III. Clinton/Gore 1992—2000: A Balance Sheet of Eight Years of their Center-Right Strategy
Democratic presidential candidate Al Gore tries to simultaneously claim the achievements of his partnership with Clinton while distancing himself from what
he perceives as Clinton's personal vulnerability. While Gore blithely proclaims "I am my own man," it is his past record that can best predict his future practice. Let's look at the carefully-crafted
center-right Democratic Leadership Council plan that Clinton and Gore perfected. The Clinton administration opened its campaign with
gestures to the Left, moved to consolidate the Center, and then to draw support from the Right. During the 1980s, when the
Democrats became convinced that there was no historical possibility of a pro-black, liberal Democrat who could get elected, and traumatized by Reagan's defeat of Carter and Mondale, and George Bush's
trouncing of Dukakis, they created the Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), a "centrist" caucus of Democrats trying to become "New Democrats." They consciously distanced themselves from federal funding of
social programs, afraid of Reagan's clever charges of "tax and spend liberals;" they deliberately distanced themselves from any defense of civil rights, implicitly agreeing with the Right's defense of white
rights and claims of "reverse discrimination;" they consciously courted the business community, trying to distance themselves from "anti-business" Democrats in the age of the free market. Bill Clinton and
Richard Gephardt were among its founders, and Bill Clinton was its first successful nominee in 1992. It is hard to remember now that the Clinton/Gore campaign in 1992 drew from the Left and
Right to form its centrist political strategy. It needed Left campaign workers and Right voters in order to seize the presidency. Appealing to the Left, the Clinton administration outlined a bold plan for
universal health care—not the progressive "single payer" Canadian plan, but one in which the government would subsidize the insurance companies who in turn would finance, and profit from, a fundamentally
private medical system. His plan was mauled by the strong male chauvinist backlash against the administration's chief health-care advocate First Lady Hillary Clinton, and by the power of the medical
insurance lobby to influence Congress, including members of the Democratic Party. Clinton dropped this single most publicized campaign initiative and never touched it again. Clinton/Gore
campaigned with a promise to expand gay/lesbian rights, very courageous in itself, but the effort was beaten back by the reactionary U.S. army. Clinton quickly collapsed, deferring to his electoral
constituency on the Right. "Don't ask, don't tell" is a massive violation of first amendment and gay/lesbian rights, and in many ways is worse than the status quo ante. By 1994, Clinton was
confronted by the success of Newt Gingrich's brilliantly organized Contract With America, which led to a massive Republican victory in the Congressional elections. In response, Clinton developed a plan
called "triangulation" in which he posited himself as "independent" of both Democrats and Republicans. These voters were the conservative, racist working class and middle class whites who were the primary
beneficiaries of the New Deal, but defected to Reagan and Bush in explicit opposition to civil rights, abortion rights, and anti-war politics. Democratic liberals meekly protested, but they had no where to
go. It worked—Clinton landed on his feet and was re-elected world leader of the imperialist system in 1996. Bill Clinton became the
king of the bull market, the soldier who "breaks down" obstacles to U.S. capitalist penetration, the architect of an international neoliberal program of inclusion and co-optation.
In his 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton ran on a muted populist theme that economic stability is good for everyone in the United States, and reached out
in particular to the white working and middle class. This appeal was popularized by advisor, James Carville, with the slogan, "It's the economy, stupid." The new wave capitalist class in the Silicon Valley,
which Clinton and Gore had long since courted in anticipation of the global political impact of the high tech stock market, understood that whatever appeal Clinton made to the electorate, what he meant was
"It's U.S. imperialism, stupid!"A recent New York Times
article explained that in the eight years of the Clinton and Gore administration, the "wealth gap" between rich and poor in the U.S. has widened considerably. The fact that America Online, an internet startup only a few years ago, was able to take over Time Warner, the largest traditional media conglomerate in the world, is symbolic of the enormous capitalist revolution under Clinton. It's no surprise that an email joke circulating in Europe recently made the front page of the
International Herald Tribune: "In a surprise announcement, AOL Time Warner announced Friday that it had acquired France. This marks the first time that a multimedia company has purchased an entire
nation." Indeed, Clinton has used the Department of Commerce, the Agency for International Development, and the State Department—shaped in its early stages by corporate lawyer Warren
Christopher and Third World trade manipulator Ron Brown—to help U.S. transnational corporations penetrate Europe, east and west, China, and every Third World nation possible. This complex penetration of
foreign markets and the effort to integrate them into a world "American system" led by U.S. transnsnationals has defined the Clinton/Gore foreign policy. In search of new markets and in defense
of old ones, Clinton virtually invented the military invasion and aerial bombardment of Kosovo and led the U.S. takeover of NATO. Clinton has continued, rather than abandoned, the Bush administration's
scapegoating of Iraq, including eight more years of U.S. air strikes and starvation of civilian populations. He has refused to challenge the Helms-Burton embargo of Cuba. He has appeased the Pentagon at
every turn, often allocating more funds than they even requested. Clinton/Gore ran as environmental candidates and yet in eight years
their policies contributed to U.S. and world ecological devastation by implementing neoliberal deregulation policies. When
Clinton and Gore were elected, there was enormous enthusiasm among mainstream environmentalists, but also among black, Latino, Asian, and indigenous leaders of the environmental justice movement, some of
whom were included in the "transition team." But within a few years it became clear that Al Gore's book Earth in the Balance had become reduced to a bed-time fairy tale.In our own work
at the Strategy Center, we have seen the Clinton/Gore administration support the buying and selling of air pollution credits and the gutting of strict air quality standards in Los Angeles, while virtually
every democratic Party candidate and trade union official has attacked environmental regulations as "killing business and jobs." A new group, Environmentalists Against Gore, has developed a detailed critique
of the Clinton/Gore administration constant practice of breaking promises on the environment in a "cynical orchestrated charade" that has included:
- turning his back on people of Appalachia by allowing mountains and streams to be destroyed by strip mining
- increasing the logging of what's left of publicly owned native and old growth national forests and monuments
- encouraging big sugar plantations to continue to pollute our everglades
- promoting offshore oil drilling in Florida, California, and Alaska
- turning the Endangered Species Act into a tool of extinction.
The deep-seated chauvinism of Clinton/Gore populism has celebrated "working family values" while cutting social welfare and successfully
co-opting the black and Latino congressional caucuses, the AFL-CIO, and even many in the environmental justice movement—the very forces positioned inside the system who could resist it. Clinton and Gore, as white Southerners, well understand the deeply conservative and racist ideology that is at the core of the entire
society—north and south. They also understand that those same white working class families desperately need economic relief, but would rather starve to death than accept government benefits they believe are
associated with minority peoples—this is the powerful material force of white racism.Clinton worked a brilliant political alchemy—turning the Reagan/Bush appeal of "family values" into the
slogan coined by the AFL-CIO President John Sweeney, "help for working families." Clinton reached out to the white working class by calling it what it likes, "the middle class," or "those who work hard and
play by the rules" and focused every appeal to "the family" such as family leave, tax cuts for working families. It was as if a woman had to be in a nuclear family dominated by a man in order to have any
benefits at all. Unfortunately, this had appeal even to sectors of the black, Latino, and Asian middle classes who have also developed a desire to distance themselves from the poor, low-wage working class of
their own nationalities. The flip side of this appeal to "working family values" has been the attack on those who receive government welfare benefits—begun ideologically by Reagan's attacks on
"welfare queens." While Reagan began the racist diatribe, it was implemented into policy by Clinton and Gore. Aid to Families with Dependent Children was a mandate of the New Deal, and was dramatically
expanded by the anti-racist movements of the 1960s. Clinton's attacks on social welfare protections, forcing women into the workforce without living wage jobs, transportation, or childcare—done in the most
cynical manner right before the 1996 election—threw black and Latina women and children to the Gingrich wolves. Clinton's ultimate feint-Left-turn-Right exercise was the sacrifice of
progressive black law school professor Lani Guinier, who Clinton initially proposed for director of the Justice Department's Civil Rights division. As an anti-racist judicial theorist, Guinier had tried to
address the concerns we share about the intractability of white racism by proposing a series of administrative measures that would protect black constitutional and civil rights from the tyranny of the white
majority—such as black electoral districts and guaranteed rights for blacks that white majorities could not abrogate. She was attacked by the Right as the "quota queen" (not much different from "welfare
queen") using the rabid mix of misogyny and racism that fuels white supremacist ideology in this country. Clinton dropped Guinier's nomination like a hot potato, claiming he had never inhaled any of her law
review articles. The black liberals in the administration put up little fight, focusing instead on their own appointments to higher office. Combining threat with offers of inclusion, the
Clinton/Gore team so successfully co-opted their liberal critics that in the face of the dismantling of welfare, there was no organized resistance by the Congressional Black Caucus, nor has there been any
serious challenge on the blockade of Cuba, the institutionalization of a permanent prison industry, or the growing U.S. intervention in Colombia. With the goal of curtailing mass protests, the Democratic
Party has built ties to many progressives and grassroots groups. The Party has convinced many liberal, black, Latino, Asian/Pacific Islander, and women elected officials that achieving civil rights means
getting elected, and easily persuaded liberal "advocacy groups" and AFL-CIO unions that any militant challenges will end their "inside" influence. The Clinton/Gore administration has made conservative judicial appointments and ushered in reactionary criminal justice policies. With the executive power to make judicial appointments, Clinton has approached his choices from the perspective of whether they would be approved by the U.S.
Senate, meaning the conservative and racist wings of the Democratic Party and the Republican right wing led by Senate Judiciary Committee Chair Orrin Hatch. During the Reagan and Bush administrations, the
Republicans made test cases out of the nominations of right-wing ideologues Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas, losing with Bork but eventually wearing the Democrats down with Thomas. While Clinton has proposed
a few liberal and black appointments to less powerful judicial positions that were rejected by the Republicans, he has never chosen a public showdown with the Right. Consistent with this capitulation, if not
consent, to the racist Right take-over of the legal system, Clinton did virtually nothing to challenge that arrangement; instead, for the historically critical positions on the Supreme Court he appointed
moderate to conservative jurists, Stephen Breir and Ruth Bader Ginsburg. On cases regarding criminal justice—questions of searches, warrants, prisoners rights—Breir and Ginsburg have joined in a bipartisan
reactionary agreement. Further, the Clinton administration, in the name of "reform," supported the Effective Death Penalty and Anti-Terrorism Act. The act limited the grounds for
appeals—restricting death row inmates to only "constitutional" violations, as opposed to, for example, procedural violations—as well as tightening timelines (a limit of one year for appeals), when death
penalty lawyers are overworked and can often not meet the time table. It also prevented U.S. citizens from having virtually any contacts with "foreign" organizations arbitrarily declared "terrorists" by the
Secretary of State, also without appeal, such as the Kurdestan Workers Party (PKK) that is fighting the U.S. ally Turkey. Further, the Clinton/Gore team ushered in an Immigration Reform Act that now gives
all the power to the INS to deport immigrants, destroying the previously held right of immigrants to challenge INS actions in court. The use of the word "reform" to signal reduction in rights, as in Welfare
"reform" and Immigration "reform," is one of the pernicious Clinton/Gore maneuvers that has helped their plan of co-optation. Make no mistake about it, Clinton and Gore, and the Democratic
Leadership Council created an effective paradigm, the Center-Right "New Democrat" that has, like Ronald Reagan before them, dramatically set, and restricted, the terms of the debate today. The public
perception that there is little to choose between Gore and Bush is partially the product of the narrow differences that the electorate will really tolerate these days, limits that were significantly shaped
by the last eight years of the Clinton administration. |