Despite Storm Clouds, Clinton Finds Silver Lining in Longest Economic Expansion
Turning the shining steel of a revived auto industry and a cheery economic report into a counterpoint to the somber impeachment drama in Washington, President Clinton on Friday saluted the arrival of the nation’s longest peacetime economic expansion, what he called “an American economic renaissance.”
The economic report could not have come at a better time for Clinton. As he struggles to remain in office, it offered a powerful reminder of his underlying popularity and the distance the country has come since the days in 1992 when his campaign against President Bush operated under the slogan: “It’s the economy, stupid.”
But even as the president left Washington, his legal and political travails followed him. A clutch of demonstrators was on the street, one carrying a sign reading, “It’s the perjury, stupid.”
The North American International Auto Show, the industry’s premier annual display, provided the context for the president’s effort to draw attention to the strength of the economy. Clinton spent about an hour examining some of the 700 models on display.
On a day that began before dawn with a walk through a gathering snowfall to a helicopter waiting on the White House South Lawn and would not end until darkness, and more snow, had fallen back home, Clinton moved as a man untroubled by the storm around him, and equally unhurried.
He told reporters that his first car was a Kaiser, “a 1952 Henry J,” he said, adding, “It ran pretty well, but it had hydraulic brakes--didn’t stop very well.”
Later, he told a luncheon of the Economic Club of Detroit, “the auto show made me feel like a kid again; I wanted to leave with 10 of the cars myself.”
Faced with a head table at which 54 people had been seated, Clinton worked the entire row, shaking hands with all and extending hugs to old acquaintances. He then launched a speech and question-and-answer session that lasted 52 minutes.
Clinton made no public reference to the impeachment trial beginning in the Senate.
“The president obviously understands what’s going on in the Senate. He’s focusing on his agenda,” White House Press Secretary Joe Lockhart said.
With some polls showing a 70% approval rating for the job he is doing, Clinton is steering a course that tries to focus on the economic and policy matters that aides believe have helped keep up his popularity in the face of the yearlong assault of news about his affair with Monica S. Lewinsky.
But, said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, it may be the Lewinsky scandal itself that bears some responsibility for Clinton’s standing.
“I don’t think his numbers would be in the 70s without the scandal. It has put into the public debate the value of the Clinton presidency,” Kohut said. “People very clearly say he has done a lot of good things. The economy has never been better. The scandal has shone a light on the president’s character, but it has also shone a light on his performance, and his performance tops personal character in the evaluation of this presidency.”
But one veteran of Republican administrations emphasized recently that it is strictly the nation’s economy that keeps Clinton’s popularity afloat.
“His numbers? People have jobs, people have income, people could buy Christmas gifts,” the former official said.
Hours after the Department of Labor announced that the number of jobs in the United States had increased by 17.7 million during his tenure and the rate of unemployment was 4.3%, Clinton was touting a period of economic growth that actually began while Bush was still president. Clinton also pointed to the fiscal discipline he and the Republican congressional majority imposed on the federal budget and the free-trade policies that were less popular with Democrats than with Republicans.
“With this last month,” Clinton told the Economic Club, “this . . . is the longest economic expansion in peacetime in the history of the United States.”
The average rate of unemployment last year was 4.5%, the lowest since 1969; welfare rolls are the lowest as a percentage of the population in 29 years; and unemployment among African Americans and Latinos is the lowest since the United States began keeping such statistics in 1972, Clinton said.
“This is a rising tide that is lifting all boats,” he said.
The city Clinton visited is faring better, in at least one crucial measure, than when he campaigned here in 1992. Then, the unemployment rate was 16%, Mayor Dennis Archer said in a gushing introduction of the president, and it has fallen to 6.3%.
Specifically, the auto industry has had a banner year; its sales of 15.5 million cars and light trucks last year were greater than any year in the last 12.
