States border...

Two economists for the Institute for Policy Studies, examining NAFTA in early 1995, after a year of its operation, found that it had caused a net loss of 10,000 U.S. jobs While more workers in Mexico were now hired by U.S. corporations that moved there, they were working at low wages, with 'lax enforcement of workers' rights and environmental standards.'

The claim of the United States to support 'free trade' was hardly to be believed, since the government interfered with trade when this did not serve the "national interests", which was a euphemism for corporate interest.

Immigration

We found no reference to Mrs. Clinton invoking her White House experience on the issue of immigration. However, given her emotional pandering to the Latino vote and professed deep, personal comitment to humane immigration policy, one might ask "where was she when her partner was cracking down ruthlessly on immigrants, both legal and undocumented?" After all, she has said she "was intimately involved in so much that went on in the White House, here at home and around the world." Mr. Zinn recounted the Clinton Administration's policies on immigration:

The reform spirit of the sixties had led to an easing of restrictions on immigration, but in the nineties, Democrats and Republicans alike played on the economic fears of working Americans. Jobs were being lost because corporations were firing employees to save money ("downsizing") or moving plants out of the country to more profitable situations. Immigrants, especially the large numbers coming over the southern border of Mexico, were blamed for taking jobs from citizens of the United States, for receiving government benefits, for causing higher taxes on American citizens.

Both major political parties joined to pass legislation, which Clinton then signed, to remove welfare benefits (food stamps, payments to elderly and disabled people) from not only illegal immigrants but legal immigrants...

Illegal immigrants fleeing poverty in Mexico began to face harsher treatment in the early nineties. Thousands of border guards were added...

Hundreds of thousands of Central Americans who had fled death squads in Guatamala and El Salvador while the United States was giving military aid to those governments now faced deportation because they had never been deemed "political" refugees. To admit that these cases were political would have given the lie to US. claims at the time that those repressive regimes were improving their human rights record and therefore deserved to continue receiving military aid.

In early 1996, Congress and the President joined to pass an "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act," allowing deporation of any immigrant ever convicted of a crime, no matter how long ago or how serious. Lawful permanent residents who had married Americans and now had children were not exempt. The New York Times reported that July that "hundreds of long-term legal residents have been arrested since the law passed." There was a certain irrationality to this new law, for it was passed in response to the blowing up of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City by Timothy McVeigh, who was native born.

The new government policy toward immigrants, far from fulfilling Clinton's promise of "a new government for a new century," was a throwback to the notorious Alien and Sedition Laws of 1798 and the McCarthy-era McCarren-Walter Act of the 1950s.

Electability

For several months the Clinton campaign has been pimping out Bill to double team Mr. Obama in every primary state. Just who the candidate truly is has sometimes become so confusing some media have resorted to calling it the Billary ticket. Billary continually hammers home the "electability" issue, claiming it has been 'tested and vetted' and been elected to the White House twice, while its opponent only offers "rhetoric." But did the Clinton Presidency ever win a mandate from American voters? And did it deliver on its own rhetoric? Mr. Zinn wrote the following about Bill's two Presidential campaigns:

Clinton had barely won election both times. In 1992, with 45 percent of the voting population staying away from the polls, he only received 43 percent of the votes, the senior Bush getting 38 percent, while 19 percent of the voters showed their distates for both parties by voting for a third-party candidate, Ross Perot. In 1996, with half the population not voting, Clinton won 49 percent of the votes against a lackluster Republican candidate, Robert Dole.

There was a distinct absence of voter enthusiasm. One bumper sticker: "If God had intended us to vote, he would have given us candidates.

At his second inauguration ceremony, Clinton spoke of the nation at the edge of 'a new century, in a new millennium.' He said: "We need a new government for a new century." But Clinton's rhetoric was not matched by his performance.