Download Bush I and Clinton-Brinkley

Bush I and Clinton
IMPORTANT NOTE I have included study questions to help guide your notetaking. If you have the answers to these questions down, you will be in good
shape. Also, I apologize for the typos in this reading. If you spot one, please send
me an email with details so I can fix it. And READ THE FOOTNOTES!
What follows is taken from Alan Brinkley’s American History: A Survey, 12th ed. I added the footnotes.
Questions:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
Why was George H. W. Bush an unpopular president by the end of his term?
How did the First Gulf War affect the 1992 presidential race?
Why did Bill Clinton win the 1992 election?
How did Clinton resolve—or not—the issue of gays in the military?
How effective were Clinton’s tax and budget policies? Why?
Why did the Clinton health care initiative fail?
How did Republicans hope to change the country after they seized control of the Congress in the 1994 mid-term
elections?
8. The 1990s are often seen as a time of political “gridlock” in Washington. Why?
9. Despite his unpopularity in 1994, Clinton won reelection in 1996. Why?
10. What is the most notable achievement of Clinton’s second term? Why?
The Bush Presidency
The Bush presidency was notable for the dramatic developments in international affairs with
which it coincided and at times helped to advance, and for the absence of important initiatives or
ideas on domestic issues.
The broad popularity Bush enjoyed during his first three years in office was partly a result of
his subdued, unthreatening public image. But it was primarily because of the wonder and
excitement with which Americans viewed the dramatic events in the rest of the world. Bush
moved cautiously at first in dealing with the changes in the Soviet Union. But like Reagan, he
eventually cooperated with Gorbachev and reached a series of significant agreements with the
Soviet Union in its waning years. In the three years after the INF agreement in 1988, the United
States and the Soviet Union moved rapidly toward even more far-reaching arms reduction
agreements.
Om domestic issues, the Bush administration was less successful. His administration
inherited a staggering burden of debt and a federal deficit that had been out of control for nearly
a decade. The president’s pledge to reduce the deficit and his 1988 campaign promise of “no
new taxes” were in conflict with one another. Bush faced a Democratic Congress with an agenda
very different from his own.
Despite this political stalemate, Congress and the White House managed on occasion to agree
on significant measures. They cooperated in producing the plan to salvage the floundering
savings and loan industry. 1 In 1990, the president bowed to congressional pressure and agreed to
1
See the earlier reading on the Reagan administration for details.
a significant tax increase as part of a multiyear “budget package”... to reduce the deficit—thus
violating his own 1988 campaign pledge of “no new taxes.” 2
The left axis is in millions of dollars. Thus, “-200,000” is
a deficit of $200,000 million dollars, which is $200 billion.
But the most serious domestic problem facing the Bush administration was one for which
neither the president nor Congress had any answer: a recession that began late in 1990 and
slowly increased its grip on the national economy in 1991 and 1992. Because of the enormous
level of debt that corporations (and individuals) had accumulated in the 1980s, the recession
caused an unusual number of bankruptcies. It also increased the fear and frustration among
middle-and working-class Americans and put pressure on the government to address such
problems as the rising cost of health care.
The First Gulf War
The events of 1989-1991 had left the United States in the unanticipated position of being the
only real superpower in the world. The Bush administration, therefore, had to consider what to
do with America’s formidable political and military power in a world in which the major
justification for that power—the Soviet threat—was now gone.
The events of 1989-1991 suggested two possible answers, both of which had some effect on
policy. One was that the United States would reduce its military strength dramatically and
concentrate its energies and resources on pressing domestic problems. 3 There was, in fact,
2
The full pledge was the dramatic phrase “Read my lips: no new taxes.” Bush’s violation of this promise cost him
considerable support from elements of the New Right, which, as we have seen, were resolutely opposed to tax
increases, no matter the reason.
3 This idea was often called the “peace dividend.”
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considerable movement in that direction both in Congress and within the administration. The
other was that America would continue to use its power actively, not to fight communism but to
defend its regional and economic interests. In 1989, that led the administration to order an
invasion of Panama, which overthrew the unpopular military leader Manuel Noriega (under
indictment in the United States for drug trafficking) and replaced him with an elected, proAmerican regime.
On August 2, 1990, the armed forces of Iraq invaded and quickly overwhelmed their small,
oil-rich neighbor, the emirate of Kuwait. Saddam Hussein, the militaristic leader of Iraq, soon
announced that he was annexing Kuwait and set out to entrench his forces there.
[We discussed the Iraq War in class, so I am cutting Mr. Brinkley’s discussion of the conflict.]
The quick and (for America) relatively painless victory over Iraq was highly popular in the
United States. But the tyrannical regime of Saddam Hussein survived, in a weakened form but
showing few signs of retreat from its militaristic ambitions. It would plague the United States
again.
The Election of 1992
President Bush’s popularity reached a record high in the immediate aftermath of the Gulf War.
But the glow of that victory faded quickly as the recession worsened in late 1991, and as the
administration declined to propose any policies for combating it.
Because the early maneuvering for the 1992 presidential election occurred when President
Bush’s popularity remained high, many
leading Democrats declined to run.
That gave Bill Clinton, the young fiveterm governor of
Arkansas, an
opportunity to emerge early as the frontrunner, as a result of a skillful campaign
that emphasized broad economic issues
instead of the racial and cultural
questions that had so divided the
Democrats in the past. Clinton survived
a bruising primary campaign and a
series of damaging personal
controversies to win his party’s
nomination.4
And George Bush
withstood an embarrassing primary
challenge from the conservative
journalist Pat Buchanan to become the
Republican nominee again.
Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1992
4
Amongst these “personal controversies” were allegations that Clinton had not been a faithful spouse, that he had
smoked marijuana (Clinton acknowledged this, but famously said “but I didn’t inhale”), and that he had manipulated
the draft system to avoid military service during the Vietnam War. As it happens, all of these accusations were
substantially true.
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Complicating the campaign was the emergence of Ross Perot, a blunt, forthright Texas
billionaire who became an independent candidate by tapping popular resentment of the federal
bureaucracy and by promising tough, uncompromising leadership to deal with the fiscal crisis
and other problems of government. At several moments in the spring, Perot led both Bush and
Clinton in public opinion polls. In July, as he began to face hostile scrutiny from the media, he
abruptly withdrew from the race. But early in October, he reentered and soon regained much
(although never all) of his early support.
After a campaign in which the economy and the president’s unpopularity were the principal
issues, Clinton won a clear, but hardly overwhelming, victory over Bush and Perot. He received
43 percent of the vote in the three-way race, to the president’s 38 percent and Perot’s 19 percent
(the best showing for a third-party or independent candidate since Theodore Roosevelt in 1912).
Clinton won 370 electoral votes to Bush’s 168; Perot won none. Democrats retained control of
both houses of Congress.
Image: nationalatlas.gov
A RESURGENCE OF PARTISANSHIP
Bill Clinton took the oath of office in January 1993 with a domestic agenda more ambitious
than that of any president in nearly thirty years. He entered the presidency carrying the
extravagant expectations of liberals who had spent a generation in exile. But Clinton also had
significant political weaknesses. Having won the votes of well under half the electorate, he
enjoyed no powerful mandate. Democratic majorities in Congress were frail, and Democrats in
any case had grown unaccustomed to bowing to presidential leadership. The Republican
leadership in Congress was highly adversarial and opposed the president with unusual unanimity
on many issues. A tendency toward reckless personal behavior, both before and during his
presidency, caused the president continuing problems and gave his enemies repeated
opportunities to discredit him.
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The Election of 1992
The new administration compounded its problems with a series of missteps and misfortunes in its
first months. The president’s failed effort to end the longtime ban on gay men and women
serving in the military met with ferocious resistance from the armed forces themselves and from
many conservatives in both parties.5 Several of his early appointments became so controversial
he had to withdraw them. The suicide of a longtime friend of the president, Vince Foster, helped
spark an escalating inquiry into some banking and real estate ventures involving the president
and his wife in the early 1980s, in what became known as the Whitewater affair. An independent
counsel began examining these issues in 1993 (the Clintons were eventually cleared of
wrongdoing in 2000). [We will have more to say about investigations of the Clintons in class.]
Despite its many problems, the Clinton administration could boast of some significant
achievements in its first year. The president narrowly won approval of a budget that marked a
significant turn away from the policies of the Reagan-Bush years. It included a substantial tax
increase on the wealthiest Americans, a significant reduction in many areas of government
spending, and a major expansion of tax credits to low-income working people.6
Clinton was a committed advocate of free trade and a proponent of many aspects of what
came to be known as globalism. He made that clear through his strong support of a series of new
and controversial free trade agreements. After a long and difficult battle, he won approval of the
North American Free Trade Agreement (or NAFTA), which eliminated most trade barriers
among the United States, Canada, and Mexico. Later he won approval of other far-reaching
trade agreements negotiated in the General Agreement on Trade and Tarriffs [sic] (or GATT).
But the administration’s substantial achievements
were overshadowed by a large failure. The president’s
most important and ambitious initiative—the project that
he hoped would define his presidency—was a major
reform of the nation’s health-care system. Early in 1993,
he appointed a task force chaired by his wife, Hillary
Rodham Clinton, which proposed a sweeping reform
designed to guarantee coverage to every American and
hold down the costs of medical care.
Substantial
opposition came from the right, from those who The “Harry and Louise” ads, paid for the the
believed the reform would transfer too much power to health insurance industry, helped doom the
plan. You can (and should) watch
the government; and that well-funded opposition— Clintons’
two of the ads here. Note: claims in the ads
combined with the determination of Republican leaders should not be taken at face value.
5
Much to Clinton’s surprise, this issue dominated the first weeks of his administration, in part thanks to skillful
manipulation of the media by military leaders, who leaked Clinton’s plan to the press before Clinton formally
announced it. Clinton was forced to retreat. The so-called compromise was the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy on
sexual orientation, which, despite Clinton’s intentions, resulted in an increase in the number of soldiers discharged
for homosexuality. This policy remained in effect until its repeal in September 2011.
6 Republicans claimed that this tax increase would have disastrous effects on our economy, but in fact the US
experienced extraordinary economic growth throughout the 1990s. And with wages rising and unemployment
falling, less money needed to be spent on programs to help the poor, and more money was collected in taxes. The
result was that, by the late 1990s, the United States was running budget surpluses and beginning to pay down the
national debt.
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to deny the president a victory on this potent issue—doomed the plan. In September 1994, after
a series of compromises failed to attract majorities, Congress abandoned the health-care reform
effort.
The Republican Resurgence
The trials of the Clinton administration, and the failure of health-care reform in particular,
proved damaging to the Democratic Party as it faced the congressional elections of 1994. For
the first time in forty years, Republicans gained control of both houses of Congress.
Several months before the election, the House Republican leader, Newt Gingrich of Georgia,
released a set of campaign promises signed by almost all Republican candidates for the House
and called it the “Contract with America.” It called for tax reductions, dramatic changes in
federal spending to produce a balanced budget, and a host of other promises consistent with the
long-time goals of the Republican Party’s conservative wing.
House Speaker Newt Gingrich at the microphone. The young Congressman in the
red-and-white striped tie at left is John Boehner, who became Speaker in 2011.
Throughout 1995, the Republican Congress worked at a sometimes feverish pace to construct
one of the most ambitious and even radical legislative programs in modern times. They
proposed a series of measures to transfer important powers from the federal government to the
states. They proposed dramatic reductions in federal spending, including a major restructuring of
the once-sacrosanct Medicare program to reduce costs. They attempted to scale back a wide
range of federal regulatory functions.
In all these efforts, they could count on an
unprecedentedly disciplined Republican majority in the House and an only slightly less united
Republican majority in the Senate. The Republican agenda represented the most substantial
potential shift in the distribution of public authority since the 1930s.
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President Clinton responded to the 1994 election results by proclaiming that “the era of big
government is over” and shifting his own agenda conspicuously to the center. He announced his
own plan to cut taxes and balance the budget. Indeed, the gap between the Democratic White
House and the Republican Congress on many major issues was relatively small. But because the
legislative politics of 1995 was becoming part of the presidential politics of 1996, compromise
between the president and Congress became very difficult. In November 1995 and again in
January 1996, the federal government literally shut down for several days because the president
and Congress could not agree on a budget. Republican leaders refused to pass a “continuing
resolution” (to allow government operations to continue during negotiations) in hopes of
pressuring the president to agree to their terms. That proved to be an epic political blunder.
Public opinion turned quickly and powerfully against the Republican leadership, and against
much of its agenda. Gingrich quickly became one of the most unpopular political leaders in the
nation,7 while President Clinton slowly improved his standing in the polls.
The Election of 1996
By the time the 1996 presidential campaign began..., Clinton was surprisingly in a commanding
position to win reelection. Unopposed for the Democratic nomination, he faced a Republican
opponent—Senator Robert Dole of Kansas—who inspired little enthusiasm even within his own
party. Clinton’s revival was in part a result of his adroitness in taking centrist positions that
undermined the Republicans on one issue after another, and in championing traditional
Democratic issues—such as raising the minimum wage—that were broadly popular. Clinton
benefited even more from the disastrous errors by congressional Republicans in 1995 and early
1996. But his greatest strength came from the remarkable success of the American economy and
the marked reduction in the federal deficit that had occurred during his presidency. Like Reagan
in 1984, he could campaign as the champion of peace prosperity, and national well-being.
As the election approached, both Democrats and Republicans grew uneasy about the failure
of the 104th Congress to pass any significant measures. In a flurry of activity in the spring and
summer of 1996, the Congress passed several important bills. It raised the minimum wage for
the first time in more than a decade. Most dramatically of all, the Congress passed a welfare
reform bill, which President Clinton somewhat uneasily signed, that marked the most important
change in aid to the poor since the Social Security Act of 1935. It ended the fifty-year federal
guarantee of assistance to families with dependent children and turned most of the responsibility
for allocating federal welfare funds (now greatly reduced) to the states. Most of all, it shifted the
bulk of welfare benefits away from those without jobs and toward support for low-wage workers.
A strong economy in the first years after the bill passed helped move many former welfare
recipients into the paid work force.8
7
Which is why leaders of Barack Obama’s reelection campaign in 2012 were salivating at the prospect that
Gingrich’s quixotic campaign for the Republican presidential nomination would meet with unexpected success. As
it happens, Gingrich proved as unpopular with Republican primary voters as he was with the population at large;
Mitt Romney secured the nomination.
8 But the much weaker employment outlook beginning with the financial crisis of 2008-2009 has shown what many
liberals believe are the weaknesses of the bill: some people are no longer eligible for welfare benefits even though
the job market is making a slow recovery and poverty has been increasing.
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Clinton’s buoyant campaign flagged slightly in the last weeks, but the president nevertheless
received just over 49 percent of the popular vote to Dole’s 41 percent; Ross Perot, running now
as the candidate of what he called the Reform Party, received just over 8 percent of the vote.
Clinton won 379 electoral votes to Dole’s 159; Perot again won none. But the president’s victory
did not have much effect on other Democrats, who made only modest gains over their disastrous
showing in 1994 and failed to regain either house of Congress.
Clinton Triumphant and Embattled
Bill Clinton was the first Democratic president to win two terms as president since Franklin
Roosevelt, and he began his second administration with what appeared to be serene confidence.
Facing a somewhat chastened but still hostile Republican Congress, he proposed a relatively
modest domestic agenda, consisting primarily of tax cuts and tax credits targeted at middle-class
Americans and designed to help them educate their children. He also negotiated effectively with
the Republican leadership on a plan for a balanced budget, which passed with much fanfare late
in 1997. By the end of 1998, the federal budget—transformed both by a series of changes in
fiscal policy and by the long-term strength of the economy—was generating its first surplus in
thirty years.
That popularity would be important to him in the turbulent year that followed, when the most
serious crisis of his presidency suddenly erupted. Clinton had been bedeviled by alleged
scandals almost from his first weeks in office: the investigations into Whitewater and related
issues; charges of corruption leveled against members of his cabinet and his staff; harsh
accusations of illegalities in financing his 1996 campaign; and a civil suit for sexual harassment
filed against the president early in his first term by a former state employee in Arkansas, Paula
Jones.
[We will have much more to say about this last scandal—
and another indirectly stemming from it—in class.]
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