With the release of Bill Clinton's memoir, the SCLM has been spending a great deal of time rehashing the Clinton legacy from the right-wing fantasy point of view (just as they did with Reagan). Liberal blogs like this one, in contrast, have been engaging in a bit of Clinton hero-worship, writing as if Clinton was the greatest President of all time, except maybe for Lincoln and FDR. Maybe.
From my (progressive) perspective, both viewpoints are wildly inaccurate. Clinton was a better President than any GOPer since Eisenhower, but he was no hero. So here's my Fair and Balanced look at Clinton's legacy:
First, the good. Note: these are in no particular order, so don't gripe just because I didn't list your favorite thing first.
Labor:
- In '93, he signed the Family and Medical Leave Act. This was one of the laws Bush I had vetoed. It gave most employees in the U.S. the right to take up to 12 weeks off for a newborn or newly adopted child, or for their own illness or that of a close family member.
- In '96, the minimum wage was increased from $4.25 to $5.15 per hour.
- Also in '96, he signed a law guaranteeing those who change jobs wouldn't lose health coverage for themselves or their family members due to pre-existing conditions, a law I've benefited from myself.
Like many Clinton initiatives, none of these really went far enough, but they all make life a little better for working people. Besides, getting anything at all past a Rethug filibuster was a significant accomplishment.
Energy/Environment:
- Clinton signed the Kyoto treaty which, if ratified, would limit emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
- Clinton stood behind the EPA when they imposed new, stricter limits on ozone and particulate pollution.
- Clinton proposed a new, safer standard for arsenic in our drinking water. (This is the one Bush infamously, but unsuccessfully, tried to roll back at the beginning of his term.)
- Clinton proposed a "roadless rule" which would have significantly limited logging in our national forests.
- Clinton declared several environmentally sensitive areas national monuments, to protect them from damaging development.
- Clinton proposed new energy efficiency standards for home appliances.
Due to the long time required for administrative rulemaking, most of these came late in his second term, including many after the 2000 election. This drew criticism from some progressives, and gave Bush an opportunity to repeal, or at least weaken, several of them. But I don't think he could've moved much faster than he did.
Other:
- In '93, after 12 years of Reaganomics, Clinton restored a modicum of fairness to our tax laws, with new, higher income tax rates for those earning the highest incomes.
- Also in '93, Clinton signed the Motor Voter law allowing people to register to vote when renewing their driver's licenses or applying for public assistance.
- Clinton rescinded the anti-choice policies which Reagan had put in place by executive order. (Bush, of course, immediately restored most of these policies upon taking office.)
- Clinton appointed many fair-minded judges to the Federal bench, helping dilute the blatant ideological court-stacking his predecessors had engaged in.
- On Dec. 31, 2000, Clinton signed the ICC treaty. He did so reluctantly and at the last minute, but he did sign it.
- Clinton brokered the Dayton peace accords, ending much of the bloodshed in Bosnia, reached an agreement with North Korea delaying their nuclear ambitions, and helped broker a peace deal in Northern Ireland. And although ultimately unsuccessful, he sincerely tried to broker a similar peace deal between Israel and the Palestinians.
- In '94, Clinton signed into law the Brady bill and a modest, but nonetheless welcome, ban on assault weapons sales.
- Terrorism. The WTC bombing taught Clinton the danger posed by Islamic fundamentalists, and as al-Qaida's tactics matured, he improved our ability to thwart them. And unlike our current team, he learned the lesson of Oklahoma City and kept close tabs on the radical Right as well.
Wow. Not bad. Certainly more than Bush is ever likely to accomplish. But lest we forget, Clinton did quite a few bad things too:
Corporatism:
- Clinton pushed Bush's NA"F"TA through Congress, as well as the Uruguay round of GATT which established the WTO. Despite the misleading term "free trade" which is so often applied to these agreements, they have little to do with freedom for anyone except corporations. They allow corporations to override national, state, and local environmental laws (which the agreements view as "barriers to trade," even when applied equally to imported and domestic goods), and provide no meaningful protection for workers' rights. And they extend the reach of the US's restrictive and protectionist patent and copyright laws to our trading partners, which as contributed in no small part to the AIDS pandemic.
- In '96, Clinton signed the Telecom deregulation bill, reversing a 1992 law (passed over George Bush's veto) regulating cable TV, and leading directly to the rise of media behemoths such as Comcast, AOL Time Warner, and Clear Channel. Worse, he strongly supported the Communications "Decency" Act included in the Telecom bill, which ran so clearly afoul of the First Amendment that it was later overturned unanimously by the Supreme Court.
- Clinton signed the "No Electronic Theft" act, making nonprofit copyright infringement a Federal crime for the first time in our nation's history; the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act," retroactively extending all copyrights in the U.S by 20 years (not it's official name, but accurate, since the purpose of the Act was to prevent Disney's copyright on Mickey Mouse from running out); and most infamously, the DMCA, which makes it illegal to circumvent any copy-protection technology for any purpose, even perfectly legal purposes.
Civil Liberties
- Clinton supported censorship in many of its guises, from mild forms like the V-chip to laws like the Communications Decency Act and the "virtual child pornography" Act (both overturned by the Supremes) and the Child Online Protection Act (requiring all schools and libraries which accept Federal funding to install censorship software on all computers which could access the Internet - this was upheld by the Supremes on the condition that adults could get an uncensored computer at the library on request).
- In '94, Clinton signed Bush's crime bill into law. This included the Brady bill and assault weapons ban mentioned above, but also vastly expanded the Federal death penalty, and included one more provision added by Clinton: Three strikes, you're out. Together with similar state laws and other laws passed under Reagan/Bush, these have given the US a prison population over 2.1 million and the highest incarceration rate in the world, exceeding that of not only present-day Russia, but even the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin.
- Not content with the '94 law, in '96 Clinton signed the "Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act." The primary and explicit purpose of this forerunner to the Patriot Act was to make it harder for death-row inmates to appeal their convictions. Since then, over 100 death-row inmates have been release because they were found to be innocent. Virtually all had appealed before this law took effect. It is therefore unavoidable that this law will result in innocent people being executed, if it hasn't already.
- Also in '96, Clinton signed the immigration "Reform" act, which contains too many civil liberties infringements to list here. I will mention one of its most egregious, however; it retroactively makes any felony, no matter how minor or how long ago, a deportable offense. Under this provision, people who immigrated to the U.S. as children and who committed a "youthful indiscretion" resulting in a felony conviction, even if they served no jail time and successfully completed probation, can be and have been deported back to a country they barely remember.
- How could I forget? DOMA! Denies Federal recognition to gay marriages, such as those recently performed in Mass., and grants states explicit permission to do the same.
- Under drug czar Barry McCaffrey, Clinton prosecuted the "war on drugs" more zealously than even Reagan or Bush I. (Of course, Bush II and Ashcroft are making all of them look like pikers, but still.) Another reason for those 2.1 million-and-growing prisoners.
- Wiretapping. Clinton pushed for CALEA, which requires telecommunciations providers to make provisions for the FBI to listen in on their customers' conversations; tried to push through initiatives like the Clipper chip, designed to secure electronic communications from everyone except the Federal government, and spent many years resisting the ability to export any cryptography product (even a secure Web browser like Internet Explorer) with more than minimal security.
- Militarized law enforcement, typified by the Waco siege. I certainly don't have a problem with trying to arrest that nutcase Koresh. I do have a problem with the hyper-militarized way they went about it, even going to the level of falsely accusing Koresh of drug manufacturing so as to bring in the military under a Reagan-era law. Even Ashcroft hasn't gone that far (yet - knock on wood).
Of course it took Ashcroft to really bring out the evil inherent in these bad laws. One of my most common complaints about Clinton was that he governed as if he were going to be President forever. He never seemed to understand that one day, we would again have a Rethug President, and these laws which didn't seem so unreasonable under himself and Reno could become quite disastrous.
International Affairs:
Compared to Bush, anyone will look great here, and I've praised Clinton previously for his peace initiatives. But let's also remember the failures:
- Somalia. In a classic case of "mission creep," a humanitarian mission morphed into a manhunt, which went famously and tragically wrong.
- Rwanda. Still stung by Somalia, Clinton refused to call the Rwandan genocide "genocide," or to intervene to stop it. Obviously, it was nowhere near the scale of the Holocaust, but other than that, the Rwandan genocide was one of the worst massacres in history.
- Iraq. It is true that early on, Saddam Hussein had tried to thwart the UN weapons inspectors that were disarming his country. But eventually he acquiesced, as we all know now. By '95 the weapons were gone, although a few questions remained. Yet, Clinton, who saw his approval ratings jump when he bombed Iraq in retaliation for an alleged plot to assassinate Bush I during a trip to Kuwait, intransigently refused to remove the economic sanctions the UN had imposed to encourage Saddam to cooperate with the inspections. Worse, he planted spies in the weapons inspectors' ranks. Eventually, by the end of '98, with an impeachment vote over the Lewinsky scandal brewing, Clinton encouraged chief weapons inspector to provoke a confrontation with Saddam, which he did by insisting on inspecting Saddam's presidential palaces. (UNSCOM had earlier signed a memorandum of understanding that the palaces did not need to be inspected.) Knowing there were spies among them, Saddam naturally refused. (The man was a brutal thug, but nobody ever accused him of being stupid.) So Clinton told Butler to pull the inspectors out, because he was going to bomb Iraq. Butler did, and Clinton did. Keeping the sanctions on resulted in the deaths of millions of Iraqis to disease, the Dec. '98 bombing smacked of "wagging the dog," and the whole turn of events set the stage for Bush's deceptions on WMD (Americans were ready to believe Saddam still had them).
- Sudan. I've praised Clinton for his actions against terrorism, but after bin Laden attacked our embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam, Clinton blew it. He went off half-cocked, and on the flimsiest of evidence, blew up a Sudanese pharmaceutical plant which he feared was producing chemical weapons. Worse, when the truth came out, Clinton offered no compensation to Sudan for the mistake, nor even an apology.
- Landmines. Clinton steadfastly refused to sign the Ottawa treaty banning landmines. I don't need to go into the horrors these and similar weapons, such as cluster munitions, have produced in every nation where they have been used. Clinton was never willing to stand up to the Pentagon brass, thanks to the draft-dodger attacks he endured during his '92 campaign.
Other disappointments:
- Welfare "reform." This was one of the biggest disappointments of the Clinton years. Clinton actually had proposed a decent welfare reform bill early in his Presidency, but when the Rethugs took over Congress in Nov. '94, they had nastier ideas. Clinton vetoed their nasty bill - twice - but with the '96 election approaching, he wimped out and signed a bill that was only slightly less nasty. Shame on you, Bill!
- Tax cuts. In the late 90's, the economy was surging. The more cautious among us warned, "the boom is being fueled by a stock market bubble! Don't expect these surpluses to last!" But Clinton didn't listen - instead he used the surpluses to justify throwing Newt Gingrich a bone: the Capital Gains Tax Cut. Normal people did get a little out of this deal - an increased Earned Income Tax Credit and a new Child Tax Credit - but that was peanuts compared to what the wealthy were getting. But appeasement didn't work in '39, and it didn't work in '98, either. This just legitimized Bush's call for even larger tax cuts during the 2000 campaign.
- Lani Guinier, Joycelyn Elders, etc. In the world of administrative appointments, Clinton and Bush have opposite character flaws. While Bush has held tenaciously onto such obviously incompetent appointments as Gen. Thomas White, Harvey Pitt, or Donald Rumsfeld, Clinton dropped even his best-qualified appointments at the first sign of Rethuglican trouble.
- Logging: the one environmental area where Clinton was consistently disappointing. First, in '95, he let a Rethug "salvage" logging rider slip into law which exempted most logging operations from all environmental laws for a year. Then, when the standoff in the Pacific Northwest over the spotted owl came up, he commissioned an expert panel, which came up with eight options for compromise, ranked from most pro-environment to most pro-logger. Not one of the options was pro-logger enough for his tastes, so he forced through an even more pro-logger "Option Nine."
OK, that does it for the good and the bad. What about
the ugly?
I can't think of anything in the Clinton's legacy that's turned out uglier than this brilliant idea: "Don't ask, don't tell." Talk about unintended consequences!
When it was first proposed, DADT was clearly inadequate, but many of us felt that at least it would be an improvement, by ending "witch hunts," wherein military personnel suspected of being gay could expect to have their bedrooms placed under secret video surveillance. Well, we were wrong. The witch hunts may have slowed down a bit, but they haven't stopped - not by a long shot. The only thing the military has done on the "Don't ask" side of the equation is to take the question off military recruitment forms. Big deal. Meanwhile, "Don't tell" has made things worse for gay servicemembers by subjecting them to discharge even without a "witch hunt."
So there you have it, and I'm sure I left plenty out - a lot happens in eight years, after all. Feel free to make your own additions to the good, the bad, and the ugly, or to dispute mine.