Stumbles Teach Clinton the Value of Measured Steps

President Clinton took office four years ago portraying himself as a different kind of Democrat, one who would transcend what he called “the brain-dead politics of both parties.”

It was his conceit that, unbeholden to the failed orthodoxies of his own party or of the Republicans, he would create a new center in American political life to address the anxieties of the beleaguered middle class and bridge the cultural chasm between government and the populace.

But in a chaotic first two years in office, he learned that while the established parties might be intellectually moribund, they were still able to thwart his expansive ambitions to remake the nation’s economy, its health care system and its social safety net.

“He fundamentally thought that with an aggressive agenda and a Democratic Congress, he would basically be able . . . to get these things achieved and the American people somehow would accept that kind of action, that he did not have to spend the time to bring the American people along,” said White House Chief of Staff Leon E. Panetta.

“He learned that he didn’t lay the groundwork or bring the country along,” Panetta added. “He himself has often said he was a prime minister at that point, as opposed to the president.”

Through a combination of arrogance, inexperience and political miscalculation, the new president lashed himself--”like Ahab to the whale,” in Clinton’s words--to the congressional Democratic leadership, which deepened his alienation from the electorate while failing to deliver on his central promises.

The achievements of his first two years in office--deficit reduction, trade agreements, a ban on assault weapons and a family leave law--were overshadowed by his failures.

Rather than establishing a “new covenant” with the voters, Clinton became defined by his failures--the attempt to integrate homosexuals into the military, the proposals to fund expensive new government “investments,” the overarching plan to change the health care delivery system.

All these breakdowns were accompanied by constant chaos in the White House, worsening relations with Congress and allegations of scandal hanging over the administration.

The role of First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton in the political and financial investigations of the Clintons, as well as her involvement in the health care debacle, made her one of the most controversial first ladies ever, and one who became deeply unpopular among broad swaths of the electorate.

The public, according to polls, perceived not a new breed of Democrats in the White House, but government by a band of cultural and economic elitists, the sort of Democrats they had rejected in the previous three presidential elections.

In the fall of 1994, voters had an opportunity to issue a verdict on Clinton and his party in Congress, and they delivered a massive repudiation.

Ironically, it is to that electoral renunciation that Clinton owes his current good fortune.

The new Republican leadership in Congress made the same mistake Clinton made in 1993: believing that one election victory confers a mandate for a “revolution.”

During the past 18 months, both sides have come to the “shock of recognition,” as one senior White House aide put it, “that there are, in fact, limits. . . . There was a misreading [by Clinton and the Republicans] of the amount of change that people wanted.”

But what change do the American voters want? And what change has Clinton, who ran as the candidate of change, actually delivered in his 3 1/2 years in office so far?

Some changes Clinton will likely boast about in his convention acceptance speech this week. The federal budget deficit, for example, now stands at its lowest level in years, and Clinton has achieved his stated goal of cutting it in half by the end of four years in office.

Similarly, the economy, which was in recession through much of George Bush’s presidency, has grown steadily, although unspectacularly, through the Clinton years.

Republicans will object that much of the improvement in the deficit has come about through greater economic growth, and that the economic growth came despite Clinton’s actions, not because of them. But during the 1993 debate on Clinton’s tax-and-budget package, Republican leaders, from Bob Dole in the Senate to Newt Gingrich and Dick Armey in the House, repeatedly made dire predictions that passage of the Clinton plan would lead to economic ruin. Clinton denied those charges, and in hindsight, it is clear he was right and they were wrong.

Clinton may also talk of his accomplishments in foreign policy, an area of weakness in his first two years. Some of his claimed accomplishments--movement in the Middle East peace process, for example--might have taken place regardless of who occupied his office, although no doubt Clinton would have been blamed had they gone sour on his watch.

At least one foreign policy success, however, Clinton can clearly claim as his own, for he had few allies in it. In Haiti, Clinton contradicted his image of being a politician who watches the polls and committed U.S. troops to force the return to power of the island’s democratically elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide. His opponents predicted disaster.

Instead, while Haiti still remains the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere and is hardly a model of democratic order, the country last year enjoyed its first democratic transition of power ever, as Aristide passed the presidential sash to his elected successor, Rene Garcia Preval.

Other changes Clinton would prefer to avoid talking about: the failure of his health care plan; taxes that have gone up; the fact that for all his talk on the subject, there is little indication that the nation’s racial climate has improved. And at this week’s convention, he is unlikely to brag much about the welfare reform bill he just signed, given the grumblings among Democrats that it is too draconian.

Perhaps the most profound change, however, has been in Clinton himself. After 1994, Clinton was no longer bound to the congressional barons of his own party and could make a separate peace with the Republicans, appropriating their ideas while smoothing the harsh edges of the GOP agenda.

The critical moment came in the spring of 1995, when, to the horror of members of his own party, Clinton acceded to Republican demands for a seven-year plan to balance the federal budget.

While adopting their overall goal, Clinton added conditions--an approach that he came to call, “Yes, but . . . .”

“Yes, I will agree to balance the budget, but only if we protect Medicare, Medicaid, education and the environment,” Clinton said in mid-1995.

“Yes, I will accept your version of welfare reform, but only if accompanied by strengthened jobs and child-nutrition programs and more fairness to legal immigrants,” he would say a year later.

In the interim, Clinton proposed a long list of small but popular measures that had the overall effect of identifying him with families struggling with stagnant incomes, decaying neighborhoods, out-of-control children and a barrage of sex and violence on television and in the movie theaters.

By stealing traditional Republican themes, he became the inheritor of the center and moderate right of the population, the territory where elections are won.

Clinton has come out for school uniforms, tough penalties for school truancy, a crackdown on deadbeat parents, a national registry of sex offenders, wiring schools to the Internet and raising the minimum wage. Today he is expected to announce a plan to deny handguns to people convicted of domestic violence.

Now progress will come in smaller steps, some by executive action, such as new regulations on the marketing of tobacco to minors; some by accepting partial and bipartisan solutions to large problems, such as his signing of a bill to ensure the continuation of health care insurance when a worker loses a job or changes jobs.

None requires a large government bureaucracy or a tax increase; all demand some civic or corporate contribution.

All this did not come without cost. Clinton has now reestablished himself as the central player in the day’s political debate but on terms substantially defined by his opponents.

When Clinton declared in this year’s State of the Union address that “the era of big government is over,” he announced the abandonment of his most ambitious goals.

Clinton still hopes to achieve an expansion of health care coverage, broadened educational opportunities, an easing of racial tensions and new means of strengthening families and communities, Panetta said, looking forward to a second-term agenda.

But “he understands now that you cannot just simply assume that you can provide the large kind of government response to it,” Panetta said. “This has to be an incremental process.”

Even the most stalwart Clinton partisans watched, dumbfounded, as he stumbled through the first two years of his term. But they express hope that the recovery of the past two years will continue into a second term as a chastened and realistic chief executive grows into the job.

“It hasn’t been a straight line,” said early Clinton supporter Al From of the Democratic Leadership Council, with more than a little understatement. But as Clinton moves toward a hoped-for second term, From added, “I think he’s going to be driven by a legacy, which is a higher calling than a presidency.”

FOREIGN POLICY / Focus on Trade and Criticism on China

In his 1992 campaign manifesto, “Putting People First,” Clinton vowed “to define a new national security policy to build on the victory of freedom in the Cold War.”

But like his predecessor, Bush, Clinton came up short on building a new foreign policy foundation to take the place of the strategy of containment that undergirded foreign relations during the Cold War.

Clinton learned, in the words of his national security advisor, Anthony Lake, that “you don’t solve foreign policy problems, you manage them.”

Despite the lack of a sweeping new foreign policy construct, however, Clinton has moved a long way toward a second, more modest goal: to give international economic relations new primacy in foreign affairs.

He completed two significant trade agreements launched under Republican administrations: the North American Free Trade Agreement and the Uruguay Round of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade.

He helped create a Pacific Rim trading alliance and negotiated dozens of new market-opening initiatives with China, Japan and the nations of Europe.

Clinton and his top trade advisors have not shrunk from confrontation when U.S. business interests are at stake. But that mercantilist approach has also led him to abandon a campaign pledge to force Beijing to improve its human rights record as a condition for Washington to grant it most-favored-nation trading status.

Former Secretary of State James A. Baker III excoriated Clinton at the Republican National Convention for “four years of flip-flops and photo ops passing as foreign policy.”

He said Clinton’s failure to press China harder on human rights after threatening sanctions cost the United States credibility.

“Not long after Bill Clinton raised the flag of his hard-line China policy, he hauled it down in surrender. The Chinese learned his word is meaningless,” Baker said.

He also accused Clinton of coddling Syrian President Hafez Assad and the regime in North Korea, while alienating Britain with his courtship of the Irish Republican Army.

Lake responded with an unprintable stockyard epithet.

“Ask any Asian government about the crisis in the Taiwan Straits last spring and the successful use of American diplomacy and power to help defuse it,” Lake said in a heated defense of administration foreign policy. “Ask the South Korean government about how closely we have worked together on the security and future of the Korean Peninsula.”

Lake then ticked off what he considers the administration’s most important foreign policy accomplishments: the use of American power to halt the war in the former Yugoslavia; the restoration of democracy to Haiti; the freezing of the North Korean nuclear weapon program; withdrawal of U.S. troops from Somalia; the removal of nuclear weapons from all ex-Soviet states except Russia; a plan for eventual enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization; progress on the Middle East peace process, including a treaty between Israel and Jordan; a substantial increase in exports to Japan.

Although Clinton dedicated his 1992 campaign almost exclusively to domestic concerns, he has increasingly turned to matters abroad in the past two years as he has found new confidence, particularly in contrast to his overseas peers, who are struggling with local conflicts and anemic economic performance.

“It took this administration a while to get itself together,” said Morton Halperin, who left a top post at the National Security Council earlier this year. “There were some slow starts, but the world is a very new and very different place than it was just a few years ago.”

SOCIAL POLICY / President’s First Love Produced Worst Defeat

If foreign policy has become a favorite of Clinton’s, domestic social policy represents his first love. It is the area where he has broken most dramatically with his party’s traditional practices by signing a sweeping welfare reform law. But the social policy arena was also the site of his greatest failure: the collapse of his wide-ranging health care proposal.

On other social policy areas, Clinton has had to make do with substituting small-scale pilot programs for the sort of sweeping proposals he pledged in his 1992 campaign. “At this point we are in a demonstration project presidency,” complained Roger Hickey, co-director of the liberal Campaign for America’s Future.

In candidate Clinton’s 1992 “new covenant,” he pledged to overhaul federal welfare and public housing programs and to provide cities with help to improve conditions in their poorest neighborhoods.

He argued that the government should provide more opportunities for Americans but demand more responsibility from them.

Clinton can point to significant change in those areas today, but Republicans have forced many compromises, arguing that some of the programs were too expensive or gave the federal government too much voice in state and local affairs.

When he promised during the 1992 campaign to “end welfare as we know it” and set two-year limits on eligibility for benefits, Clinton also promised welfare recipients that they would be given government-sponsored community-service jobs if the clock ran out and they had no job.

By contrast, the measure Clinton signed last week directs states to require most recipients to go to work within two years of joining welfare rolls and would limit eligibility for cash benefits to five years in a lifetime. But states are not obliged to provide community-service positions for those who cannot find work or to provide education or training.

“The welfare bill that he presented himself would have met all of those pledges,” said Robert Greenstein, executive director of the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities, a liberal Washington think tank. “The final bill meets some and not others.”

Under Housing and Urban Development Secretary Henry G. Cisneros, the administration has sought to demolish the most dilapidated public housing. In its place, officials have tried either to build new campus-style housing with strict rules barring convicts, or to relocate residents by giving them vouchers for rent in privately owned buildings.

Clinton has increased funding for programs to combat homelessness from $570 million in 1993 to $1.12 billion in 1995, though that figure has been pared by Congress to $820 million this year.

To help improve conditions in poverty zones, the administration has begun a program to give a number of cities a package of federal aid for use in “empowerment zones.” That aid includes tax breaks and low-cost loans for businesses that will operate in the zones, as well as assistance for cities to create education and training programs and to reduce crime.

In late 1994, six cities received $250 million in tax incentives that go to employers to hire local residents, as well as $100 million to fund community-improvement programs.

Critics on both ideological flanks attack those proposals--with liberals saying they are too small to address the deep problems of many cities, while conservatives say Clinton has tried only to tinker with a welfare state that needs a complete overhaul.

Complete overhaul was what Clinton proposed for the health care system. The proposal, prepared by a task force headed by his wife and unveiled by the president in a nationally televised speech to Congress, would have met the goal of guaranteeing health coverage for all Americans, an idea pursued by every Democratic president since Harry S. Truman.

But just like Truman, Clinton saw his proposal go down to defeat in Congress. The failure helped set the stage for the 1994 electoral debacle Clinton’s party suffered. Notably, the platform the Democrats are expected to adopt this week would, for the first time since Truman’s day, drop the party’s call for “universal” health coverage in favor of a more vaguely worded promise to improve access to health care.

And while Clinton partisans note that the rate of inflation in health care has slowed markedly in the last few years--and suggest that Clinton’s proposal effectively scared the industry into mending its ways--it is also true that the number of Americans without health insurance has steadily increased and now stands at 17% of the population younger than 65.

TAXES, ECONOMY / ‘Laser Beam’ Hit Some Targets, Missed Others

The day after he won the presidency in 1992, Clinton promised to focus “like a laser beam” on the economy.

He pledged major new public investments in the nation’s infrastructure and the work force. He promised to lift the working poor out of poverty, train the unskilled, spur business to invest in new technology and unleash the energy of entrepreneurs. He vowed to stimulate the economy and create 8 million jobs--in fact 10 million have been produced--and to slash the federal deficit in half.

A centerpiece of Clinton’s economic platform was to spend $20 billion a year on “public investments” in roads, bridges and other parts of the nation’s infrastructure.

In fact, no such fund ever was created, and the $80-billion goal has remained far out of reach in a time of deficit-cutting and battles with Congress over spending.

Still, Clinton did increase spending, albeit modestly, on a range of infrastructure projects. For example, federal grants to state and local governments for clean-water facilities, transportation, housing and other projects rose to $41.3 billion this year, from $31.1 billion in 1993.

On the negative side of the scorecard, Clinton’s early promise of middle-class tax relief was not delivered. In 1993, as the president ventured forward with his deficit-cutting plan, he decided that the tax cut was not affordable at the time. In fact, Clinton raised taxes on certain older, upper-middle-class households by increasing the amount of Social Security benefits subject to taxation--from 50% to as much as 85%.

Clinton’s vow to raise taxes on wealthier Americans was delivered. A higher, 36% bracket was created (the previous top rate was 31%) affecting households with adjusted gross incomes above $180,000 a year. In addition, a surtax for “millionaires” was applied to taxpayers with annual incomes above $250,000, in effect creating a 39.6% bracket.

At the opposite end of the income ladder, Clinton said he would expand the earned income tax credit so that no family with a full-time worker remained below the poverty line. That promise has been largely delivered, with the help of the recently enacted boost in the minimum wage.

ENVIRONMENT / Vetoes Have Been Driving Force Behind Policy

In some ways, Clinton’s record on the environment has been the flip side of his experience on social policy.

In the social arena, Republicans have forced him to scale down or abandon programs that are popular with his party’s liberal activists. On the environment, Republican threats to cut back environmental programs have so frightened many environmentalists that they are more than willing to overlook Clinton’s own abandonment of campaign goals.

During the 1992 campaign, Clinton said:

* The United States should, by 2000, reduce its total emissions of carbon dioxide, the gas suspected of causing global warming, to 1990 levels.

* The United States should decrease its reliance on nuclear power while boosting conservation programs.

* In a Clinton administration, energy conservation would be encouraged by raising fuel-efficiency standards for automobiles to 40 miles per gallon by 2000.

In office, however, the administration retreated on the carbon dioxide emissions, the fuel-efficiency standards fell by the wayside and Congress has blocked proposed tax incentives for research into renewable energy.

“Despite a nominally green White House and Democratic majorities in both houses of Congress, the only major environmental legislation to come out of Washington in the first two years of Clinton’s administration was the California Desert Protection Act,” wrote Paul Rauber, a Sierra Club editor.

At the same time, however, the federal government stepped up efforts to close the most seriously polluted toxic waste dumps in the Superfund program, cut emissions of toxic air pollution and went along with Congress’ overhaul of a law imposing limited regulation on pesticides in foods.

The government also set the first water-quality standards for the Great Lakes, gained approval for somewhat tougher drinking water standards, and provided funds for communities to improve water treatment plants.

“All of these are terribly important. They go to the air we breathe, the water we drink, the food we eat,” said Carol Browner, administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency.

With Republicans gaining majorities in the House and Senate in 1994, much of Clinton’s environmental policy has been built around vetoes.

Clinton vetoed measures that would have allowed oil and gas drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and clear-cutting in Alaska’s Tongass National Forest. He also fended off a plan to weaken protection of the Mojave Desert preserve and sharply cut EPA spending and enforcement of federal regulations.

But, retreating from an earlier veto, Clinton signed legislation allowing timber-cutting in some of the nation’s oldest forests. In the wake of protests, Clinton has said he wants to repeal the measure.

CRIME AND PUNISHMENT / White House Works to Avoid the ‘Soft’ Label

On the issues of crime and guns, Clinton’s campaign goals were neither grand nor sweeping. Fighting crime remains a matter mostly for local and state police, not federal agents, despite the politically charged rhetoric in Congress.

For 30 years, however, Democrats have been dogged with the “soft on crime” label, and the Clinton White House has seemed determined to prove that on crime at least, it would not toe the liberal line.

As a candidate, Clinton said he would move to put 100,000 more police officers on the streets and would support the death penalty, handgun registration and a ban on assault weapons.

All of these proposals have been enacted, although their impact remains a topic for debate.

Since 1994, Congress has agreed to make the annual installment payments toward the 100,000-officer goal. Federal funds pay up to $75,000 over three years for police departments to hire a new officer. After the three years, the local police agencies must pick up the entire cost.

In 1993, Clinton lobbied for and won passage of the Brady Act, the first federal gun-control law in 25 years.

Named for James S. Brady, the presidential press secretary wounded in the attempted assassination of President Reagan, the law requires a five-day waiting period for the purchase of a handgun. Local authorities use that time to check to see whether the purchaser has a criminal record or a history of mental illness.

In 1994, Clinton lobbied for and narrowly won passage of a ban on the manufacture and sale of semiautomatic assault weapons. The bill squeaked by on a 216-214 vote in the House.

Supporters said these fast-firing guns are weapons of war that do not belong on the streets.

Critics said the bill was the first step toward disarming American citizens but now argue that the ban has been ineffective because new guns have been produced that circumvent the law.

Civil libertarians have denounced some of Clinton’s actions, particularly a law he signed that expanded federal death penalties, but Clinton’s actions have won him support from many police organizations and victims-rights advocates.

Times staff writers Ronald Brownstein, David G. Savage, James Gerstenzang, Jonathan Peterson, Elizabeth Shogren and Melissa Healy contributed to this story.