Clinton Domestic Affairs

Bill Clinton began his transition into the presidency promising to focus "like a laser beam" on the economic needs of the nation: unemployment, the runaway deficit, the health care crisis, and welfare reform. On all fronts but one, health care reform, he succeeded significantly but not completely.

Fulfilling Campaign Promises

By the end of his first year, Clinton had battled Congress to secure adoption of an economic package that combined tax increases (which fell mainly on the upper class) and spending cuts (which hurt mainly impoverished Americans). His 1993 economic package passed without a single Republican vote in either chamber of Congress, and despite that party's dire predictions that it would result in economic chaos. This economic policy lowered the deficit from $290 billion in 1992 to $203 billion by 1994. By 1999, surging tax revenues from a booming economy had generated a surplus of $124 billion -- a development few would have thought possible in 1992. Surpluses amounting to $1.5 trillion were then projected for the first decade of the 21st century. Equally important were the pace of economic growth and low inflation. Combined with historically low interest and unemployment rates, these factors positioned the American economy as the world's strongest and most robust. On some other issues, like passage of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which cleared Congress in 1993, Clinton essentially endorsed Republican programs and benefited from Republican support. On others, like welfare reform, the Republican-controlled Congress accepted Clinton's lead in publicizing the issues, but dominated the writing of legislation creating the actual programs. In the summer of 1996, Congress passed a sweeping reform bill, fulfilling Clinton's 1992 campaign promise to "end welfare as we know it." The legislation replaced the long standing Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program with a system of block grants to individual states. It also dropped the eligibility of legal immigrants for welfare assistance during the first five years of their residency. Clinton also won an increase in the minimum wage to $5.15 per hour. At the same time, the President blocked Republican attempts to bar public education to children of illegal immigrants. During the 1992 presidential campaign, Clinton had also vowed to end the exclusion of homosexuals from military service. A federal court ruling just days after Clinton's election moved that controversial topic onto the public agenda, where it was difficult for the President to set it aside until a more convenient time. A political fight ensued with conservative members of Congress and the leadership of the armed forces. Clinton compromised by agreeing to delay a decision on gays in the military for six months. He ultimately proposed a policy of "don't ask, don't tell," meaning that the military services would not ask about the sexual orientation of service personnel and that these personnel, in turn, would

not be required to divulge this information. The compromise seemed to satisfy few people. Liberals and gays felt betrayed by the President, and conservatives overrode the administration's executive directive by writing a more restrictive policy into law in a defense authorization bill. But the controversy knocked the administration off balance politically at the very outset of the first term. Clinton also looked weak and out of his depth when he withdrew the names of two female nominees for attorney general because they had legal problems with hired immigrant household help. The President's image problem took another hit when he retracted the nomination of Lani Guinier, an African-American law professor and old personal friend, to head the Civil Rights Division of the Department of Justice. Guinier's nomination was jeopardized when critics attacked her legal writings about representation as too radical.

Cabinet and Staff Appointments

During his campaign in 1992, Clinton had promised to form a cabinet "that looked like America." Having lost two female candidates to early controversy, Clinton finally settled on Florida prosecutor Janet Reno for attorney general. Clinton went on to name three other women to cabinet positions: Donna E. Shalala, who had been chancellor of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, as secretary of health and human services; Hazel O'Leary, an African-American woman, as secretary of energy; and Madeleine K. Albright as secretary of state (she had previously served as Clinton's ambassador to the United Nations). The President also put women in several other important posts. His campaign media manager Dee Dee Myers was appointed press secretary and California economist Laura D'Andrea Tyson became chair of the Council of Economic Advisers. Florida environmental official Carol Browner -- also Al Gore's one-time legislative assistant -- was named to the top slot in the Environmental Protection Agency. Additionally, Dr. Joycelyn Elders, an African-American who was serving as the Arkansas health director, became U.S. surgeon general. And when Supreme Court justice Byron White retired in 1993, Clinton named Ruth Bader Ginsburg as his replacement; Ginsburg was a federal appeals court judge who had taught at Columbia Law School and pioneered the litigation of cases involving sex discrimination. Clinton also named several African-American males to leading posts in the administration. He tapped Democratic national chairman Ronald H. Brown as secretary of commerce; former Mississippi congressman Mike Espy as secretary of agriculture; Jesse Brown, a disabled Marine veteran, who ran the Disabled American Veterans office in Washington, as secretary of veterans affairs; and Clifton Wharton, Jr., chairman of TIAA-CREF, as deputy secretary of state. Latinos were also appointed in more substantial numbers than in previous administrations, with former San Antonio, Texas, mayor Henry G. Cisneros as secretary of housing and urban development and Federico Pea as secretary of transportation.

Health Care Reform

Along with the political scandals that plagued his presidency, Clinton failed to realize a major goal of his administration: affordable health care insurance for every American. The United States is the only industrialized nation in the world without a universal health care system, and Clinton felt passionately about the fact that 60 million Americans did not have adequate health insurance. In addition, health-care costs had skyrocketed since the 1970s, consuming, according to some estimates, one seventh of the nation's goods and services -- a greater proportion than that of any other industrialized country in the world. Winning a national health package would have provided Clinton with a lasting historical legacy, much as Franklin D. Roosevelt had achieved with Social Security. In the minds of some, Clinton's health care program -- if realized -would have constituted the most important piece of social legislation in American history. The consequences of health care reform were enormous. If Clinton could control health-care costs, he could remove a major drag on the economy. From a political standpoint, universal health care would link the middle-class and the working-class to the Democratic Party for at least another generation. Republicans understood the implications of such a victory and were, with rare exceptions, united in their determination to deny Clinton on this issue. Many Americans, while wanting health insurance, worried, too, that national health insurance was socialistic, a step that would deny Americans the right to see a doctor of their choice while placing physicians in the service of a government bureaucracy. To push through a health-reform bill in his first hundred days in office, Clinton named his wife, Hillary Rodham Clinton, head of a task force to develop the program, and Ira Magaziner as its director. Hillary Clinton, a hard-driving, forceful, and committed feminist with a distinguished legal career, was Clinton's closest political confidant -- his true partner in his political career. The President appointed her to head the task force, which would be administered by Magaziner, because he knew that she cared deeply about the issue, and that "if anybody had a chance to do it, she had the best chance." Hillary had led a commission on education reform in Arkansas for her husband -- to critical acclaim -- and the President wanted her to do the same thing for health care nationally.

The First Lady and Health Care Mistake

The appointment of Hillary was a serious mistake. It immediately placed the First Lady in a position of being a major policy and political power -- an appointment that deviated significantly from precedent, allowing critics to attack her as well as the program. Moreover, her unique relationship with the President meant that other advisers reacted to her differently than they would to any other task-force head, not wanting to alienate the President's wife with difficult but well-intentioned criticism.

Hillary also blundered in several important ways. Her decision to recruit a taskforce network of experts to work in secret on complex issues -- such as healthcare premiums, managed competition, and health-care alliances -- looked too much like policy by cabal and fiat. A federal court forced her to make records publicly available of some of the proceedings, after some in the health-care industry sued for open access. Most importantly, the process largely left Congress out of the picture as the task force drafted the particulars of the plan, thus reducing the plan's chances for legislative success; Clinton had wanted to present to Congress a finished package, which meant that key participants in the congressional lawmaking process were not involved in its drafting. Moreover, there was significant internal disagreement within the administration about the costs of the plan, its scope, and its political marketability.

Republican and Public Backlash

The final product was a massively complicated and sophisticated measure, completely beyond the reach of the average citizen to comprehend. Nearly 1,350 pages long, the proposal had taken much longer to produce than originally imagined. Some critics immediately complained that the President had misstepped in not going to the public with the broad outlines of the plan that then could have been worked through the congressional committee process. Although Clinton's September 1993 speech on national health care effectively dramatized the need for reform, Republican opponents lashed out at the plan's size, incomprehensibility, and threat to small business and individual choice. A consortium of health-insurance companies funded a series of sophisticated, negative TV ads featuring "Harry and Louise," a middle-class couple deeply worried about losing the quality health care they had come to expect as Americans. The coordinated Republican attack was greatly assisted by the outbreak of the Whitewater investigation and the suicide of White House aid Vincent Foster -- a distraction that put the Clinton administration on the defensive. No extreme seemed out of bounds in attacking the President and First Lady. Conservative talk-radio hosts ridiculed the President daily, suggesting that Foster's death might have resulted from his harboring dark White House secrets - or even that someone close to the President had murdered him. Although Clinton had threatened to veto any health-care proposal that did not include universal coverage, no legislation ever got that far. By summer of 1994, health care reform was doomed; congressional leaders dropped consideration of it in August. Opinion polls revealed public support for the general principles of reforming the health-care system, but the approval number dropped enormously once Clinton's name was attached to such a proposal. The loss of health care reform was a devastating setback. In the minds of many political analysts, it was a botched opportunity of gigantic proportions.

The Republican Revolution

By 1998, the Republican offensive that captured both houses of Congress in 1994 had run out of steam. Not only did the Republicans lose the presidential election of 1996 but they also lost public support by overplaying their hands in the impeachment of a popular President during times of prosperity. As a result, the nation settled for compromise or deadlock for the last two years of the Clinton presidency. During this period, the administration decided that it could best achieve some of its policy goals through executive order. For example, the President signed several proclamations in 2000 creating national monuments out of vast expanses of the American West. Of course, as they were to discover in subsequent years, anything done by executive order can also be undone that same way, if a succeeding President is so inclined. In one remaining area of executive authority, the President sparked a final controversy. In the dwindling hours of his term, Clinton issued 140 presidential pardons, several of which drew heated criticism not just from the President's usual opponents, but also from some supporters. The most controversial was the pardon of international fugitive Marc Rich, whose ex-wife was a prominent Democratic fundraiser. Few questioned the President's authority to exercise this constitutional power, but many believed that the authority had not been wisely used in several cases. Clinton thus left office dogged by charges of scandal that had been a staple of his time in the White House.