Mr. President, you're no LBJ - Bill Clinton's social policies; late President Lyndon Johnson

National Review, Dec 27, 1993 by Vin Weber

AS THE 103rd Congress closed up shop for the holidays, Democratic leaders on Capitol Hill were predictably boasting how productive President Clinton's first legislative year had been. House Speaker Tom Foley said Clinton's accomplishments in 1993 rivaled "the first years of Dwight D. Eisenhower's and Lyndon B. Johnson's Presidencies." The Washington Post echoed this sentiment in a front-page article, gushing that "in a triumph of substance over style, President Clinton and the 103rd Congress broke through the legislative gridlock that has gripped Washington in recent years, stumbling to one of the most fruitful first years of an Administration in decades."

The comparisons are, as Newt Gingrich recently put it, "a joke." Clinton passed no original legislation on the scale of the Civil Rights Act or Medicare. "You can't find a single bill they passed this year that resembles a medium-sized bill under Lyndon Johnson," said Gingrich, "unless it's the $255-billion tax increase."

Most of the praise Clinton has been receiving relates not to the weight of any new legislation that was passed, but to how well he and the Democratic leadership in Congress got along. They passed a record number of bills, and completed the year with no vetoes (only the second time that has happened in six decades).

In the first place, with the Democrats in control of the White House and both houses of Congress, it would have been surprising for them not to get along. But as to the quality of Clinton's legislative accomplishments this year, they consisted mostly of averting disasters. The vote on his $255-billion tax bill, for example, came just after his first legislative foray--the so-called economic "stimulus" package--was killed by a Republican filibuster in the Senate. In the wake of that embarrassing defeat, Clinton had to pass his budget. He pulled out the razor-thin final vote only through last-minute pleading to Democratic lawmakers that his Presidency was on the line, last-minute pork-barrel deals, and a skillful bailout by Speaker Foley and Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell, who brought their full weight to bear on wavering Democratic members.

Furthermore, congressional Democrats had so reworked, altered, and revised the legislation that the final budget barely resembled the one the President had originally submitted to Congress. Asked just before the vote whether the final bill was to the President's liking, a senior White House official said, "At this point we're for whatever will pass." The budget did pass--by just one vote, and without the support of a single Republican. In the end, the President was seen more as having avoided humiliating defeat than having successfully championed his agenda in Congress.

On NAFTA, Mr. Clinton does indeed deserve credit for forcing the agreement through an unwilling Congress. But the NAFTA vote also reveals how much of a congressionally led party the Democrats currently are.

Clinton's supposed lieutenants in Congress Majority Leader Dick Gephardt and Majority Whip David Bonior--openly rebelled against their President and used their leadership positions to organize the campaign against his legislation. This is unprecedented in recent history. Even when President Bush announced the 1990 budget deal, Republican leaders who opposed the deal never abused their leadership offices to fight their own President's agenda. As it was, Clinton had to turn to his bitter enemies-- Newt Gingrich and other congressional Republicans--to provide the margin of victory on NAFTA.

Then, instead of building on the stature he gained from his NAFTA victory to begin pushing a New Democrat agenda, Clinton quickly moved to "heal the wounds" with the liberal coalition in Congress. He immediately allied himself with this liberal coalition to defeat the bipartisan Penny-Kasich deficit-reduction bill. And he back-pedaled on welfare reform, reintroducing the discredited idea of providing government subsidies to private businesses to hire welfare recipients. Now, as Clinton takes on the issue that could define his Presidency, healthcare reform, he is again in danger of being co-opted by the liberal leadership in Congress.

When the President announced his health-care agenda to a joint session of Congress earlier this year, he immediately conceded that the only point in his proposal that was non-negotiable was the principle of universal coverage. Everything else, he said, was on the table. This all but guaranteed that the final product of next year's healthcare debate will be congressionally driven legislation. Stan Greenberg, Clinton's pollster, has been urging him to find common ground with advocates of a Canadian-style single-payer program. Liberal senators such as Ted Kennedy and Paul Wellstone are gearing up to take advantage of this.

Meanwhile, President Clinton's approval ratings have hung consistently in the mid forties, the lowest level of any President since such statistics have been kept. And his party suffered a total collapse in this November's elections, losing the governorships of Virginia and New Jersey and the mayoralty of New York to Republican challengers.