Scandal Aside, Clinton’s Political Legacy Is Secure

As the Monica S. Lewinsky affair drags on, President Bill Clinton is reportedly fretting about his historical legacy. He shouldn’t. Even if Clinton were to heed the calls of his critics and resign tomorrow, his place in history will be secure--as the most successful Democratic president since Harry S. Truman.

Recall the records of Clinton’s predecessors. John F. Kennedy had been stymied by Congress before an assassin’s bullet tragically cut his term short. Lyndon B. Johnson destroyed the Great Society by plunging America into the jungles of Vietnam, setting up a decade of fiscal irresponsibility and distrust of government. Jimmy Carter promised a new era in politics and delivered the unprecedented one-two punch of simultaneous high unemployment and inflation.

For all his political zig-zagging and personal turmoil, Clinton has done far better. Instead of pursuing tired Democratic nostrums of raising taxes and engaging in big spending, he has followed a more moderate path--and leaders from Britain’s Tony Blair to France’s Lionel Jospin have embraced his third way between rampant capitalism and old-style Keynesianism. But in the United States, where the punditocracy remains fixated on denouncing Clinton, his accomplishments have been overlooked.

Consider the economy. When Clinton took office, the budget deficit was at a record $290 billion and the economy was mired in recession. This year, for the first time since 1969, the budget will record a surplus and the economy is thriving. While Republicans are gunning for more tax cuts, Clinton has maintained that fiscal responsibility must come first. He has correctly insisted that any surpluses be directed toward ensuring the financial future of Social Security--a program many Republicans want to gut by privatizing it. A balanced budget has also had a good effect on employment, since it allows the Federal Reserve to hold down interest rates. Thus, unemployment is at a low 4.5% and Clinton has presided over the creation of a record 16 million jobs, a rate higher than even the Reagan administration recorded. And wages are up, too--adjusted for inflation, the wage rate is up 2.7% in the last 12 months.

Republicans will claim that Clinton doesn’t deserve the credit for all this good news. But this argument doesn’t hold water. Republicans can’t have it both ways: Several years ago, they complained that Clinton’s economic policies would lead to ruin.

Despite GOP claims that government intervention will invariably distort the economy, U.S. economic prowess has allowed Clinton to pass a number of sensible measures to aid lower- and middle-income Americans. On the most basic level, Clinton pushed for increasing the minimum wage, from $4.25 to $5.15 per hour. He also expanded the Earned-Income Tax Credit for another 15 million families, and a $500-per-child tax credit for another 27 million families. And the Family Medical Leave Act permits up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave to care for family members without threat of job loss.

Clinton has also been in the lead on the education, science and health-care fronts. The Headstart program was expanded to reach 830,000 children. Clinton has resisted GOP calls to end the AmeriCorps program, which permits current or recent college graduates to repay student loans through community service. The idea of community service, a Clinton campaign promise, has been one of Clinton’s biggest initiatives. This fall, Clinton intends to push for further tuition tax credits to ease the enormous bills of middle-class families putting children through college. In the science arena, Clinton has pushed for investments in new technology and space exploration projects, including the Mars Pathfinder mission.

On health care, Clinton may have bungled its overhaul in his first term, but since then he has signed the Kennedy-Kassebaum bill--which makes coverage portable and helps maintain coverage for the newly unemployed. In addition, the administration enacted the $24-billion Children’s Health Care Initiative, to cover five million children.

Similarly, Clinton and Vice President Al Gore have always insisted that the environment is about health and jobs. Clinton battled for the Safe Drinking Water Act and issued new standards to cut toxic pollution from chemical plants.

Then there is welfare reform. Democrats such as Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan of New York said Clinton’s signing of the welfare bill was a betrayal of the Democratic Party’s promise to protect the poor. But Clinton campaigned promising to “end welfare as we know it”--and kept his promise. The good news appears to be that dire predictions of hundreds of thousands of poor people becoming homeless have not been borne out. Instead, 7.5 million people are off the welfare rolls--a 41% decrease since 1992.

What about foreign policy? Clinton has stressed the link between foreign trade and domestic prosperity. In all, the administration has negotiated 240 separate trade agreements. Exports have increased by 50% over the past five years. Clinton narrowly managed to get the North American Free Trade Agreement with Mexico and Canada through Congress, though the more traditional elements of the Democratic Party strongly resisted it. While the jury remains out on NAFTA, it does not seem to be anything close to what the doomsayers predicted.

The same goes for expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. Remember how the doomsayers turned out for that? Russia, they warned, would become an enemy of the United States; it would never tolerate the incorporation of Eastern European states into NATO. Well, it has. If NATO expansion has gone smoothly, Russia policy itself has encountered more bumps--focusing as it did on propping up Boris N. Yeltsin. As Russia continues its downward economic slide, it may head into financial oblivion, but it does not represent a major military threat to the United States. The truth is that no country does. The United States retains preeminence.

Of course, Clinton’s record on foreign policy is far from perfect. There was the Bosnia debacle. And the downside of Clinton’s trade policy has been an unwillingness to confront Third World dictatorships on human-rights issues--though Clinton partly redeemed himself in his recent trip through China when he spoke up for human rights. Similarly, the administration has been working to disentangle itself from the Iraq imbroglio rather than confront Saddam Hussein.

And the administration has largely beaten the old GOP rap about being unwilling to use force--it lobbed missiles at Baghdad and sent carrier groups off Taiwan to deter the Chinese. And the recent missile strikes against terrorists in Afghanistan and Sudan showed that Clinton has not yet faded into irrelevance.

Indeed, as Clinton heads into the fall, he may avoid the fate of becoming a crippled president. Congress has passed little legislation this year and will probably compromise with Clinton in the final budget endgame rather than go home to the voters empty-handed. Clinton’s plan, says one administration official, is to protect Medicare and press for concessions on middle-class education tax cuts and investment in child care. Clinton can also use his veto power to block GOP attempts to gut other federal programs. He might even provoke them into another unpopular government shutdown. Clinton’s best bet will be to go on the offensive this fall since GOP control in the House rests on a shift of only 11 seats.

Sure, the pressure could heat up from independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr--but not if all he can produce are a few titillating Lewinsky episodes. Most Americans seem to have decided that the Lewinsky episode is not tragedy disguised as farce, but farce disguised as tragedy. If the economy takes a downturn after Clinton leaves office, the public could yet become nostalgic for his presidency.