Clinton’s Legacy: He’s No Teddy Roosevelt or Harry Truman

In his last State of the Union address, on Thursday night, President Bill Clinton will celebrate the nation’s prosperity and outline an ambitious agenda for his last year--but his eye will be on history. Even in the springtime of his presidency, Clinton was absorbed by his potential rank in history. He reportedly complained to his political guru, Dick Morris, that history had dealt him a bad hand. Without a great war or depression to fight, he couldn’t rank with the greatest presidents. But he had high hopes to make the second tier, beside Theodore Roosevelt and Harry S. Truman.

The conventional wisdom on Clinton’s legacy is already congealing. He’ll be credited for presiding over the longest economic expansion in the county’s history--and stained with the follies that led to his impeachment. But historians are likely to focus on questions that get little attention today. The president may end up being treated far more harshly because of how he played the hand that history dealt him. He was elected at a momentous moment of great national challenge and opportunity that the nation, beguiled by prosperity and bemused by partisan posturing, has largely squandered.

Clinton was the first president elected at the end of the 40-year Cold War. After any great war, the historic challenges are clear: a settlement with the vanquished, creating conditions for global economic growth, building a system to keep the peace and urging the victorious to grasp the opportunities and challenges posed by peace. The disastrous peace after World War I taught the perils of getting this wrong; the aftermath of World War II demonstrated the potential of getting it mostly right. By this measure, the Clinton presidency may well be found wanting.

The hash made of the peace with Russia goes without saying. A great nation has been reduced to barter. Life expectancy plummets; plagues, poverty and suicides soar. The heralded transition to free markets has turned into a blatant looting of a country by Mafia tongs and robber barons.

Russia was not ours to lose. But like any victor in a longstanding role, the U.S. had major responsibility for postwar Russian reconstruction. We set the terms and scope of assistance the new Russian leaders received. Those terms were tied to a remarkably dogmatic belief in the magic of markets. The U.S. pushed the Russians to make their currency instantly convertible and to sell off public assets in a “big bang” privatization. The results were catastrophic. Russia was held to far harsher terms than Germany after World War II. The U.S. helped execute a peace that was surely as ruinous as that imposed on Germany after World War I. The price has yet to be paid.

The administration pursued a similar laissez-faire doctrine in constructing the post-Cold War global economic order. Faced with the challenge of integrating hundreds of millions of new workers and consumers into the burgeoning global market, the administration peddled financial deregulation, floating currencies and free trade. Private, not public, investment and loans would provide capital for development. Under U.S. pressure, successful East Asian countries began to open their financial markets. The destructive force of the resulting flood of short-term speculative capital contributed directly to the worst global financial crisis since the Great Depression. Treasury Secretary Robert E. Rubin and Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan get high marks for staving off a global depression, but that does not hide the roots of the failure. In recent speeches, the president has begun to outline an ambitious and far-sighted agenda for regulating the global marketplace, including curbs on speculation, enforcement of core worker rights and environmental protections and new forms of corporate accountability. But historians will surely focus more on his policy than his rhetoric.

As the world’s only superpower, the U.S. is, as Secretary of State Madeleine K. Albright boasts, the “indispensable nation.” But the president’s cavalier use of force--over Iraq, bombing the chemical factory in the Sudan--has created a growing backlash. The United Nations has been used and discarded like an old shoe. Promising efforts to build regional partnerships--Partnership for Peace in Europe, collective peacekeeping in Africa--have floundered. In the end, the administration focused on the expansion of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization in Europe, an initiative that, if we are lucky, will turn out to be irrelevant rather than destructive.

The president rightly points to years of economic growth and growing prosperity as the centerpiece of his legacy at home. Erasing the crippling deficits left by the Reagan years was vital to any post-Cold War reconstruction. High levels of employment have finally begun to lift wages at the bottom after years of decline. The president can be applauded for successfully frustrating the Newt Gingrich Congress, staving off deep tax breaks for the wealthy and deep cuts in domestic programs. Impeachment was a briar patch for the radical right. The right wing took on sex, drugs and rock ‘n’ roll--and sex won.

In retrospect, historians surely will wonder at the president’s failure to summon the nation to a larger mission in a Gilded Age: the squandering of the public consensus for national health care, the default in addressing the plight of public schools, the shameful abandonment of the one in five children raised in poverty. Here again, a conservative Congress and a rapacious corporate lobby share the blame. The weakness of progressive and moral voices is also notable. But, surely, the president cannot avoid responsibility for his failure to do much about the glaring inequality of hope and opportunity.

Clinton is a man of remarkable political gifts whom Democrats will sorely miss. He presided over a period of peace and prosperity. But elected at the end of the Cold War, he embraced the conservative consensus of his time, with deplorable effects. Perhaps he could not have been a Franklin D. Roosevelt or Abraham Lincoln. But he chose not to be a Teddy Roosevelt or Truman. That was a great waste. *