Clinton Was a Bipartisan President, Except When He Wasn't

Damon Winter/The New York TimesFormer President Bill Clinton was greeted with an extended standing ovation at the Democratic convention on Wednesday.

CHARLOTTE, N.C. – Perhaps only Bill Clinton could deliver one of the most brutal partisan poundings of the other party in recent memory and come out of it with people talking about how bipartisan he is.

For 48 minutes on Wednesday night, he extolled the virtues of working with Republicans, then eviscerated them as dangerous radicals. He offered more abundant praise of George W. Bush than most prime-time speakers at the Republican convention, then said he had left President Obama “a total mess.”

“It was a pretty bipartisan speech relative to a convention,” Howard Dean, the former Democratic National Committee chairman and Vermont governor, said on CBS News on Thursday morning.

Former Gov. Ed Rendell of Pennsylvania, another former party chairman, pointed out the caveat. “It was bipartisan,” he said. “It was a little bit like giving someone flowers at the same time you’re taking a scalpel and dissecting them.”

In that sense, the speech was a vivid reminder of Mr. Clinton’s famed capacity for juggling many different ideas, personas and narratives, and along the way rewriting the history of his own presidency. The story line of a relatively bipartisan era when Democrats and Republicans came together to overhaul welfare, balance the budget and expand the economy profoundly oversimplifies a much more complicated, messier presidency.

As it happens, the revised version of history is something of a bipartisan conspiracy. As much as Mr. Clinton wants to emphasize those elements of his record, so now do Republicans, as a way of contrasting the popular Mr. Clinton with the not-so-popular Mr. Obama. They have praised Mr. Clinton as a bipartisan centrist, as opposed to the leftist Mr. Obama.

“Bill Clinton was a different kind of Democrat than Barack Obama,” Representative Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, told CNN before the former president’s speech. “Bill Clinton gave us welfare reform. Bill Clinton worked with the Republicans to cut spending. Bill Clinton did not play the kind of political games that President Obama’s playing.”

After the speech, Mitt Romney’s campaign pressed home that theme. “President Clinton drew a stark contrast between himself and President Obama tonight,” said Ryan Williams, a campaign spokesman. “Bill Clinton worked with Republicans, balanced the budget and after four years he could say you were better off. Barack Obama hasn’t worked across the aisle.”

It is certainly true that Mr. Clinton in his instincts and messaging was more centrist than Mr. Obama, and the 42nd president emerged from the White House with a string of achievements that both parties laid claim to. But to say that Mr. Clinton worked together with Speaker Newt Gingrich’s Republicans on welfare, spending, trade and other issues is an exercise in selective amnesia.

Mr. Clinton’s first major budget plan passed Congress without a single Republican vote. Once Mr. Gingrich’s party took over Congress in the 1994 midterm elections, the two men clashed over spending so fiercely that the government was shut down. The two sides eventually drafted a plan to balance the budget, but it was made considerably easier by an economy that was growing so fast that few genuinely hard choices had to be made – and in fact the budget became balanced years before it was envisioned because of unexpectedly strong tax revenues.

Likewise, many talk today about how Mr. Clinton and Republicans worked together on overhauling welfare. Not exactly. Mr. Clinton had long supported limiting the number of years that recipients could receive benefits, requiring work in many instances and providing child care, training and other assistance to make that possible.

But he strongly opposed Mr. Gingrich’s more conservative vision of welfare and twice vetoed Republican proposals before bowing to the political winds in an election year and signing a third, somewhat modified version. Even then, he spoke out against limits on benefits to legal immigrants and promised to overhaul the overhaul.

By the time he appeared at the Time Warner Cable Arena in Charlotte on Wednesday night, Mr. Clinton was grayer and memories fuzzier. The fights of his generation have faded with time, and the accomplishments have been accordioned into simple sentences. At some points it even seemed that Mr. Clinton had forgotten some of the harshest moments of his own time in the White House.

“Though I often disagree with Republicans,” he said, “I never learned to hate them the way the far right that now controls their party seems to hate President Obama and the Democrats.”

This from the man who was hated so much by Republicans that they impeached him for lying under oath about his affair with Monica Lewinsky – and who loathed a number of his enemies back.

But Mr. Clinton, more than most politicians, has always been able to reimagine himself and his place in America, and he has a knack for eventually reconciling with those he battled against.

He beat the elder George Bush in 1992, then once out of office became such good friends with him that they hang out in the Bush compound in Kennebunkport, Me. He beat Bob Dole for re-election in 1996, then bestowed on him the Medal of Freedom. He campaigned against George W. Bush in 2000 and 2004 but now travels the country with him giving joint speeches.

He even broke bread at points with conservative figures like Richard Mellon Scaife, Rupert Murdoch and Christopher Ruddy who were among his biggest antagonists in the 1990s. (The one exception has always been Kenneth W. Starr, the independent counsel who investigated his attempts to cover up his affair with Ms. Lewinsky in a sexual harassment lawsuit. “That’s another kettle of fish,” he once said.)

In any case, Mr. Clinton’s speech on Wednesday night was seen as a template for Mr. Obama, an example of how to run in a difficult year. “Cooperation works better,” Mr. Clinton said and noted the various Republicans Mr. Obama had appointed. But he went on to say that Republican plans “will hurt poor kids,” explode the debt, “force seniors to pay more for drugs,” cut taxes for millionaires and raise them for the middle class.

“They want to go back to the same old policies that got us into trouble in the first place,” he said. Then he appropriated the Republicans’ greatest recent hero, Ronald Reagan. “As another president once said, there they go again.”

The truth is that party conventions and election campaigns are partisan affairs. If Mr. Clinton provided any lesson for the current president on Wednesday, it might not be in how to be bipartisan, but how to be partisan and win while not looking like it.

View the original article here

<nbsp/> Clinton states his case for a 2nd Obama term

CHARLOTTE, N.C. — CHARLOTTE, N.C. Former President Bill Clinton wowed the crowd at the Democratic National Convention on Wednesday with a full-throated defense of President Barack Obama's job record during a dramatic speech that heaped ridicule on the Republicans' rationale for ousting Obama.

Clinton, who occupied the White House and handily won re-election during an economic-boom period in the 1990s, formally offered Obama's name for renomination in the latest twist in a relationship that has not always been so friendly. The 42nd president -- whose wife, Hillary Clinton, gave Obama his stiffest Democratic competition in the 2008 primaries -- delivered a powerful address that Obama may find difficult to top.

Obama will formally accept his party's nomination today, the same day that former Rep. Gabrielle Giffords of Arizona is expected to lead the convention in the Pledge of Allegiance. It would be Giffords' highest-profile public appearance since a nearly fatal assassination attempt almost two years ago during a constituent event outside Tucson.

Clinton's 48-minute primetime remarks, which Obama listened to from backstage at Time Warner Cable Arena, praised the president's handling of the economy and hailed him as the man who "stopped the slide into depression and put us on the long road to recovery" and who is still "committed to constructive cooperation."

Clinton acknowledged that Obama is not satisfied with the economic situation but stressed that Americans are better off than when he took office during the recent recession, which he blamed on the Republicans.

"In Tampa, the Republican argument against the president's re-election was actually pretty simple and pretty snappy," said Clinton, referring to last week's Republican National Convention, where former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney was nominated for president. "It went something like this: We left him a total mess, he hasn't finished cleaning it up yet, so fire him and put us back in."

The case for Obama's second term is stronger, Clinton said. "Here it is: He inherited a deeply damaged economy. He put a floor under the crash. He began the long hard road to recovery and laid the foundation for a more modern, more well-balanced economy that will produce millions of good new jobs, vibrant new businesses and lots of new wealth for the innovators."

Clinton's speech preceded the traditional convention roll call in which delegates from Arizona and other states announced their support for their party's renomination of Obama and Vice President Joe Biden, whose acceptance speeches have been moved indoors because of weather concerns.

Arizona's delegation, which consists of 80 delegates and six alternates, were joined for the roll call by CC Goldwater, granddaughter of the late Sen. Barry Goldwater, a five-term Arizona Republican and 1964 GOP presidential nominee.

"My grandfather wouldn't recognize the Republican Party of today," said an audibly nervous Goldwater, who endorsed Obama over Sen. John McCain in 2008 and is supporting Democrat Richard Carmona in this year's Arizona Senate race. "Barry Goldwater believed in personal freedoms, the right to privacy and a woman's right to choose. On behalf of the Arizona delegation, I want to cast 77 votes for Arizona for Barack Obama."

Other high-profile speakers on the convention's second night included House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi; Elizabeth Warren, the Democratic candidate for the Senate in Massachusetts; and Sandra Fluke, a recent law-school graduate whose advocacy for contraception coverage by insurance companies prompted conservative radio commentator Rush Limbaugh to call her a "slut."

Giffords, the three-term Arizona Democrat whose ongoing recovery from a gunshot wound to the head has inspired the nation, and her retired NASA astronaut husband, Mark Kelly, were sighted in Charlotte on Wednesday, and news of her likely appearance electrified the convention as it spread from delegate to delegate. Giffords resigned from Congress on Jan. 25 to focus on her rehabilitation.

The tightly choreographed convention was knocked off script briefly Wednesday as Democratic delegates amended their recently adopted 2012 party platform to include a reference to God and to acknowledge that "Jerusalem is and will remain the capital of Israel."

The original platform, which delegates endorsed Tuesday, drew criticism for the omissions. The changes were made only after multiple voice votes and over loud dissent.

If Obama wins a second term, he will become only the second Democrat to do so since Franklin Delano Roosevelt and the first since Clinton was re-elected in 1996.

Clinton asked delegates and television viewers to choose what kind of a country they want to live in.

"If you want a winner-take-all, you're-on-your-own society, you should support the Republican ticket," Clinton said. "But if you want a country of shared opportunities and shared responsibility -- a we're-all-in-this-together society -- you should vote for Barack Obama and Joe Biden."

Phoenix Mayor Greg Stanton, who is attending the convention, said he hopes Clinton's message of compromise resonates. Clinton stressed that in the real world, compromise and cooperation trump the "politics of constant conflict." Stanton noted that Clinton for much of his presidency had to deal with a GOP Congress and held him up as an example of someone who could work with his opponents.

"Pretty much wherever Bill Clinton goes, he's the big star," Stanton said. "Bill Clinton is very popular in America today. He is very popular among both parties. I think that was harkening back to an era when there was bipartisan agreement. And Bill Clinton was a great messenger: No one could speak to an audience of 15,000 people but make you feel like he was speaking just to you, individually, like Bill Clinton."

In another development, convention organizers announced Wednesday that Obama's acceptance speech would be moved from the outdoor Bank of America Stadium, where the NFL's Carolina Panthers play, to the Time Warner Cable Arena, a smaller, in-door facility that is home to the NBA's Charlotte Bobcats and was host to the first two days of the convention.

Steve Kerrigan, the Democratic National Convention Committee CEO, said forecast thunderstorms forced the venue change, although the decision came amid speculation that Democrats were struggling to fill the stadium's more than 65,000 seats.

On Tuesday, Ben LaBolt, the Obama-Biden campaign's national press secretary, told reporters that the plan was to proceed at Bank of America Stadium rain or shine. He denied that the campaign would have any problem finding enough people to fill the seats.

Copyright 2012 The Arizona Republic|azcentral.com. All rights reserved.For more information about reprints & permissions, visit our FAQ's. To report corrections and clarifications, contact Standards Editor Brent Jones. For publication consideration in the newspaper, send comments to letters@usatoday.com. Include name, phone number, city and state for verification. To view our corrections, go to corrections.usatoday.com.

Posted

View the original article here

The Clinton Tax Challenge for Republicans

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

Republicans are adamant that taxes on the ultra-wealthy must not rise to the level they were at during the Clinton administration, as President Obama favors, lest economic devastation result. But they have a problem – the 1990s were the most prosperous era in recent history. This requires Republicans to try to rewrite the economic history of that decade.

Perspectives from expert contributors.

In early 1993, Bill Clinton asked Congress to raise the top statutory tax rate to 39.6 percent from 31 percent, along with other tax increases. Republicans and their allies universally predicted that nothing good would come of it. They even said that it would have no impact on the deficit.

Ronald Reagan himself was enlisted to make the case the day after President Clinton unveiled his program. Writing in The New York Times, the former president said, “Taxes have never succeeded in promoting economic growth. More often than not, they have led to economic downturns.”

Of course, Reagan himself raised taxes 11 times between 1982 and 1988, increasing taxes by $133 billion a year, or 2.6 percent of the gross domestic product, by his last year in office. Presumably he supported these measures because he thought they would raise growth; otherwise he could have vetoed them.

Speaking before the Heritage Foundation’s board on April 16, 1993, former Representative Jack Kemp, Republican of New York, predicted budgetary failure from the Clinton plan. “Will raising taxes reduce the deficit?’ he asked. “No, it will weaken our economy and increase the deficit.”

Conservative economists were often quite specific about exactly what the negative impact of the president’s plan would be. On May 8, The New York Times interviewed several. John Mueller, a Wall Street consultant, said inflation would rise to “at least 5 percent within the next two or three years.”

In fact, the inflation rate did not rise at all until 1996 and then went up to 3.3 percent before falling to 1.7 percent in 1997 and 1.6 percent in 1998.

In the same article, the economist John Rutledge also saw higher inflation from the Clinton plan and said it would raise the deficit. “Look for a higher, not lower, deficit if the Clinton package passes Congress,” he said.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the federal budget deficit fell every year of the Clinton administration, from $290 billion in 1992 to $255 billion in 1993, $203 billion in 1994, $164 billion in 1995, $107 billion in 1996, and $22 billion in 1997. In 1998, there was a budget surplus of $69 billion, which rose to $126 billion in 1999 and $236 billion in 2000 before it was dissipated by huge tax cuts during the George W. Bush administration.

Among the most detailed economic analyses of the negative impact of the Clinton plan was one made by the economist Gary Robbins in August 1993. He predicted that G.D.P. would be $244.4 billion lower in 1998 compared with the C.B.O. baseline. He did not provide the baseline figure, so I looked it up. In its January 1993 projection, the budget office put G.D.P. at $7,953 billion in 1998. Subtracting Mr. Robbins’s estimate of the economic cost of the Clinton plan yields an estimated G.D.P. of $7,709 billion in 1998.

If one goes to the government Web site where the G.D.P. figures appear and looks up the one for 1998, one finds that it was $8,793 billion. Thus Mr. Robbins was off by more than $1 trillion. G.D.P. was 14 percent higher than he predicted.

Nevertheless, Republicans continue to rely upon Mr. Robbins’s estimates of the effects of the economic impact of tax cuts, which always show hugely positive effects from tax cuts. Recently, he was the author of the 9-9-9 tax plan put forward by Herman Cain as he sought the Republican presidential nomination last year.

In my posts on May 22, 2012, and Nov. 22, 2011, I presented other data on the positive economic consequences of President Clinton’s high-tax policies compared with the poor economic consequences of President Bush’s low-tax policies. Nevertheless, it is conservative dogma that we need more policies like President Bush’s and must not, under any circumstances, replicate President Clinton’s policies.

However, there are still a few people around old enough to remember the 1990s and 2000s. Even without looking up government statistics, they know that the 1990s were a time when the economy boomed, while the 2000s were a period of economic stagnation.

This has created a problem for Republicans, leading to economic revisionism.

Last year, the Republican anti-tax activist Grover Norquist asserted that the boom of the 1990s resulted from the election of a Republican Congress in 1994, because business people and financial markets somehow knew this would lead to a cut in the capital gains tax. The capital gains tax was in fact cut in 1997. But the boom and the improvement in the budget deficit long predated that event.

In July, Charles Kadlec, a Forbes columnist and author of the book “Dow 100,000” (New York Institute of Finance, 1999), insisted that it is a “myth” that the economy prospered under President Clinton’s policies. He offers no actual evidence for this assertion except to say that the economy would have done even better under Reagan-type policies. Like Mr. Norquist, he attributes anything good that happened in the 1990s to the Republican Congress, which did not take office until 1995.

Last week, the investor Edward Conard, author of a recent book glorifying the ultra-wealthy, addressed the Republicans’ Clinton problem in a commentary in The Wall Street Journal. He said that the boom of the 1990s was the result of Internet-driven growth and that President Clinton was just lucky that it happened on his watch.

Maybe so, but Mr. Conard left unexplained why the budget went from a large deficit to a large surplus simply because of the Internet or why the big tax cuts on the rich he favors failed to raise growth one iota in the 2000s.

I would not argue that tax increases are per se stimulative. It all depends on circumstances. But it is clear from the experience of the 1990s that they can play a very big role in reducing the budget deficit and are not necessarily a drag on growth. And the obvious experience of the 2000s is that tax cuts increase the deficit and don’t necessarily do anything for growth. Those arguing otherwise need to make a much better case than they have so far.

View the original article here

Would Romney Be Another Bill Clinton or Another George W. Bush?

Bruce Bartlett held senior policy roles in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations and served on the staffs of Representatives Jack Kemp and Ron Paul. He is the author of “The Benefit and the Burden: Tax Reform – Why We Need It and What It Will Take.”

Mitt Romney has lately been praising Bill Clinton’s economic policy, The New York Times has reported.

Perspectives from expert contributors.

This is a bit surprising, as Mr. Clinton is a Democrat who was widely loathed by Republicans like Mr. Romney when he was in office. Moreover, Mr. Romney seldom mentions the last president of his own party, George W. Bush, often referring to him merely as Barack Obama’s “predecessor.”

From a nonpartisan point of view, this is not surprising. Mr. Clinton consistently governed as a fiscal conservative and Mr. Bush as a liberal. However, Mr. Clinton was not a conservative by today’s standards, but rather by those of an earlier generation.

That is to say, he actually cared about the budget deficit and was willing to raise taxes to reduce it – as Ronald Reagan did 11 times, and George H.W. Bush courageously did even though he knew it would probably cost him re-election.

Today’s conservatives oppose tax increases so strenuously that many were willing to default on the nation’s debt last summer rather than raise taxes by a single penny.

They overwhelmingly believe in a nonsensical theory called “starve the beast,” which asserts that tax cuts automatically reduce spending and tax increases never reduce the deficit because they invariably lead to spending increases.

The Clinton and Bush 43 administrations are almost perfect tests of starve-the-beast theory; the former raised taxes in 1993, while the latter signed into law seven different major tax cuts, according to a Treasury study. If there were any truth whatsoever to starving the beast, we should have seen a rise in spending during the Clinton years and a fall in spending during the Bush years. In fact, we had exactly the opposite results.

Congressional Budget Office

Spending fell 3.2 percent of the gross domestic product under Mr. Clinton and increased 2.4 percent under Mr. Bush, even though taxes rose 3.1 percent of G.D.P. under the former and fell 2 percent under the latter. As a consequence, the national debt fell almost 15 percent of G.D.P. under Mr. Clinton and rose almost 8 percent under Mr. Bush.

But what about the economy? Republicans almost obsessively refer to all tax increases as job-killers. They commonly assert that tax increases would crush the economy and investment. Conversely, they assert that tax cuts are always what the economy needs to raise growth and create jobs.

This is why Mr. Romney; Paul D. Ryan, the chairman of the House Budget Committee; and every other Republican leader say that we must cut taxes, especially for the rich, even as spending for the poor is slashed in the name of fiscal responsibility.

But the record does not support the idea that tax cuts necessarily foster jobs or growth. (I think the Reagan tax cuts worked, because economic conditions were far different than today.)

Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics

As one can see, contrary to Republican dogma, tax increases did not kill jobs during the Clinton administration. In fact, 23 million jobs were created, compared with one-fourth that number under Mr. Bush. The key reason for this is that real G.D.P. grew twice as fast during the Clinton years as it did during the Bush years: 3.9 percent per year on average compared with 2 percent.

A major factor powering the higher real growth is that nonresidential investment rose sharply during the Clinton presidency but was flat throughout the Bush presidency.

I think Americans are more aware of these facts than Republicans believe. That is why they have consistently blamed Mr. Bush far more than President Obama for the poor state of the economy, as documented in these New York Times/CBS News polls.

Who do you think is mostly to blame for the current state of the nation’s economy?

1. The Bush administration
2. The Obama administration
3. Wall Street and financial institutions
4. Congress
5. Someone else

The New York Times/CBS News polls

Even more surprising is that three-fourths of the way through President Obama’s administration, three times as many people primarily blame Mr. Bush as blame Mr. Obama for the budget deficit, according to the New York Times/CBS News poll.

Who do you think is mostly to blame for most of the current federal budget deficit?

1. The Bush administration
2. The Obama administration
3. Congress
4. Someone else

The New York Times/CBS News polls

No wonder Mr. Romney would rather identify himself with Mr. Clinton than the last president of his own party.

View the original article here