Clinton in Charge : The Bushification of the Presidency

As Bill Clinton boarded Air Force One for the Tokyo summit, that broken promise nobody noticed was his 1992 commitment: He would focus on domestic affairs, leaving White House preoccupation with international events as a sour national memory of George Bush. Now, six months into his term, an international performance that is weak on everything but public relations is becoming as big a threat to Clinton as his domestic miscalculations.

The resemblance between William Jefferson Blythe Clinton and George Herbert Walker Bush is growing--especially in foreign affairs. Globe-trotting is a minor symptom. First, there’s Clinton’s reversal to align himself with Bush in rejecting Haitian emigration and soft-pedaling human rights in China. He’s also edging closer to Bush on the Israeli-Palestinian issue and free trade with Mexico. Last week’s camera-hungry talk from the summit, with its emphasis on global trade liberalization, is all-too familiar. And, most of all, is the recent attempt to raise Clinton’s ratings and cloud domestic mismanagement in the patriotic smoke of another missile attack on Baghdad.

The irony is that Americans satisfied with a Yalie President who enjoys overseas junkets, lies about taxes and counts on the Persian Gulf to divert attention from a bungled economy already had one in office last year.

Bush, however, for at least three years, convinced Americans--and much of the world--that he had real skills in foreign policy. Not until 1992--when Saddam Hussein was still in power and the New World Order was becoming a joke--did his supposed achievements become suspect, along with his priorities. In Clinton’s case, foreign policy has been mediocre from the start, making international affairs an inglorious avenue for his retreat from domestic unpopularity.

Take the just-completed economic summit of the leaders of the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Britain, Italy and Japan. A less impressive septet has not gathered since Abbott and Costello and Laurel and Hardy met the Three Stooges. Their collective home-front job-approval levels give new meaning to the word low. These ratings also explain the assembled leaders’ dire political need for enthusiastic press coverage of such “breakthroughs” as global tariff reduction on a number of manufactured goods. In the end, though, little was achieved beyond the leaders taking each other’s measure--presumably the same underwhelming assessment registered by wary publics from Venice to Vancouver.

Similar cynicism colors many analyses of Clinton’s pre-summit air strike against Iraq. Though announced as retaliation for Hussein’s earlier attempt to assassinate Bush, it was perceived by some as calculated to improve the President’s polls and prove his mettle. Drawbacks, from a geopolitical standpoint, are: Muslims dislike the ethnic double standard in Washington’s willingness to attack Baghdad and kill civilians while refusing to protect Muslim Bosnians from ethnic cleansing; chances of terrorism coming to the United States are increasing (and polls show more Americans are worried), and Clinton has left a questionable global impression of toughness.

The more immediate problem, from a White House political standpoint, is that Clinton’s action doesn’t seem to have impressed the U.S. public. The first polls after the missiles fell revealed a surge of support, but within days, as the attack lost impact, the opinion-poll spike turned into a spikelet. Less than a week later, as Clinton left for Japan, a published survey showed the President’s job approval back to a weak 38%--barely above the record lows posted a month earlier. No President in U.S. history has ever scored so poorly after a more or less successful military attack against a foreign foe. That tells us something about the public’s wariness.

The man who out-maneuvered the Hot Springs, Ark., draft board two decades ago seems to be replacing the Monroe Doctrine and the Truman Doctrine with a de facto “Clinton Doctrine,” shaped in Bosnia and then in the sanitary, high-tech attack on Hussein’s military intelligence headquarters. Its apparent guideline is more or less as follows: Washington cannot put military lives at risk because, if coffins start returning to Delaware’s Dover Air Force base, distraught mothers will complain to TV interviewers about that draft dodger in the White House sending their sons to be killed when he wouldn’t serve himself. It is a plausible caution.

In addition, Clinton miscalculated in choosing a foreign-policy team headed by Secretary of State Warren Christopher and National Security Adviser W. Anthony Lake. Competent but colorless, schooled in past Democratic embarrassments, Christopher and Lake are a foreign-policy team to have if you don’t expect to bother with foreign policy.

However, given Clinton’s trend toward greater foreign involvement, combined with evidence that U.S. weakness is creating complications around the globe, the Christopher-Lake option makes less sense. January’s global de-emphasis has become July’s global drift.

Which brings us to trade--one international area Clinton always intended to emphasize. His economic stance toward Japan is tougher than Bush’s, but other positions are converging. Just as Clinton, once in office, supported the Bush positions on Haitian emigration and U.S.-Chinese relations that he had earlier rejected, the new President’s emphasis on free trade increasingly mimics Bush’s. Listening to him try to pump up the Tokyo summit by insisting on the job benefits of a minor global-trade liberalization agreement, one could hear echoes of Bush.

Clinton’s Bushification is even more obvious in the high-stakes fight over U.S. ratification of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which spells out a new U.S. economic relationship with Mexico and Canada. Back in 1992, Clinton appeared to straddle on NAFTA, often sounding closer to the suspicious economic nationalism of House Majority Leader Richard A. Gephardt (D-Mo.) than to the free-trade enthusiasm of Bush. But by late spring, Clinton’s statements were moving toward Bush’s, while a major attack on NAFTA grew up around populist leaders from Ross Perot to Ralph Nader.

Now, NAFTA has become a populist’s dream of a political target--with its secret negotiations, greased-track congressional procedures, multinational trade tribunals and backstage promotion by the best-financed foreign lobbying in Washington memory, to say nothing of its threat to Rust Belt jobs. By July, opposition strategists could also see how the NAFTA deal is recreating many of the same circumstances that provoked a near-fatal grass-roots revolt against the Panama Canal Treaties 15 years earlier.

The deal with Mexico, like that with Panama, involved controversial secret negotiations. It aroused voter suspicion that the principal support for NAFTA (like the canal treaties) came from the foreign-policy Establishment and the multinational corporate and financial elites. With Mexico, like Panama, treaty supporters have to defend collaboration with a corrupt, undemocratic Latin American country from which large-scale drug smuggling into the United States was a problem.

And in both cases, U.S. voters became concerned that something Americans had built was being given away--then, it was the canal; today, U.S. manufacturing industries and jobs. It’s not surprising that few of Clinton’s senior international officials have fathomed the provocation. Most who held senior positions in the Carter Administration hadn’t foreseen the Panama Canal embarrassment either.

Taken in sum, this is not the portrait of a leader likely to win hosannas in international affairs. But what’s striking is how a President forced onto the defensive after botching tax and social policy on his preferred domestic stage has become like his unsuccessful predecessor: He is letting foreign relations take over more of his agenda, and tilting his views toward those of the bipartisan Establishment, while populists roar in the hinterland.

Bush took more than three years to fail by ignoring the distance between his domestic and international priorities and those of the American people. Clinton’s surprising weakness lies in how many of the same avenues he has traveled in just six months.