As his tenure winds down, President Clinton is engaged in an almost daily crusade to be remembered as the president who guided the nation through its greatest golden age.
The Monica Lewinsky scandal is sure to be mentioned prominently by Clinton biographers and obituary writers, but the president seems to be fighting to ensure that the sizzling economy gets equal or better mention.
In an Oval Office interview Thursday with the Chicago Tribune and two other newspapers, Clinton took some credit for the remarkable economic boom.
“I do not believe that we would have had a recovery this robust, with this many jobs–I don’t think we’d be anywhere close to that–if we hadn’t taken serious, aggressive and immediate action to get rid of the deficit,” Clinton said.
He was quick to say that others played a big part as well. “I don’t think anyone can claim sole credit,” Clinton said. “I think we’ve had a remarkable balance here, where the American people, all of us in our own way, essentially have done what we were supposed to do. And there’s more than enough credit to go around.”
As eager to deprive him of his place in history as he is to seize it, Clinton’s opponents deride even claims of partial credit. They ascribe the boom to Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan or former President Ronald Reagan; they cite the high-tech explosion, falling trade barriers or cheap oil–anything other than Clinton’s policies.
The question of how much credit Clinton gets has more immediate ramifications than Clinton’s legacy. Vice President Al Gore is increasingly basing his presidential campaign on the claim that as a Clinton White House veteran, he is best equipped to keep the prosperity going.
Economists might never agree on precisely how much credit Clinton deserves, but he loses few opportunities to influence their verdict. Not always the most press-friendly president, Clinton has been hosting small groups of reporters in the Oval Office to discuss the economy.
His annual economic report to Congress, released Thursday, bristles with dazzling figures. “These economic successes have not been achieved by accident,” Clinton adds, crediting his strategy of fiscal discipline, wise spending and free trade.
When he announced his fiscal year 2001 budget Monday, Clinton stood before a made-for-TV backdrop reading “America: Debt Free By 2013.” He theatrically raised a paint roller–“this is the point where we have the photo op,” he joked–and painted a line on a huge chart to show the debt receding to zero.
This echoed another dramatic performance last September, when Clinton announced that the budget surplus for 1999 would be $115 billion. At an early morning Rose Garden ceremony, Clinton whipped out a magic marker and wrote “$115,000,000,000” on a large chart, lingering over each zero as photographers raced about the Rose Garden for a better angle.
It is a rare speech these days in which Clinton does not recite the country’s impressive economic figures. In his State of the Union address last month, it took him only until the second paragraph to begin his litany.
“We begin the new century with over 20 million new jobs, the fastest economic growth in more than 30 years, the lowest unemployment rates in 30 years, the lowest poverty rates in 20 years, the lowest African-American and Hispanic unemployment rates on record, the first back-to-back budget surpluses in 42 years,” Clinton declared.
To some observers, it is only logical that Clinton would claim credit for the boom.
“Given the bad things that have happened during his presidency–the personal things–the economy may be one of his best legacies,” said Democratic consultant Joe Trippi. “It’s really important, in the last part of his tenure, to emphasize the things he wants historians and others to look toward.”
Clinton’s detractors consider him lucky. They say he took office just as the Internet and dozens of high-tech innovations were making workers exponentially more productive. At the same time, they say, Greenspan was adroitly setting interest rates at just the right levels, and the end of the Cold War was creating enormous new markets.
Any president would look like a genius under those circumstances, they say. Further, some Republicans add that Clinton would never have cut the deficit if Republicans had not taken over Congress and forced him to do so.
“Given that the balanced budget occurred after a Republican Congress was elected and not before, and given the scope and speed of the technology age, I think (Senate Majority Leader) Trent Lott’s remark that `Bill Clinton taking credit for the economy is like a rooster taking credit for the sunrise’ is true,” GOP consultant Bill Greener said.
Republicans have engaged in their own attempts to propagandize. At a meeting and rally in January to discuss their agenda, congressional Republicans stressed that they, not Clinton, were responsible for the good times.
Clinton’s supporters reel off Clinton actions that they say greased the way for the economic growth, even if the actions did not directly cause it. Many of these actions came at serious political cost, they say.
Clinton cut the deficit, appointed level-headed Robert Rubin as treasury secretary, reappointed Greenspan, worked relentlessly for free-trade treaties and invested in education and technology, his advocates say.
“Our main contribution in the short run was to make it absolutely clear that we would have a consistent, disciplined fiscal approach that would cut and then eliminate the deficit,” Clinton said in the interview. “And I think that played a major role in the investment boom.”
Democrats point especially to Clinton’s 1993 economic package, which squeaked through Congress without a single Republican vote. At the time, some Republicans predicted economic disaster, but now Clinton says that vote set the stage for the boom.
“If the economy had gone in the tank on his watch, the Republicans would be screaming right now that it was all his fault,” Trippi said. “So if he deserves the attacks that would have come, he honestly can claim that on his watch the economy did improve dramatically.”
Some Republicans insist that it was Reagan’s tax cuts, not Clinton’s balanced budgets, that sparked this boom. They depict the recession of the early 1990s as merely a temporary interruption in the Reagan expansion.
“We have had a nearly uninterrupted period of economic growth stretching back to the fourth quarter of 1982,” said Haley Barbour, former chairman of the Republican National Committee. “In that 17-plus years, we have had more than 200 months in which the economy grew, and eight or nine in which it didn’t. President Clinton’s view is that the more than 10 years of economic growth that began before he got there should be disregarded.”
James Horney, an economist with the liberal-leaning Center for Budget and Policy Priorities, ridiculed that proposition.
“The idea that this is the Reagan expansion gets a little silly,” Horney said. “You could say this is the (Franklin) Roosevelt expansion, with just a couple interruptions. How many interruptions do you allow? Expansions are measured from the last downturn.”
In the view of most economists, Clinton deserves a good deal of credit but far from all of it.
“Many people give this administration some credit for not breaking the bank in terms of spending and for working on things that did balance the budget,” said Marilyn Moon, an economist at the Urban Institute. “Like any president in this position, not all the credit will or should go to him. I don’t think anyone fully understands why the numbers look so good.”
In the political world, such sober assessments are less important than which version of the truth the public accepts. Gore has been pounding home the message that the economy was in shambles when he and Clinton took office and is now booming.
At stop after stop in New Hampshire, Gore visited old factories and military bases that have been reborn as sizzling high-tech firms. He brought Rubin–now back on Wall Street but a symbol of the economic boom–to campaign with him.
Meanwhile, Gore portrayed his rivals as fiscally reckless. Former Sen. Bill Bradley, Gore charged, would spend the entire surplus on a “pie-in-the-sky” health plan. Texas Gov. George Bush, he insisted, is pushing a “risky tax scheme.”
Gore has begun to tie Bush not so subtly to his father’s presidency, when the economy was faltering. Gore is likely to push that message even harder if he and Bush are their parties’ nominees.
For all its turmoil, the Clinton presidency began with a focus on the economy and seems to be ending the same way.
“If you go back to 1992, Clinton was saying, `It’s the economy, stupid,’ ” Trippi said. “I think that’s where we’re at again. It’s come full circle. Now he is saying to the historians, `It’s the economy, stupid.’ “
