The Presidency of Bill Clinton

The Legacy of a New Domestic and Foreign Policy

Mark White

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781848858886
• eBook ISBN: 9780857732132
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The presidency of Bill Clinton has an intrinsic historical significance: a marker of generational change, as he was the first 'baby boomer' to reach the White House; the first president whose personal life received no less attention than his policies; and the first elected Democrat President to win re-election since Franklin Roosevelt. This book provides wide-ranging coverage of Clinton's career, addressing the salient aspects of Clinton's life in politics: his governorship; the 1992 presidential campaign; the battle for health care reform; his economic policies; the issue of character, including the Monica Lewinsky scandal; his foreign policy - specifically his role in the peace process in Northern Ireland and in authorizing an aerial war in Kosovo; his handling of the issue of gay rights; and his relationship with the Hollywood film industry. Based on the latest research, this volume provides important new perspectives on Clinton's life in politics. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in American History, Politics and International Relations.

1

GRAPPLING WITH THE GOVERNORSHIP: THE FALL AND RISE OF BILL CLINTON

BRIAN S. MILLER

Frank White’s defeat of incumbent Bill Clinton in the 1980 gubernatorial race signalled a change in Arkansas politics: the end of a fourteen-year period in which moderate progressive politicians were to the fore. Clinton’s core problem in his first two-year term in office was pushing the moderate progressive style of politics too far, being too liberal at a time when economic, social and political pressures were making Arkansans and their politicians favour a more economically conservative agenda.

Bill Clinton proved to be a politician able to learn from his mistakes, and his defeat in 1980 taught him how to gauge public opinion and to adapt his agenda accordingly (following Alexandre Ledru-Rollin’s apocryphal quote, ‘There go the people. I must follow them, for I am their leader.’). This insight reveals parallel tendencies in Clinton’s presidency, when after his first two years in office he abandoned a liberal position in the face of massive public opposition, and instead embraced a more centrist agenda.¹

Arkansas Politics before Bill Clinton

World War II changed Arkansas in many ways, not the least of which was by providing the state with talented veterans who saw that major changes needed to be made in state politics. Sid McMath, a marine who fought at Guadalcanal and a prosecuting attorney in resort town Hot Springs, used his veteran status and newness to politics to be the first of this ‘G.I. Revolt’ to become prominent in Arkansas politics – in 1948 he was elected governor.

McMath, as the face of a generation that demanded change, proved to be far more economically progressive and racially moderate than any of his predecessors, and this strengthened the idea that state government could be used to better citizens’ lives. He worked to increase educational opportunities and medical care for Arkansans. His emphasis on road construction – of great interest in a state still largely travelled by dirt roads – won him support from the business community, though his stand against the powerful Arkansas Power and Light Company over the building of a steam plant in the Ozarks made McMath powerful enemies as well. It was that, combined with a scandal over highway construction contracts, that doomed McMath to only two terms in office. He had dared to do much, but had in the end fallen short.²

His immediate successor, Francis Cherry, served a term best noted for its lack of anything to note. Following Cherry, however, was one of the most debated politicians in Arkansas history, Orval Faubus. An administrative assistant to McMath during his governorship and a veteran as well, Faubus brought to the state house a continuation of McMath’s progressive populism by increasing funding for education and the mentally disabled, creating an office for industrial development, and naming six African Americans to the state Democratic Committee. Faubus’ credentials as a liberal, however, were damaged at Little Rock’s Central High School.³

Faubus was in many ways a consummate opportunist, willing to do almost anything to keep his office – this is not surprising, as unlike many of his office-holding peers, Faubus had little in private life (such as a law practice) to fall back on. His effort to halt the integration of Central High School was more about getting an unprecedented third term in office than in preserving some ideal of segregation, but it linked Faubus permanently to the demagoguery of the civil rights period. As a consequence, he came across as a segregationist, or at least as a governor with segregationist leanings, regardless of his personal beliefs. By the mid-1960s Faubus had become allied with the racially conservative financial elites of the state, the very group he had worked against in his earlier years. His administration was perceived as more about maintaining the racial and economic status quo than advancing McMath’s progressive vision, and so Arkansas politics remained dominated by the peculiar Southern strain of demagoguery, racism, and conservative populism.⁴

In this atmosphere, Arkansas in the 1960s embraced a new political agenda, championed by Arkansas émigré Winthrop Rockefeller, scion of the wealthy Rockefeller family and a dedicated Republican. Arkansans in the 1960s were awakening to the idea that the national Democratic Party had shifted in the years since the New Deal, but that realization had little impact at the state level: the Democratic Party, though dominant, remained relatively conservative. Arkansas voters were willing to support national non-Democratic candidates such as George Wallace and Richard Nixon only because their political stances mirrored the state’s core values more closely than did their opponents.

Rockefeller’s 1966 gubernatorial victory over Democratic candidate and arch-segregationist Jim Johnson, however, was about a candidate who promised a change from the negative aspects of the past – especially racism – to a brighter future that championed positive, progressive state development such as better prisons and schools. In this, Rockefeller built on the ideas of McMath, which had been derailed by Faubus. Rockefeller’s opponents, on the other hand, promised only an extension of the race-based politics of the Faubus years. While Rockefeller was positively liberal by the standard of ‘old guard’ Arkansas Democrats, he was only moderately progressive in terms of American politics at the national level. But this moderate progressive strain would mark Arkansas politics for the next fourteen years.⁵

One reason for the success of this moderate progressivism is that Arkansas, like America at large, found itself reasonably well-off economically, and thus willing to spend money on new social programmes and infrastructure development. More importantly, it was an idea whose time had come. Arkansans had grown tired of an image of economic, racial and cultural backwardness, and wanted to embrace the benefits emerging from Sunbelt growth. Rockefeller singlehandedly brought in a left-leaning progressivism to the Arkansas Republican Party that contrasted not only with the state Democratic Party, but with more conservative Republican parties in other Southern states.

It was Rockefeller’s money, to be sure, that had as much to do with his success as any inherent desire among the party faithful to embrace any sort of liberalism.⁶ But his victory showed more broadly that Arkansas was, in fact, partaking in a trend of Southern states moving away from the race politics of the civil rights era. The state, however, had no new Democratic politicians of sufficient stature to challenge the political ‘old guard’ Democrats. The wealthy Rockefeller, after a successful tour of duty as chairman of the new Arkansas Industrial Development Commission, did.⁷

Arkansans tended to vote pragmatically by picking the man rather than the party, because for so long there had been in effect only one party to choose from. Rockefeller’s victory was thus more about voters’ perception that he would do a better job than his Democratic opponents than the fact that he was a Republican (the first Republican to become governor since Reconstruction). Voters were willing to ignore his party affiliation as long as there was no Democratic candidate who also embraced this moderate progressivism.

That person came along in 1970 when Dale Bumpers ran for governor as a Democratic moderate progressive, and soundly defeated Rockefeller. Pat Moran, who served for a time as Bumpers’ top assistant, remarked that rural Arkansas voters were ‘looking for a way to stay with the Democratic Party; they have to be run off’. Arkansas had been, notes historian V.O. Key, the state that most adhered to the Solid South tradition, and when candidates were otherwise equal, Arkansas voters chose the Democrat over the Republican. When Bumpers appeared on the scene, therefore, his victory over Rockefeller was virtually assured.⁸

After two two-year terms in office, Bumpers successfully ran for the US Senate, and was replaced by David Pryor, whose political stance was almost identical to that of Bumpers. He also followed Bumpers’ example – two terms as governor, and then a move up to the US Senate. Clinton would be the direct inheritor of this Democratic moderate progressivism, the third, with Bumpers and Pryor, of the ‘Big Three’ Arkansas politicians.⁹

Clinton’s Push into Politics

Bill Clinton’s entry into politics came in 1974 when he unsuccessfully challenged Republican incumbent John Paul Hammerschmidt for northwest Arkansas’ Third District House seat. Clinton was at the time teaching at the University of Arkansas Law School in Fayetteville, the economic hub of northwest Arkansas and, in the Ozark Mountains, a small but persistent enclave for Republicans since the Civil War. This would be the first of only two elections that Clinton would lose.¹⁰

In 1976 Clinton ran for state attorney general, marking his foray into state politics. Two years later, when David Pryor decided to make his run for the Senate, Clinton was ready to step into the Governor’s Office. He easily defeated his four Democratic opponents in the 30 May primary, and largely ignored his Republican opponent, Lynn Lowe, in the general election.¹¹

At thirty-three, Clinton was the youngest Arkansas governor in history, and the youngest sitting governor in the nation. He was one of a number of progressive Southern governors elected in 1978, all of whom made attacks on various social and economic problems. Hence Arkansas was not the only state where new governors were expanding moderate progressive tendencies originating in the late 1960s. Clinton, though, was the only one of these governors who would be up for re-election in 1980, giving him very little time to recover from any serious mistakes.¹²

During his campaign in 1978 and throughout his first term, Clinton continually made the self-serving point that while he considered himself an activist, he could not be called liberal. In truth, all the moderate progressive governors made a point of their activism; certainly, no one could call them conservatives in the mould of either ‘old guard’ Arkansas Democrats or Frank White. Unlike Bumpers and Pryor, however, Clinton exhibited the boundless enthusiasm of someone who had rarely failed in getting what he wanted. As a result, Clinton focused on developing an activist style of leadership to the exclusion of other aspects of being governor.

In an attempt to continue the drive of his three predecessors, Clinton formulated a legislative programme that was ambitious. It pushed the moderate progressive stance to almost unacceptable levels, enough to make rural conservatives leery of their new governor. He came out for local school consolidation (never a popular topic), and accepted a legislative proposal to raise car license and tag fees to finance new highway construction. He changed or started new social service and education programmes, and restructured the governor’s office to make it more efficient. Clinton also created a contentious teacher-testing programme, and backed an Arkansas Education Association plan for a teacher fair dismissal policy.¹³

This was too strong a liberal agenda at a time when Arkansans were retreating to older, more conservative positions. The national economic downturn hit the state hard, and Clinton’s policies were suddenly out of step. Many who voted for him in 1978 began to wonder if his opponent in that race was correct in labelling Clinton a ‘tax-and-spend’ candidate. His choice of ‘Eastern liberal’ advisors – aloof, overeducated out-of-state beard-wearers who had little knowledge of, and little sympathy for, the farmers and workers that made up most of the state’s population – did not help endear him to a rural, culturally conservative electorate, nor did his expensive and glitzy ‘Diamonds and Denim’ inaugural ball.¹⁴

Clinton’s personality also caused problems. He was seen as arrogant, uncaring, and increasingly out-of-touch with the hard times of Arkansans. His wife, the Illinois-born (and thus ‘foreign’) Hillary Rodham, ruffled more feathers by refusing to use the Clinton name. Many Arkansans began to consider voting against him in 1980, not as an attempt to permanently end a promising political career, but in an effort to ‘teach him a lesson’. It was very apparent that Clinton had lost the sympathy of the Arkansas voter.¹⁵

Clinton’s programme alone could not generate enough negative feelings to cost him an election. Arkansas had a tradition of giving governors two terms in office to get their prog...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1. Grappling with the Governorship: The Fall and Rise of Bill Clinton
• 2. Vicissitudes: 1992 and the Road to the White House
• 3. A New Democrat’s New Economics
• 4. Found and Lost: A Third Way on Health Care
• 5. The Clarion Call, the Muted Trumpet, the Lasting Impact: Gay Rights
• 6. The Clinton Character Conundrum
• 7. Diplomacy in Northern Ireland: Successful Pragmatic International Engagement
• 8. The Aerial War in Kosovo
• 9. Courting the Hollywood Film Industry