The essence of Clintonism

National Review, Oct 19, 1992 by Hadley Arkes, Tony Snow

BILL CLINTON has taken, as the center of his political art, the sculpting of himself, with every accent and shading deliberately placed. Part of the artifice is to suggest a character rooted in the landscape of the rural South, but evidently connected to a world beyond Arkansas. And so, when the Vice President linked him with the "cultural elite," Bill Clinton could summon the incredulity of a country boy:

That's a bad thing to be, you know [i.e., a member of a cultural elite]. Mario Cuomo, the son of an immigrant grocer, graduated first in his class at law school and didn't get a Wall Street offer because he was an immigrant blue-collar kid, give me a break.

Let me tell you, I read a book or two in my life, and maybe that qualifies me to be in a cultural elite, but when Dan Quayle and I were kids ... he was the son of a publishing man, and I once lived in a house without indoor plumbing. Who is he to call me part of an elite? Anybody who has ever had to go to the john outside with a temperature in the teens is automatically not in the cultural elite.

The question was engaged in a lusty way, turned into a parable--and very stylishly left unaddressed. An artful performer makes his audience do some of the work, and in this case Clinton's listeners are induced to assume that there is, behind the badinage, a sensibility shaped at Georgetown or Oxford.

But in truth, Georgetown and Oxford seem to have left no lasting imprint on the furnishings of his mind. At the time Clinton attended Georgetown, that Catholic university was still different from other colleges in the Northeast in the kinds of moral concerns that pervaded the place and made their impression even on the dimmest undergraduate. Yet they evidently did not shape Bill Clinton's understanding in the slightest degree.

The telling reflection here was offered, inadvertently, during Clinton's acceptance speech at the Convention. He was speaking of the political leaders and teachers who had inspired him, and he intended a deep compliment to his late professor, Carroll Quigley, by putting that venerable teacher of history on the same plane as John Kennedy. From Professor Quigley's tutelage, Clinton had extracted this grand lesson: "Carroll Quigley ... said America was the greatest country in the history of the world because our people have always believed in two great ideas: first, that tomorrow can be better than today, and second, that each of us has a personal, moral responsibility to make it so."

How many professors have suffered acute embarrassment when a former student credits his teacher with a revelation that opened his mind--and then attributes to his professor a proposition of staggering banality? The late Carroll Quigley had deployed his considerable wit to explain, among other things, the intricacies of the Reformation and the strategic interests engaged in the First World War. But the intricacies and the abiding questions had flown past. What registered with the young Bill Clinton was a line offered in passing, a line he could use one day on the hustings.

To this day, Clinton will draw what he can use, with an ear sharply attuned to his setting, and it is that disposition, joined to his animating art, that makes his performance at once so impressive and so elusive. Impressive in that he manages to combine an assortment of issues and moods in a manner that no other politician has quite matched. He has absorbed the theme of "reinventing" government, scaling it down, and he has commonly as a "tax subsidy"--as though the money belonged, in the first instance, to the State. As Paul Craig Roberts has already pointed out, rather than protecting jobs, Clinton's scheme would cast up the most calculable discouragement from investing in the United States.

At the deepest level, Clinton does not respect the market of a free economy, because he does not understand what it does well, beyond the wit of the cleverest managers. Clinton knows, without a flicker of doubt, just which industries are bound to fuel the growth of the economy and provide the largest return for the nation. He knows, then, the industries that deserve "incentives" which is to say, discriminatory taxation in their favor. They are the "high-tech" industries: "new fiber-optics networks," "high-speed rail," "new generations of computer... and biotechnology." It is curious that Clinton reduces technology, or the knowledge of technics, to equipment. What he leaves out are novel principles of organization, or the more ingenious application of some older, more enduring principles. In that respect, one of the most dynamic parts of the American economy is the system of retailing, with its relative ease of entry and competition. Sam Walton's Wal-Mart has shown the most stunning returns on its stock, while computer companies have suffered the ravages of the market. If Clinton knows, with such unbreakable certitude, the industries that are sure to bring vast returns and propel the growth of others, he should be doing something far more important than running for President: he should run for Chief Broker and manage all of our portfolios.