America's Greatest 20th Century Presidents (35 page)

Kenneth Starr

Other controversies came to the surface in the first few years of the Clinton presidency, including the 1993 suicide of Clinton family friend and Deputy White House Counsel Vince Foster. Despite wide-ranging conspiracy theories that Foster was murdered and/or that the Clintons covered up foul play, Starr’s investigation corroborated the findings of an independent investigation that Foster had indeed committed suicide.

Months after Foster’s suicide, “Troopergate” hit the headlines, with journalist David Brock reporting allegations by Arkansas state troopers Larry Patterson and Roger Perry that they arranged sexual liaisons for Clinton while he was governor of Arkansas, including with Paula Jones. Brock later recanted his piece in the American Spectator and personally apologized to Clinton, accusing the troopers of being “greedy” and having “slimy motives”. Jones herself filed suit against Clinton in May 1994, alleging sexual harassment. Though the case would later be settled out of court, it was Clinton’s testimony for the Jones case about Monica Lewinsky that eventually formed the basis for the charges used to impeach him in Congress.

Healthcare

In addition to these scandals, Clinton’s early presidency and First Lady Hillary Clinton’s reputation were both marred by the push for universal healthcare. A favorite topic of Hillary’s back in their Arkansas days, President Clinton had tremendous confidence in his wife’s ability to lead this project; after all, she had been billed by Clinton himself as “two for the price of one”, and
she had done a good enough job in Arkansas of delivering urban health care. But an extremely well-organized strategy by the insurance industry, political conservatives and even the American Medical Association (AMA) killed the legislative effort in Clinton’s first year.

Over 15 years later, many political experts and pundits predicted the Obama Administration’s push for healthcare was rather a losing effort like the Clinton Administration’s had been. But Obama had never fully invested in the public option or the single-payer mechanism which seems to have been the Clinton Administration’s almost non-negotiable starting point in 1993. When even
a compromise legislative effort by the Senate majority leader Democrat George Mitchell of Maine failed in August 1993, it was clear that the reform was not going to pass then. And moreover Obama spent almost
all
of his political capital of his first few years in office on healthcare.
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Clinton had not. Universal healthcare reform was the legislation that doomed the first few years of the Clinton Administration and caused significant losses of Democratic seats in both houses of Congress. Clinton would famously take the message from the midterm elections and announce in his 1996 State of the Union Address, “The era of big government is over”. Though that is one of Clinton’s most memorable soundbytes, the followup to that statement is often left out. Clinton continued, “[B]ut we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves. We must go forward as one America, one nation working together, to meet the challenges we face together. Self-reliance and teamwork are not opposing virtues -- we must have both."

Even still, Bill and Hillary were able to get some healthcare measures through Congress, even after the 1994 midterms. In 1997, Hillary and her staff pushed through compromise legislation that provided coverage to up to five million children through the State Children's Health Insurance Program (SCHIP). SCHIP wound up being the largest healthcare success of Clinton’s presidency. Hillary also worked with Congress to pass the Adoption and Safe Families Act and the Foster Care Independence Act.

Other Legislation

Nevertheless, Clinton was not deterred. Clinton fought hard for and was able to sign into law the Brady Bill (so named after the secret service protection of President Ronald Reagan who was paralyzed by a gunman’s bullet intended to maim and/or kill Reagan) on November 30, 1993. This statute imposed a five-day waiting period on handgun purchases throughout the United States. President Clinton also was able to expand the Earned Income Tax Credit, which essentially was a subsidy for low-income workers, and Clinton refused to flinch in the absence of Republican support for his tax bill, the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1993 in August of that year, which passed both houses of Congress without a single Republican vote. In fact, several Democratic members of Congress are said to have been certain that with their votes they were signing away their electoral prospects in November 1994. The 1993 tax law reduced taxes for almost fifteen million low-income families, expanded tax cuts for 90% of all small businesses in the United States, and — much to the annoyance of the Chamber of Commerce — increased taxes on the wealthiest 1.2% of taxpayers. This is the same law that Clinton’s immediate successor President George W. Bush would repeal and which the Obama Administration is now trying to reinstate. Additionally, through the implementation of spending restraints, it mandated the budget be balanced over a number of years.

Clinton also signed the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) (applicable to the United States, Canada and Mexico) into law, after the treaty passed Congress with narrow margins in both houses. This free trade measure also established extraordinary protections for investors of one signatory from the government of another. In what are called investment treaty arbitration tribunals, run by the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) and a few other organizations, investors may sue for high sums of money for the direct
or
indirect expropriation of some investment. This has included situations where market share or market access has been truncated by policies of the “host State.” Protectionist Democrats, anti-trade Republicans and many supporters of the Green Movement opposed NAFTA because they viewed it as weakening the regulatory power of the State to protect human rights and to maintain environmental standards.

In 1994, President Clinton pushed for and saw to the finish line his Omnibus Crime Bill, which made countless alterations to existing federal statutes. The most significant of these changes was the sweeping expansion of capital punishments to include crimes not immediately causing death, such as running a large-scale drug enterprise. During Bill Clinton's re-election campaign he asserted, "My 1994 crime bill expanded the death penalty for drug kingpins, murderers of federal law enforcement officers, and nearly 60 additional categories of violent felons." As a former constitutional law professor at the University of Arkansas Law School, Clinton must have known that this statute conflicted directly with United States Supreme Court precedent — then and now.
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He was, however, acting as a politician now. Never taking his eye off the political ball, Clinton's "twistification" served as a "code" to the public that he understood their problems while, simultaneously, appointing reliably progressive judges to the Supreme Court and lower federal courts who would invalidate such a law. His Supreme Court appointees, Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Justice Stephen Breyer, have both been quite progressive (at least more progressive than not) on criminal law and gay rights issues. After all, his 1996 re-election was coming up, the same reason that he signed DOMA when the Republican Congress presented him with the bill.

Chapter 7: Foreign Policy

Pax Americana?

On the now ironic date of September 11, 1990, President Bush addressed a joint session of Congress to explain why he was assembling a coalition of nations to intervene against Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait. Bush stated, “Out of these troubled times, our fifth objective -- a new world order -- can emerge…A new era, freer from the threat of terror, stronger in the pursuit of justice and more secure in the quest for peace.”

As his son would later attempt in another war against Iraq, Bush sought to present the coalition of nearly 40 nations as indicative of multilateralism, even though it was dominated by American forces. At the time, the Soviet Union was less than a year away from collapsing, leaving the United States as the sole superpower when Clinton came to office.  

In fact, the “new world order” that Clinton stepped into was one that allowed for American unilateralism. Since World War II, the United States had protected the West during the Cold War, and Clinton’s idol, President Kennedy, had coined the term “Pax Americana” to describe his hope of peace for the world. 30 years later, Clinton now had what he believed was the opportunity to use America’s unchecked power to instill and preserve peace across the world.

However, Clinton soon learned this was much easier said than done.

The Balkans

Within months of Clinton’s presidency, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) began enforcing a no-fly zone over Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was the battleground during the Bosnia War. Together with the United Nations, NATO worked on the ground and in the skies to prevent aggression by the Bosnian Serbs, who were accused of conducting ethnic cleansing in the region. From 1993-1995, NATO sporadically engaged Serbians who violated U.N. resolutions or the no-fly zone, but it was in 1995 that NATO truly brought its force to bear, when it conducted a drastic bombing of Serbian targets that forced Serb leaders to the table to negotiate. The campaign demonstrated the power that the United States and its allies could bring to bear.

In 1999, in order to make the Serb nationalists cease and desist the ethnic cleansing and genocide of Albanians in the former Federal Republic of Yugoslavia's province of Kosovo, Clinton authorized the use of American troops in an officially North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO)-led bombing campaign, named Operation Allied Force. With the passage of the United Nations Security Council Resolution 1244, the bombing campaign formally concluded on June 10, 1999. This resolution, in effect, put Kosovo under United Nations administration and legally authorized a ground peacekeeping force. Media pundits chastized pre-war statements by the Clinton administration as hyperbole, pure and simple. The Clinton administration was accused of conveniently conflating, with impunity, the precise terms of "genocide" or "ethnic cleansing." Eventually Slobodan Milošević, the then-President of Yugoslavia, was charged with the "murders of about 600 individually identified ethnic Albanians" and "crimes against humanity." The history in that region has always been fraught with anti-American sentiment. After all, in 1995, the United States and NATO had assailed Bosnian Serb targets to stop their attacks on United Nations safe zones and to force them to accept a peace agreement. Clinton had subsequently sent American peacekeepers to Bosnia in late 1995, to uphold the Dayton Agreement. None of this had worked.

Despite the criticism, Clinton’s policies and NATO’s operations in the Balkans were widely considered a successful use of force, which no doubt galvanized Clinton’s ambitions to use force elsewhere. If anything, the early success may have led Clinton into the troubles he faced in other hotspots like Somalia.

Peace in the Middle East?

Clinton, Israeli Prime Minister Rabin, and PLO Chairman Arafat

In September 1993, Clinton seemed to be on the verge of an historic foreign policy success. On September 13, 1993, Palestine Libertation Organization Chairman Yasser Arafat shook hands with Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in the Rose Garden at the White House, with the president broadly smiling behind them. The Palestinians and Israelis had been engaged in conflict dating back even before the founding of the modern state of Israel in 1948, and this seemed like the first time in 45 years that peace was on the horizon. The signing of the Oslo Accords earned Rabin and Arafat a Nobel Prize that year.

The Accords provided for the establishment of the Palestinian Authority (PA), which was headed by Yasser Arafat and Fatah. The Palestinian Authority would be given the responsibility for governing the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip and West Bank as the IDF gradually withdrew from parts of the territories and handed off security control to the PA. At the outset, the Israelis recognized the PLO as the Palestinian representative, clearing the way for the PLO’s leadership to head the Palestinian Authority. Meanwhile, the PLO recognized Resolution 242, renounced terrorism, and recognized the right of Israel to exist in peace and security.