Pilgrim's regress - Pres. Bill Clinton's task of selling positive government

Reason, May, 1994 by Martin Morse Wooster

President Clinton's future depends on selling big government to a leery electorate.

AS PRESIDENT CLINTON CELEBRATed his first year in office, some journalists admired his achievements, while others were skeptical. But for many journalists living inside the Beltway, President Clinton was not just a politician--he was a hero.

Journalists call a story a "beat sweetener" if it's meant to please a source or boost the ego of a powerful person. There were far too many writers whipping up sticky feasts of love in 1993, hoping that, if they were very good, Bill Clinton would pat them on the head and Hillary Rodham Clinton would reward them with a homemade cookie. While some writers, such as The Washingtonian's Barbara Matusow, Newsweek's Eleanor Clift, and Time's Margaret Carlson, were content to deliver lollipops to the Clinton camp, The New Yorker's Sidney Blumenthal wanted to deliver the entire candy store to the presidential partners.

Blumenthal was in an odd position. He had made his career as a liberal pit bull who saw conservatives and Perotistas as juicy raw meat. When attacking right-wingers, Blumenthal wouldn't usually stop until the bones were picked clean.

But now the Republicans were out of power, and diminutive billionaire Ross Perot had disappeared from the national political radar. Worse still, Blumenthal's good friend, Bill Clinton, was in the White House--and under attack. The revelations of the Arkansas state troopers had made the president's private parts fodder for comedians, and the smoldering scandal of the Whitewater Development Corporation threatened to burn the president, the First Lady, and several other White House staffers. Something had to be done!

So in the January 24 New Yorker, Blumenthal concocted a beat sweetener so sugary it threatened to give the magazine's readers diabetes. In his effort to become Clinton's best friend in the press, Blumenthal pulled out all the stops. He made comparisons between the president and Lyndon Johnson, John Kennedy, Dwight Eisenhower, Harry Truman, and Woodrow Wilson. Showing his mastery of history, Blumenthal wrote that "Clinton had the worst first week of any president since William Henry Harrison, who caught pneumonia while delivering a long inaugural speech and died a month later. Clinton suffered from attorney general nominees with nanny problems and from visceral opposition to gays in the military."

My favorite passage in Blumenthal's article described Bill Clinton's goals. The dilemmas Clinton faces, according to Blumenthal, "must be excruciating, because the issues he insists on confronting are so basic. Yet...he is open to recasting his methods in order to reach his goals. Honor and glory must remain ceremonial. If the glittering superficialities of the office entrance its occupant, he risks distraction from his arduous tasks. This pilgrim has to be a politician: it is the only way he knows how to progress."

In the midst of such high-minded praise, Blumenthal had one substantive point to make. If Clinton is to succeed, Blumenthal wrote, "he must revive belief in positive government. Not for a long time--not since the mid-1960s, really--have Americans been confident that government could help them deal with the significant problems of their lives."

The national lack of faith in "positive government"--more commonly called big government--will be difficult, if not impossible, to overcome. The New Dealers who were active in the Democratic Party during the Carter presidency are by now dead or retired. The Great Society advocates who could still pass themselves off as young Turks in the late 1970s are discredited graybeards now.

But the problem isn't just on the big government side. The Clinton administration faces more--sophisticated intellectual opposition than the Carter crew ever did. Free-market think tanks are far larger now than they were in the "national malaise" years. Had Jimmy Carter proposed a national health-insurance scheme, it's unlikely it would have been countered as effectively as Clinton's was by the Manhattan Institute's Elizabeth McCaughey in the February 7 and the February 28 New Republics (it's equally unlikely that The New Republic would have run an argument against a Democratic president).

THE LINGERING RESENTMENT OF GOVERNment doesn't, of course, merely exist among think tankers. This dislike for the state is the result of our country's contempt for petty bureaucracy. The regulators who make sure you stand in line for hours to renew your driver's license have done more to undermine support for government than any policy analyst ever has. As the American Enterprise Institute's William Schneider notes in the November 27 National Journal, when critics of the Clinton health plan ask, "Do you want health care run like the Post Office?," the charge is effective because postal workers, protected by a state-granted monopoly, have no incentives to be pleasant to their customers.

Liberals have duly noted this sea change in attitude. The cover of the January Washington Monthly asserts "Government Can Work"--the implication being, of course, that everyone agrees that it is not working at the present moment. Inside, Nicholas Lemann notes that when he first came to D.C. in 1976, the notion that government bureaucracies were inefficient and unpleasant was "considered the province of anti-New Dealers and Taftites." Even mainstream Republicans, Lemann writes, thought that bashing big government was "faintly embarrassing--the kind of thing that one doled out for Nebraskans at fundraisers but didn't really mean."