COLUMN LEFT : All Prologue and No Real Program : Bill Clinton’s vaunted plan is silent or terminally fuzzy on all the issues that count.

The rush to the Clinton bandwagon is now in full swing; the aroma of sycophancy around Power Imminent thick enough to cut with a knife. The message from the opinion-forming elite is in: Bill Clinton’s the one.

Not since the rise of Jimmy Carter in the early primary season of 1976 has there been such excitement--unless you count the mini-surge for Gary Hart in 1988, before his downfall as that year’s best-known adulterer.

Journalists love Clinton. He has, one reporter wrote recently in the Los Angeles Times, “a serious and well-documented problem-solving approach to national issues rather than dependence on traditional liberal formulas expressed in impassioned rhetoric and based on sweeping federal programs.” This is typical of the sort of coverage he’s been getting.

Clinton represents the final bankrupt marriage of convenience between neo-liberalism and the business lobbies that finance the Democratic Party. Here is a man so terrified of “impassioned rhetoric” or political passion of any kind that he cannot bring himself to talk about the poor, about labor, about women, about black people, about Latinos, about jobs, about the environment. In his person suppurates the decay of a Democratic Party so desperate for power that it is turning to the 11-year governor of a right-to-work state where the definition of a “good job” is underpaid, non-union checkout clerk at Wal-Mart, a state with a regressive sales tax, a state that has been rated 48th overall in environmental practices.

A look at the Clinton manifesto--a 17-page plan to “restore the American dream”--reveals a blend of procedural rhetoric and substantive vagueness that is indeed reminiscent of Jimmy Carter and his pledges to run a government as good and as honest as the American people.

Clinton promises both short- and long-term solutions to America’s problems. First out of the short-term box is quick action on a highway bill. After this stirring specimen of new thinking, Clinton proposes a tax cut for the middle class, to be balanced by higher taxes on the rich and by closing loopholes. Redistribution is needed, but in terms of jump-starting the economy this will do nothing. The 1986 tax reform closed most loopholes, so the revenue Clinton says he’ll reap is a mirage. In fact, Clinton never explains how he’s going to pay for anything, beyond such hot-air pledges as cutting “the $200-billion annual budget for the federal bureaucracy.”

Remember Jimmy Carter’s campaign flim-flam about “zero-based budgeting”? Clinton similarly pledges to cut spending for the federal bureaucracy by 3% a year. This is a lot of money, a lot of bureaucrats to turn out of their jobs. Elsewhere Clinton says, “We must not forget about the real people whose lives will be turned upside down when defense is cut deeply.” Of course, “real people” work in government, too, but bashing bureaucrats is an old part of knee-jerk campaign rhetoric and so no one calls Clinton on the real implication of a promise to cut such spending by nearly 12% over four years.

Page after page of Clinton’s program turns to mush at the first encounter with reality. He proposes to deliver “affordable health care to all Americans” by “eliminating administrative waste in the current system, controlling costs and ending fraudulent billing practices.” That’s it. As Andrew Kopkind writes in the Nation, “If there are no second acts in Americans’ lives, there are no second pages in Clinton’s proposals.”

Everything in Clinton’s vision is prologue. He speaks well about the need to educate and train young Americans. He says nothing about what these Americans are supposed to do once they leave the classroom and the training shop. As the governor of Arkansas, the low-wage, anti-union state, he should know--which is probably why the Clinton manifesto is silent on the matter, just as it is on the fast-track trade negotiations with Mexico, which Clinton supports.

Clinton is almost entirely silent on public spending for infrastructure, energy, health (unlike Tom Harkin, for example, who faces both this issue and environmental sustainability, another topic on which Clinton is taciturn). He is silent on the banking crisis. On the fundamental problem of how to lower long-term interest rates, thus easing the crippling burden of government interest payments (14% of the budget), he has nothing to say. So how is he going to pay for any of his pledges? He has nothing serious to say about that either. Why should he bother, so long as no one takes the time to ask him a few troublesome questions.