He's no Bill Clinton - comparison to Harry Truman - Cover Story

Washington Monthly, May, 1995 by Daniel Franklin

And let's not forget Clinton's efforts to solve what many consider the most serious and vexing of America's problems: crime. Amid the partisan attacks and counterattacks, which the press recorded faithfully, the clear benefits of the President's bill were lost. Even the most conservative estimates say that the bill will put around 20,000 more police officers on the nation's streets through support to community policing programs. And the $8.8 billion that Clinton's bill allocates to prisons will help ensure that violent criminals are not forced back on the streets due to overcrowding.

Clinton is also the first president in history to have the courage to take on the 800-pound gorilla of special interests: the National Rifle Association. The organization is the ninth-largest PAC in the country, donating nearly $2 million to congressional campaigns in 1994. For years their money and ability to mobilize their 3.3 million members led many to consider them the single most powerful interest group in Washington. For the past 25 years, their friends in Congress have stalled the banning of armor-piercing bullets and assault weapons. But Clinton has defied the gun lobby, including in his crime bill a provision that bans 19 different kinds of assault weapons. He also passed the Brady Bill, which requires five-day waiting periods for all gun purchases so background checks can be conducted. The law, which had been stonewalled by the NRA's congressional proxies since it was first introduced in 1986, prevented 44,000 convicted felons--and 2,000 fugitives--from purchasing weapons in the first year of its enactment.

Other domestic triumphs? The President early in 1993 passed the Family and Medical Leave Act, which ensures that family members who take time off from work to care for a newborn child or a sick relative will have their jobs waiting for them when they return.

And his "Reinventing Government" initiative has had several notable successes, such as the elimination of over 1,200 field offices of the bloated and overextended Department of Agriculture. Perhaps no government function is more burdened by red tape than the government procurement process. Before the President's plan, buying an office computer could take as much as three months of wading through the swamp of regulations that nearly doubled the retail cost of computers. Now a government worker can go to a computer store and buy one off the shelf like anyone else. This may sound picayune until you realize that 70 to 80 percent of government acquisitions are small, everyday purchases like these. And it is only through this concern for government reform, for which Clinton is unique among recent presidents, that government will begin to work under the guidelines of common sense.

One of the most lasting legacies of any president is the lifetime appointments he makes to the nation's highest court. In this, too, Clinton outshines Truman. Stephen Breyer and Ruth Ginsburg breezed through Senate confirmation with bipartisan support both on Capitol Hill and within the legal community and are universally hailed as being pragmatic, intelligent, and moderate. "These two have helped calm the waters and soothe what had been an inflamed Supreme Court process--inflamed by Bork, inflamed by Thomas," says Yale Law Professor Akhil Amar. "The long-term stability of the Court and the Republic is not well served by confirmation donnybrooks and spectacles." In his first two years, Truman nominated Fred Vinson and Harold Burton, two men whose mark on the Supreme Court was far from exemplary. It was Chief Justice Vinson who, with Burton's assent, delivered one of the most damaging blows to the First Amendment in the Court's history. The Dennis v. United States decision, written by Vinson, declared that even the teaching of communism was illegal and punishable by imprisonment.